LANGUAGE ARTS-NEW MEXICO

Secretary Garcia and AYP

NM Education Secretary Veronica Garcia had some interesting things to say about AYP in her August 1 remarks on NCLB and the preliminary AYP results.  Here are some that seemed especially noteworthy:

• We cannot let the AYP label continue to destroy public confidence in our schools and continue to demoralize our teachers and students.
• I implore schools and communities to not get discouraged by a lower AYP rating. We must closely analyze the data, look at improvement, and stay the course.
• I would like to remind our parents, students, teachers, administrators, community members, and state leaders that AYP is only one tool and is a very narrow and sometimes unfair measure of success and progress.
• The accountability system is also unfair in its expectations and support of our English Language Learners, special education students, and low-income students that have additional barriers to learning.
• While AYP is an unfair measure and label for schools because it does not measure growth, using the same snap shot score at the classroom level to judge the effectiveness of a teacher would also be grossly unfair.

You can read the whole thing here.

NMCTE Program Proposals Due July 15

Submit a program proposal for the New Mexico Council of Teachers of English Annual Conference, to be held October 24 and 25 in Albuquerque.

Historical Housing Crunch

From the Associated Press: 

Twain, Wharton homes join others in financial peril

By  STEPHANIE REITZ  –  1 day ago

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Mark Twain, Edith Wharton and other boldfaced names among the dead have something in common with living Americans in these hard financial times:

Their homes are in jeopardy.

For scores of historic house museums, simply keeping the lights on has become a challenge. The Mount, Wharton's home in Lenox, Mass., is trying to stave off foreclosure with a feverish fundraising campaign. The Twain House in Hartford can't even afford to buy energy-saving light bulbs that would slash its electric bill.

Experts say this summer may make or break some sites, many of which already have cut their hours and staff and are struggling for donations in today's troubled economy.

More here.

Eggers on Teachers

Dave Eggers, the author of a A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and founder of the 826 Valencia writing center, is now working on a documentary about the professional lives of teachers. 

College for Everyone?

An argument some education reformers make is that in the future just about everyone will be going on to some form of higher education.  This article from today's Sacramento Bee suggests otherwise:

By 2015, a regional job surge is forecast, but it poses a quandary

Vocations won't need a 4-year degree

By Deb Kollars - dkollars@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PDT Monday, June 16, 2008

A fresh jobs forecast for the Sacramento region shows tens of thousands of new openings coming our way, but not all are the type public schools are emphasizing.

Although a major push has taken hold in public schools to get all high school graduates ready for college, the new work force study found the vast majority of jobs will require no postsecondary education.

"Employers are going to have a lot of jobs, good quality jobs, that won't require four years of college," said David N. Butler, chief executive officer of the nonprofit Linking Education and Economic Development, or LEED, which was involved in the study.

More here.

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NMCTE Program Proposals Due July 15

Submit a program proposal for the New Mexico Council of Teachers of English Annual Conference, to be held October 24 and 25 in Albuquerque. 

In the Age of Facebook

From Education Week's Digital Directions:

June  9, 2008

 

Friend or Foe? Balancing the Good and Bad of Social-Networking Sites

     

By Michelle R. Davis

      

Principal Conn McCartan of Minnesota’s Eden Prairie High School had no plans to police the Internet and its social spheres. But in January, he was mailed a computer disk containing photos of students drinking alcohol, and the photos had been posted on the social-networking Web site Facebook. McCartan couldn’t ignore the rule-breaking.

McCartan and his staff interviewed 43 students; 13 of them were subsequently disciplined. Most were members of athletic teams and clubs that have specific prohibitions and penalties for underage drinking.

“Facebook is a public site, but we didn’t go out there looking for it,” McCartan says of the misbehavior that came to light. “Somebody sends us something, and we’re obligated to respond.”

With the advent and rapid growth of social-networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, an increasingly significant portion of school-age socializing takes place online. The result is that school leaders are being forced to deal with a host of unsettled and even unsavory issues—such as when to monitor students’ online activities, and how to deal with the very real results of online socialization that spills into school hallways.

More here.

Smaller Classes Equals More Engaged Students

Teachers already knew this, but it's always good to have research on your side.  From Education Week:

Student Engagement Found to Rise as Class Size Falls

By Debra Viadero

A new British study quantifies and confirms what many teachers have long believed: Students tend to be “off task” more often when they are in larger classes.

The report, by researchers from the University of London Institute of Education, was one of several studies on the educational effects of reducing class sizes that were presented here Monday on the first day of the annual meeting of the Washington-based American Educational Research Association. The March 24-28 event is expected to draw more than 15,000 education scholars from around the world before it ends on Friday.

Studies on class size have long suggested that elementary school pupils tend to learn more in classes of 20 students or fewer. The papers presented yesterday, which were based on studies conducted in the United States and Hong Kong, as well as in the United Kingdom, extend and deepen the discussion on that topic by looking more closely at what goes on inside smaller and larger classes.

In his study of British classrooms, for instance, researcher Peter Blatchford found that both elementary and secondary students benefit from smaller classes and that the benefits at the secondary level are particularly strong for the lowest-achieving students. That study involved 686 students in 27 primary schools and 22 secondary schools in the United Kingdom. Benefits in Britain

More here.

Take a Lit Trip

Did you ever wish there was an interactive, online map to go with a particular work of literature (The Grapes of Wrath, for example)?  Visit Google Lit Trips and see how the power of Google Earth software is making it possible to accompany your favorite characters on their journeys. 

Mrs. Smith and Mr. Jones

Here's a good essay about NCLB by the 2008 New York State Teacher of the Year: 

November 7, 2007

Teachers need role in fixing  No Child Left Behind

Richard Ognibene

 Guest essayist

Question #1: Mrs. Smith and Mr. Jones both teach fifth grade. In May, only 40 percent of Mrs. Smith's students passed the state's standardized reading test, while 97 percent of Mr. Jones' students passed the same test. Who is the better teacher? A) Mrs. Smith. B) Mr. Jones. C) More information is necessary. If you picked "C," you understand the inherent complexities of education.

Question #2: Mrs. Smith works in a high-needs district. In September, most of her pupils read at a second-grade level, but through brilliant pedagogical strategies and dogged determination, she brought all of her class to a fourth-grade reading level or higher. Some of her students managed to pass the state reading test; all of them showed tremendous growth. Mr. Jones works in a more affluent district. In September, all of his students read at a fifth-grade level and by May most of them read at the sixth-grade level. Who is the better teacher?

According to the No Child Left Behind act, Jones is wildly successful as his students have demonstrated adequate yearly progress. Smith is not so fortunate. According to NCLB, she is an abysmal failure; her students have not shown AYP (adequate yearly progress) and her school will lose funding if this continues.

In a perfect world, every pupil would enter the classroom with age-appropriate skills. However, as a teacher, I am acutely aware that our world is far from perfect. My job is to welcome all of my students and help them improve. I have no control over the skills they have as they enter my room, but I have much to say about the skills they have when they leave. By that standard, Smith should be recognized for her outstanding work.

Read the rest here.

The Ever-Looming Test

From the Boston Globe:

Waging a battle on standardized tests

By Dan Brown  |  November 3, 2007

TEACHERS NEED to pick their battles. I scanned my fourth-grade students in the Bronx and considered several battles in my mind.

Battle Number One: Manolo arrived in my classroom determined to fight the world. His mother had died when he was in second grade and he had to repeat the year. However, Manolo took substantial steps when he began to write creative stories, favoring historical fiction in which he inserted himself into a famous event. His writing revealed great imagination and interest, but his spelling and mechanics remained poor, and state exams continued to label him a failure.

Battle Number Two: Sara entered my classroom leaps ahead of her peers. She wrote hilarious, irreverent poetry and had already mastered grade-level math. She fired off endless questions about current events. Sara was a dream student, hungry to be challenged. However, the administrators at my school discouraged creative lesson planning in order to cram in endless "drill-and-kill" packets of basic skills test-taking strategies.

Battle Number Three: Eddie was in his fourth year in fourth grade because of absences and test failures. It seemed impossible to get him engaged in class. However, he loved to draw and showed a remarkable, natural talent for perspective sketching. Tragically, my class was deprived of all arts in order to allot more time for standardized test preparation.

How could I help these children face their challenges? Every moment, I felt pulled in 26 directions, invariably drawn to the louder children who act out. And then there was the ever-looming Test.

Read the rest here. 

New Analysis of Dropouts

There were stories in newspapers across the country yesterday about an Associated Press/Johns Hopkins University analysis of Department of Education data about high school completion rates. The term the Johns Hopkins researcher uses for schools that graduate fewer than sixty percent of their freshman class is "dropout factory," which newspaper headline writers love. You can read the AP story here and see an interactive map that shows where the schools are located here.  (Wouldn't it be nice if the people who write such stories and do research like this actually visited the schools they're labeling?)