Classroom Grades Better Reflection than SATs

Although more than three million high school seniors take standardized college admissions tests like the SAT, “it is well known by educational researchers that high-school grades are the best indicator of student readiness for college, and standardized admissions tests are useful primarily as a supplement to the high-school record,” according to Richard C. Atkinson in a speech to be presented April 15, 2009 at the American Educational Research Association’s 90th annual meeting in San Diego.

“We now have a much deeper appreciation of why assessment of achievement and curriculum mastery remains vital as a paradigm for admissions testing. Curriculum-based achievement tests are the fairest and most effective assessments for college admissions and have important incentive or “signaling “ effects for our K-12 schools as well: They help reinforce a rigorous academic curriculum and create better alignment of teaching, learning and assessment all along the pathway from high school to college,” according to Atkinson.

The College Board’s SAT admissions test sends a confusing message to students, teachers, and schools. It featured esoteric items, like verbal analogies and quantitative comparisons, rarely encountered in the classroom. Especially troubling, the perception of the SAT as a test of basic intellectual ability had an adverse effect on many students from low-performing schools, tending to diminish academic aspiration and self-esteem. Low scores on the SAT were too often interpreted as meaning that a student lacked the ability to attend UC, notwithstanding his or her record of accomplishment in high school.

Read the full article in Science Daily

Will Stimulus Money Make It To Classrooms and Students?

"A key goal of the stimulus law is to patch holes in state budgets and save and create jobs. Educators agree that $54 billion to be funneled to states will prevent thousands of teacher layoffs and drastic program cuts and that schools would be in dire straits without that bailout. An additional $25 billion will target aid to students who are disabled or in poverty, groups the federal government has long helped educate.

But President Obama has linked the funding to high expectations for schools. The administration wants school systems to consider lengthening the school day, expanding charter schools and experimenting with merit pay plans. Obama challenged the country to have the highest rate of college graduates in the world by 2020."

Read the full article in the Washington Post

Early Reading First Program - Grant offering

This program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, supports local efforts to enhance the oral language, cognitive, and early reading skills of preschool-aged children, especially those from low-income families, through strategies, materials, and professional development that are grounded in scientifically based reading research.

Contact Information
Contact Website:
http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2009/E9-44...

Virtual Charter School: Innovative and Note-worthy

Learning at home in her pajamas before a computer screen, Emily Brown's youngest daughter is picking up things in 6th grade that her older daughter is attempting as a freshman at a Catholic school.

For the former teacher, that's evidence enough that Chicago Virtual Charter School is working.

"The curriculum is better here," Brown said. "It's a grade level higher."

The school, the city's only online program for kindergarten through high school, has become an alternative to traditional public schools for parents such as Brown who believe regular schools often don't challenge children enough or don't give slow learners the extra time they need.

Principal Bruce Law said last year the school, which opened in 2006, met the measure of "adequate yearly progress," mandated under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. More than 30 percent of Illinois schools did not qualify, many of them charter schools, according to the state board of education.

As U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan prepares to dole out federal aid for school reform, charter schools—especially those with an online component—stand to gain, experts say. Duncan, the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, is a proponent of charter schools and an early backer of the Chicago Virtual School. He announced last week that the budget to reform the nation's schools was doubled to more than $100 billion.

"Arne Duncan wants to fund innovative learning methods and I can't think of anything more innovative than online learning," said John Watson, a consultant with Colorado-based Evergreen Consulting, which publishes an annual online school report "I think they should be funded through some of this stimulus money."

Read the full story in the Chicago Tribune.

More Time in School Needed

DENVER - The nation's education chief was in Denver talking about national school reform on Tuesday and says U.S. children need to be in school more.
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Secretary of Education Arne Duncan visited two Denver schools Tuesday morning. He toured with Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, who, until this year, was superintendent of Denver Public Schools.

During his visit, Duncan said American schools should be open six days a week, at least 11 months a year, to improve student performance.

"Go ahead and boo me," Duncan told about 400 middle and high school students at a public school in northeast Denver. "I fundamentally think that our school day is too short, our school week is too short and our school year is too short."

"You're competing for jobs with kids from India and China. I think schools should be open six, seven days a week; 11, 12 months a year," Duncan said.

Bennet showed the secretary reforms he made in Denver that could be replicated on a national scale. The Obama administration has released billions in school aid but vowed that reforms will come with it.

Duncan learned about a pay-for-performance teaching plan, and thoughts on making schools more autonomous.

Bennet and Duncan planned to tour Bruce Randolph School, the first autonomous school, and Montclair Elementary School.

"This is one of the fastest growing schools in achievement in the entire city of Denver," Bennet said, before introducing Duncan at Bruce Randolph.

Duncan is looking at Bruce Randolph as a model for the country in turning around failing schools.

Read the full story at 9News Denver.

Preparing Students for National Merit

SOUTHAVEN — Like most principals, Southaven’s Jeff Gilder is digging this National Merit Scholar concept.
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It’s a scholarship awarded to a select number of students based on the scores of the PSAT test taken in their junior year of high school.

However, there’s more.

“It’s not necessarily the scholarship you’re looking for,” said Gilder. “It’s to get put on a list of colleges. They want to seek you out and they’re going to find you. And it’s not just Ole Miss or (Mississippi) State.

“It’s Harvard, it’s Yale, it’s Stanford, Notre Dame — it can be anywhere in the country.”
Southaven is just one of a couple of places in the Magnolia State where students can prepare themselves for that collegiate opportunity.

Read the full story in the Hattiesburg American

“It doesn’t matter if you’re in Mississippi, in Maryland or in Massachusetts,” Gilder said. “A National Merit semifinalist is a National Merit semifinalist — and we’ve worked hard to instill this program of how to get there.”

Two from the school reached that elite level this year.

Teach For America Boosts

Diane Viadero blogs: The Urban Institute made national headlines last spring when it released an influential study suggesting that Teach For America recruits were more effective than other teachers in North Carolina's high schools. One criticism of the study at the time, though, was that the researchers were comparing the TFA teachers with a group of teachers with a hodgepodge of training.

In answer to the critics, researchers Zeyu Wu, Jane Hannaway, and Colin Taylor decided to update their study with a larger sample of teachers and students. They added data for 32 teachers and more than 2,000 students, and re-ran the numbers so that they could do more "apples to apples" comparisons. The results were the same: Across the eight subjects tested, the students of TFA teachers racked up bigger learning gains than their non-TFA counterparts.

The TFA teachers were also found to be more effective than teachers who had graduated from a fully accredited North Carolina teacher-training program and those who were licensed in the subjects they taught. The overall TFA boost, in fact, was bigger than the size of the learning improvement that students normally get from having a teacher who's been on the job for three years or more.

Read the full article in Education Week.

High School Dropouts Cost $319 Billion Over Lifetime

ATLANTA (AP) — High school dropouts from the class of 2008 will cost the country $319 billion over their lifetime, former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise said during a panel discussion Thursday.

That number includes the income the students will have lost because of a lack of education and what they'll cost taxpayers in publicly funded healthcare, prison stays and other services.

"The first group affected when a student drops out of high school is the student themselves, but there's another group affected as well," Wise told the room full of teens from across the country. "It's the rest of us. It's you, me, all of us."

Read the full article in Education Week

Can't Fix An Outmoded System

"All the money in the world will not fix a system that is outmoded," Jenifer Fox writes in her first blog post for the Huffington Post Fox is the Executive Director of The Strength Movement, dedicated to improving student engagement. Her post cites great evidence of student ability and desire to be needed, valued, and thinking members of our community, yet we are hardly preparing them for that role.

As a society we need to ask if the way we do school is meeting the physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and societal need of its users, the students. Until we can answer this question and build our system out from there (regardless of how we have always done it), abandoning what does not work and eliminating what is not needed, we are just throwing money away. It is like we are still doing CPR on the patient who died a long time ago.

Read Jenifer Fox entire post in The Huffington Post

Social Skills, Extracurricular Activities Pay Off Later in Life

ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2009) — It turns out that being voted “Most likely to succeed” in high school might actually be a good predictor of one’s financial and educational success later in life.

According to a University of Illinois professor who studies the sociology of education, high school sophomores who were rated by their teachers as having good social skills and work habits, and who participated in extracurricular activities in high school, made more money and completed higher levels of education 10 years later than their classmates who had similar standardized test scores but were less socially adroit and participated in fewer extracurricular activities.

Christy Lleras, a professor of human and community development, says that “soft skills” such as sociability, punctuality, conscientiousness and an ability to get along well with others, along with participation in extracurricular activities, are better predictors of earnings and higher educational achievement later in life than having good grades and high standardized test scores.

Read the full article in Science Daily

What You Should Consider Before Education Graduate School

March 25, 2009 05:34 PM ET | Eddy Ramírez

If you're thinking about going into teaching, take heed of this message from Katherine Merseth, a senior lecturer and director of the teacher education program at Harvard University: "The dirty little secret about schools of education is that they have been the cash cows of universities for many, many years, and it's time to say, 'Show us what you can do, or get out of the business.'"

Merseth, who spoke at an event in Washington, D.C., this week as part of a panel about how to improve teacher quality, was not trashing her employer, to be sure. Nor was she discouraging aspiring teachers from going to graduate school. Merseth was taking aim at institutions that produce ill-prepared teachers and yet insist on holding a monopoly in awarding teaching degrees. "It's high time that we broke up the cartel," she said. "We need to hold graduate schools of education more accountable." Merseth says that of the 1,300 graduate teacher training programs in the country, about 100 or so are adequately preparing teachers and "the others could be shut down tomorrow."

Read the full article on U.S. News and World Report blog

Wear Red April 7

The City Council’s decision to cut funding for MCS has caused a cloud of uncertainty to hang over all MCS students, parents, teachers, principals; in fact over our entire community. If funding is not restored there will be more cuts and this time they will have an effect in the classrooms.

We are asking everyone to WEAR RED and attend the Tuesday, April 7 City Council meeting at 3:00 p.m. as a way to show city-wide support for stable funding for our schools.

Supporting Groups:
The Memphis Ministers Association, Common Ground, Bridges, Metropolitan Baptist Church, the Black Business Coalition, Temple Israel, Memphis Education Association, the University of Memphis, Latino Memphis, Southern Christian Leadership Council, Memphis PTA Council, MCS Parent Assembly, Memphis Peace and Justice Center, Memphis Baptist Ministers Association and Unite Memphis for Education will be represented.

What Do Students Want in Schools?

Looking for ideas on how to spend federal stimulus dollars to enhance educational technology? Project Tomorrow has a suggestion: Listen to what students say they'd like to see in their schools.

The nonprofit organization is touting the results from its annual Speak Up survey as a means of giving lawmakers--as well as state and local education leaders--some guidance on how stimulus funds can be used to improve teaching and learning.

Project Tomorrow highlighted the results from this year's survey during a March 24 briefing on Capitol Hill. According to the group's report, students can be viewed as a digital advance team: They are early adopters and adapters of new technologies, creating new uses for various technology products to meet their sophisticated needs.

"What kinds of technologies are students using, and which are the types of things that students can use in school?" asked Julie Evans, chief executive officer of Project Tomorrow. Those are questions many educators are now asking as well--and the survey's results provide some answers.

More than 280,000 K-12 students, 28,000 teachers, 21,000 parents, and 3,000 administrators responded to the online Speak Up survey between October and December 2008.

The report focuses on five areas where schools can better incorporate technology: increasing the use of mobile devices, creating different types of spaces for learning, incorporating Web 2.0 tools into daily instruction, expanding access to digital resources in the classroom, and getting beyond the classroom walls to explore careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines.

Read the full article in eNews

Groups Push for Media Literacy Education

Nearly three out of five states say they have defined what it means for students to be "media literate" and have implemented media-literacy standards, according to a recent survey--a result suggesting that states are beginning to address the importance of preparing students for an information-rich society, but they still have more work to do.

Called "The Changing Media Landscape: Ensuring Students' Safety and Success in School and in the Future Workplace," the survey was developed "to get a snapshot of how states are assisting schools to prepare today's students to be ready for life, work, and citizenship in our increasingly digital world," said Mary Ann Wolf, executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA).

SETDA developed and administered the survey in partnership with Cable in the Classroom (CIC), the cable industry's education foundation. The two groups issued the results, along with a media-literacy toolkit that SETDA created to help promote "a systemic approach for [teaching] information and media literacy within our schools."

According to SETDA and CIC, media literacy means knowing how to access, understand, analyze, evaluate, and create media messages on television, the internet, and other outlets. It also means "knowing how to use these and other technologies safely, productively, and ethically."

For Doug Levin, senior director of education policy for CIC, which has been advocating for media-literacy education for more than 15 years, media literacy also means reevaluating definitions to fit 21st-century needs: "There are a host of new, exciting educational applications on the horizon, from virtual worlds like Second Life to educational games and online simulations,…that require a rethinking of what it means to be literate."

The survey requested that states specify their guidelines for media literacy, and it asked them to rank their needs and areas of interest regarding media-literacy issues. According to SETDA, 38 states and the District of Columbia responded.

Of these respondents, 23 states (or 59 percent) said they define media or information literacy and have established standards for teaching media literacy. States that require statewide assessments of media-literacy skills include Hawaii, Michigan, New Hampshire, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Read the full article in eNews