December 2009 Archives

From guest blogger Catherine Gewertz:

The Education Department has announced a second round of public meetings to gather input for the $350 million slice of Race to the Top money that is earmarked for designing common assessments. They're going to be held on Jan. 13, 14, and 20 here in Washington.

The first round of meetings, held in Atlanta, Boston, and Denver in November and December, featured testimony from assessment experts. (See our story from the Boston meeting, and transcripts of the oral and written testimony from all three meetings.)

Where the first three meetings focused on topics such as general assessment design, high school assessment, and tests for students with disabilities, the second round will dig into more targeted areas.

The Jan. 13 meeting will focus on project and consortium management (the money is for tests designed and shared by groups, or consortia, of states). The session on Jan. 14 will focus on the various state procurement rules that can come into play, and Jan. 20 is set aside for discussion of general and technical assessment.

The notices published in the Federal Register about the two rounds of public meetings (first one here, second one here) are handy summaries of the program.

The department states clearly what it's after in the new generation of assessments (see the "assessment program design and questions" section, which begins on page 8 of the first notice or page 11 of the second notice). It wants tests that are aligned to common K-12 standards that are internationally benchmarked and denote college and career readiness. They should measure student achievement at a given point in time, but also its growth over time, and the extent to which each student is "on track"—at each grade level tested—to be ready for college or a career when they graduate.

Tests wouldn't have to be limited to once yearly, either; they could be broken into multiple components given over the course of the year. And the information gleaned from the tests must be useable in informing the practice of teaching, gauging students' readiness for career or credit-bearing college work, and judging the effectiveness of teachers, principals and schools.

The department plans to issue a formal notice of competition, with accompanying application guidelines, by March. Applications will likely be due in the summer of 2010, with money awarded by September.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The health care reform bill pending in the U.S. Senate includes $50 million for programs that teach youths to delay having sex, widely called "abstinence-only" programs. I wrote about this issue for EdWeek weeks ago after a bill approved by the Senate Finance Committee authorized funding for such programs. The health care legislation approved by the U.S. House of Representatives includes funding only for comprehensive sex education programs, which emphasize teaching about contraceptives.

On Sunday, the Washington Post published a story saying that the funding for programs that stress abstinence has survived in the current Senate bill to reform health care.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:20 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I take my holiday stocking cap off to Beth Fertig for writing a book that shows what it takes for some students with learning disabilities, including dyslexia, to be taught to read. I've almost finished reading why cant u teach me 2 read?, a 2009 book about three young adults who graduated from or spent several years in New York City high schools without being able to read. The three students, all children of Dominican immigrants, win from the school system payment for one-on-one tutoring by private education centers. (See a Q & A with the author and USA Today's take on the book here.)

But with the tutoring, the struggle has only begun for these three adults. Fertig, a reporter for WNYC radio, obviously spent hours observing in classrooms in the school system and in the private education centers documenting how educators systematically try to address students' learning difficulties, which can be a very tedious process.

The book includes more description of reading instruction than any book I've ever read. It's particularly interesting how she describes tutoring and speech therapy sessions with Yamilka. The young woman desperately wants to be a reader but has a host of challenges, such as not being able to hear certain sounds in words, let alone sound them out when she sees printed words before her.

Fertig addresses a lot of big-picture issues regarding reading nationwide, such as whether school districts use direct instruction, where reading instruction is prescribed, or "balanced literacy," where teachers have a lot of choice in the books read by their students. But where the book makes a wonderful contribution is in showing what happens between teachers and students who are at risk of not learning to read because of special challenges.

I can now see why some people say "reading is rocket science."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Policymakers need to raise the level of history instruction in U.S. schools by making state certification requirements for teachers of history more stringent, argues a report released today by the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. For example, secondary-school history teachers should be required to have majored in history, the report says.

The report also recommends that the National Assessment of Educational Progress test history knowledge every other year, rather than every five years or so, as is the case now. Such a change, it argues, would help to promote awareness of the subject.

The report praises the Teaching American History Grant Program, adopted by Congress in 2001, in its support for history knowledge.

The report cites various reports that have indicated that U.S. students and adult Americans don't know much about history. It cites a study commissioned by the American Revolution Center, which my colleague Sean Cavanagh blogged about, that showed Americans overestimate their knowledge of the American Revolution. Only a little more than half of participants in the study could identify James Madison as the "Father of the Constitution."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Six education organizations, including the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, have created a partnership to support teachers in bringing African-American history to life for their students.

They're sponsoring an essay contest for high school juniors and seniors on "the legacy and lessons" of the Civil Rights Movement. The deadline for submission of essays is Jan. 9.

The winner and five finalists receive cash awards and will be honored at a Capitol Hill awards ceremony expected to be attended by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

I'm thinking that this could be a good extra-credit assignment for the holiday break.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:20 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

National common standards would make expectations for all students to succeed academically more equitable, contends Bob Rothman, a senior fellow for the Alliance for Excellent Education, in a brief released today by that organization.

In arguing for why common standards are necessary, Rothman says that low-income youth and children of color "too often" face lower expectations in school. He indicates that a lack of common standards across states contributes to gaps between students in how they are prepared for colleges and careers. That leads to disparities in income. "All students, no matter their background or career aspirations, need to be prepared for postsecondary education."

Common standards, he believes, would help to rectify this problem.

What do you think? Would common core standards be a good deal especially for low-income and minority students?

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 2:19 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The What Works Clearinghouse of the U.S. Department of Education explored the question of whether the Reading Recovery short-term tutoring intervention is effective with English-language learners, but it didn't come up with an answer. The reason: the clearinghouse determined that the 13 studies it identified about the use of Reading Recovery with ELLs didn't meet its "evidence standards," which is not an uncommon occurrence for the clearinghouse. So it wasn't able to draw a conclusion about the impact of the intervention, according to a report published this week by the Education Department's Institute of Education Sciences.

The clearinghouse ruled out eight studies because they didn't have a control group that could be compared with the treatment group of students. Three others were ruled out because the control group wasn't considered to be comparable to the treatment group before the start of the intervention.

Reading Recovery provides one-on-one tutoring, generally in pull-out sessions, by trained teachers for half an hour each day for 12 to 20 weeks, according to the report.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Joanne Jacobs blogs about a report on tracking in middle schools in Massachusetts released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute this week. The report found that schools with tracking have more students with advanced knowledge in mathematics than those without it. The edition of EdWeek that went to press today has coverage of the report.

Joanne adds a personal note that in the late 1960s, her high school had tracking and she loved it because it saved her from boredom. She acknowledges that it might not have been such a good deal for slower learners.

My senior year of high school, I transferred to a public school in Oak Ridge, Tenn., the home of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a government research center. Oak Ridge High School enrolled a large number of students whose parents were scientists and worked at the laboratory. I remember that 13 of my peers in the senior class were National Merit Finalists, and I was intimidated by them.

The school had tracking, and I was put in all the advanced classes. For the academic area of mathematics, I was tracked way beyond my ability and knowledge. But I did enjoy the tracking into Advanced Placement English, the first AP class I'd taken in my life (my old school back in Pennsylvania didn't have any AP classes). In that course, I fell in love with literature, and have remained in love with it for three decades.

I haven't done enough reporting on tracking to know all the benefits and disadvantages of the policy. I know I am grateful for having been assigned to a high-level English course my senior year of high school, though not so grateful for the math experience.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The school board in Alameda, Calif., has reversed its decision to support an elementary school curriculum on anti-gay bullying. It had adopted the curriculum in May but voted this week to phase it out, according to The Associated Press.

The board decided to instead supplement more generic anti-bullying lessons with children's books that address different kinds of discrimination, including bias against gays.

It sounds from the article that community members, both those that supported and opposed the curriculum on anti-gay bullying, are still uneasy about where the matter stands.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Private elementary schools are more than three times more likely than public elementary schools to offer students foreign-language classes, according to a national survey released recently by the Center for Applied Linguistics.

The survey was conducted in collaboration with Westat, a statistical survey organization, with funding from the U.S. Department of Education.

In 2008, the percentage of private elementary schools offering foreign-languages was 51 percent, versus 15 percent in public elementary schools.

The survey shows that the proportion of elementary and middle schools teaching foreign-languages declined significantly from 1997 to 2008, from 31 percent to 25 percent in elementary schools and from 75 percent to 58 percent in all middle schools. The decline occurred mostly at public elementary schools. I wrote a story for EdWeek about this trend, based on preliminary findings from the survey, back in March.

The level of foreign-language offerings at high schools stayed about the same over the last decade.

The survey also showed that students attending schools in rural areas are less likely to have the chance to study a foreign tongue than students in suburban or urban areas, regardless if the school is private or public. And schools with students primarily from low-income families are also less likely to offer foreign languages than schools with students who tend to be from more affluent families.

By the way, the Smithsonian Institution just announced this week a travel-abroad program for high school students, Smithsonian Journeys, intended to give students a language-immersion experience in a foreign country for three weeks in the summer.

The travel-abroad experience is pricey, $5,695 for three weeks in Beijing, for example, and that doesn't cover the cost of the plane ticket. The Smithsonian is offering a scholarship of $1,500 for one student in each of the groups going to three countries this next summer. But it seems to me that the experience is still unaffordable for anyone from a low-income family.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

What is that high-performing Asian nations get right, when it comes to math teaching? A pair of researchers have explored that question in a new study, which examines the standards of Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea by creating a "composite" of their expectations in that subject.

Those nations limit the repetition of topics across grades 1-6, as others have noted. But researchers Steven Leinwand and Alan Ginsburg also find that the three nations concentrate heavily on numbers, measurement and geometry, with less emphasis on data analysis and little exposure to algebra. Those countries also sequence lessons logically, so that one topic builds on another, and they order content so that it reinforces students' knowledge of other concepts, they found. Ginsburg is a U.S. Department of Education official who has studied Asian nations' approaches to education extensively; Leinwand has also written a great deal on the topic for the American Institutes for Research, which published the study. It was prepared for the Asia-Pacific Development Cooperation, or APEC. (The authors note that the report does not represent the views of the U.S. Department of Ed, or APEC.)

Policymakers, particularly those shaping the ongoing effort to draft common K-12 standards across states, would be wise to look closely at the three countries' approach, the researchers say. The composite of the Asian nation's math standards, they say, "offer a theoretically and empirically valid international benchmark for the development of common U.S. standards in mathematics."

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 4:09 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Given the emphasis that U.S. schools place on testing at all levels, derailments are not uncommon, at the federal, state, and, as was announced this week, at the local level, with an admissions exam to a prestigious public school.

The Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology discovered printing errors on the testing booklets given to students hoping to gain entry to the school. About 3,000 students had taken the 8th grade test last weekend. The test is developed by Pearson, which offered its regrets for the foul-up but blamed a third-party contractor, according to the Washington Post. A re-test has been tentatively scheduled for Jan. 23. The test is just one of several criteria on which applicants to Thomas Jefferson High are judged, according to the Post, which reports that all the students who took the test on day in question are likely to have to retake it.

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Computer science advocates are using this week to fight for their share of classroom time. They've dubbed Dec. 6-12 "Computer Science Education Week." They've even got an all-important congressional resolution in their favor!

Their argument is simple. The number of jobs in computer-related fields is growing, but the academic curricula is failing to keep up, and even falling behind. "While five of the top 10 fastest-growing jobs are in computing-related fields, the percent of schools with rigorous high school computing courses fell from 40 percent to 27 percent from 2005 to 2009," they say. "The last 60 years witnessed an extraordinary burst of innovation and talent that have produced a nation where most can scarcely remember life without computers. Yet this innovation-based society is at risk if students are not learning fundamental computing knowledge in our nation's schools."

Do you see computer-related courses being unfairly squeezed out of the curriculum in your district or state? Should these courses be preserved in their entirety, or folded into broader math, science, or engineering classes, or are there other curricular options? How essential are these skills, compared with core academic knowledge?

The effort is being led by the Association for Computing Machinery, which has been joined by several partners, including the Computer Science Teachers Association.

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 5:38 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In a speech to early-childhood education researchers meeting at Georgetown University today, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan expressed his belief that high-quality preschool programs can create a level playing field for all children at the start of school. "We're trying to get out of the catch-up business," he said. If early-childhood education is "glorified babysitting," he said, "we're not changing people's lives."

Duncan reinforced remarks he made last month at a conference of the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

Today's research meeting in Washington was hosted by the Early Childhood Educator Professional Development Program of the U.S. Department of Education; the Zero to Three program of the National Center for Infants, Toddlers, and Families; and Georgetown University's Center on Health and Education.

The education secretary expressed his support for legislation introduced in Congress that would authorize $8 billion for early-childhood education over eight years. (The House version calls for $1 billion per year for eight years, according to Early Ed Watch.) He said national standards are needed for what preschoolers need to know and be able to do to be ready to learn.

Duncan also observed that the relationship between education and health- and human-services agencies in this country has been "pretty dysfunctional" at all levels of government. He expressed his desire for the Education Department and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to cooperate in improving early-childhood education.

U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius also made remarks at the meeting about the need for the two departments to cooperate. "You can't learn unless you are healthy," she said. Sebelius called for more funding for early-childhood education. "We sure don't put the resources behind it." The nation is lucky, she added, to have a president who gets the importance of a strong preschool education.

The two Cabinet members honored a longtime advocate of early-childhood education, Barbara T. Bowman, a professor of child development at the Erikson Institute and the chief officer of the office of early-childhood education for the Chicago public schools. Duncan expressed his appreciation for Bowman's work to help the Obama administration create an agenda for early-childhood education. She is also the mother of Valerie Jarrett, the senior adviser and assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs and public engagement, who attended the Georgetown event as well.

Bowman spoke about how early-childhood education has improved since she entered the field in 1950. Back then, she said, the few half-day nursery schools that existed "were not viewed as educationally significant." But experts in human development such as Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget, and Rene Spitz brought awareness to the need for infants and toddlers to receive high-quality care and education, she said.

She noted how the federal Head Start program, started in 1966, has "seesawed between being an employment agency for adults or a program for kids." She's happy that current administrators view it as a program for children. Bowman said the field has progressed so that educators now realize the value of early-childhood education. "The bad news is that going to scale with good programs is complicated," she said. The nation still doesn't seem to have the political will to provide high-quality programs on a large scale, she said.

Bowman lauded the cooperative spirit between Duncan and Sebelius, whose agency oversees Head Start. "The notion that the secretaries of education and health and human services would sit together and work together on a platform for young children is the best thing since sliced bread."

At that, Duncan and Sebelius scooted closer to each other at their luncheon table and draped their arms around each other to show their collegiality.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 4:55 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Some EdWeek readers already know this, but for those who don't, I'll make it official: I'm leaving the newspaper this week. I'll be going to work for the Academy for Educational Development, a nonprofit that works on school, human health, and economic development issues internationally, and here at home. It's located in the D.C. area.

This is a new opportunity for me, and one I'm enthusiastic about. But as I've told several of my colleagues, my experience here will be tough to match. I'll also miss you, our readers—smart, engaged, and passionate about schools. You keep us on our toes. The staff at EdWeek, meanwhile, will continue keeping you informed about the K-12 world through news coverage, and through the Curriculum Matters blog. So above all, keep reading.

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Veronica Garcia, the public education secretary for New Mexico, is backing a proposed Hispanic Education Act in the state that would include curricula based on Hispanic culture and language, according to the Associated Press. New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, a Democrat, proposed the legislation.

Garcia says the act would help to close the achievement gap between Hispanic students and their white and Asian counterparts.

Remember that over in Arizona, a curriculum in the Tucson school district that focuses on the history and culture of Mexican-Americans has been controversial. Meanwhile, in Florida, a state-funded task force contends that only eight of Florida's 67 school districts are complying with a state law to include African-American studies in the curriculum, as my colleague Sean Cavanagh mentioned on this blog.

Some legislators in New Mexico are arguing that a separate Hispanic Education Act isn't necessary. Others question if the state has money to pay for such a proposal.

Garcia credits the state's Indian Education Act of 2003, which supports tribes in implementing curricula in Native American languages, culture, and history, with improving Native Americans' scores in reading and math, the Associated press article says.

I'd like to hear more about the Indian Education Act of 2003. If you know something about it and its impact, hit the comment button here.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Twenty years ago, a gunman entered the engineering school at the École Polytechnique in Montreal and killed 14 women, injuring 10 more, along with four men. The assailant claimed he was "fighting feminism." The tragedy became known as the Montreal Massacre.

This story in the Ottawa Citizen recounts that event and examines the reluctance of female students to pursue engineering studies. The author does not suggest a direct connection between the school shooting and the larger trend. But the story discusses the isolation that female students encounter in some science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or "STEM," fields, and the stereotypes that seem to drive them away. According to the story, the percentage of women majoring in engineering studies at two Canadian universities rose from 12 percent to 24 percent from 1996 to 2000, but then fell, and now stands at about 17 percent.

One Canadian woman who made it into the field, who's quoted in the story, is Monique Frize, an engineering professor at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa. She's just released a book, The Bold and The Brave, about the history of women in science and engineering.

Teachers and researchers who've studied gender disparities in STEM probably won't be surprised that Canadian colleges (and perhaps schools) are coping with many of the some issues that U.S. education is. Perhaps Frize's work will inform the work of American educators who are attempting to bring more females into science and math-related disciplines.

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 9:31 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A former reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer remarked to my colleague Lesli Maxwell that for journalists to better cover classroom issues in schools, they need to have better access to classrooms. Lesli included the views of Dale Mezzacappa in a story about a report by the Brookings Institution that documents a lack of education stories on the front pages of mainstream newspapers nationwide. The report also concludes that education gets scant attention in the top news stories produced by radio and television reporters.

Mezacappa's remarks resonated with me because I've found that the ability I have to provide examples of how a school's curriculum plays out in the classroom depends on whether I'm permitted to spend a lot of time observing in classrooms.

I sometimes find it difficult to convince school administrators that when I visit a school, I want to spend at least a whole day observing students and teachers, rather than taking a tour of the school and mostly interviewing administrators. With observation, I can identify examples to show how a curriculum is implemented. See this story I wrote about summer philosophy classes to get a sense of examples I gleaned from a day of observation. And even in this policy story about Striving Readers, a federal adolescent-literacy program, I was able to provide a classroom example at the end of the story because Chicago public schools gave me good access to classrooms during a site visit.

The Brookings Institution report decries the lack of news coverage of curriculum.

One way that school officials might be able to urge reporters to take a greater interest in curriculum is to invite them to observe in classrooms.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:29 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Backers of the "Common Core" state standards project released a summary of the feedback that's rolled in on the draft document they released this fall. It looks like educators seized the chance to weigh in on the document.

Fifty-three percent of the respondents identified themselves as "educators" of some kind (presumably teachers or college faculty), according to a summary released by the organizations leading the standards process. Their reaction (again, this is just a synopsis) was positive overall, backers of the project say. Interest was greater in the draft of the English-language arts document (255 comments) than the math draft (169).

A common theme among those who spoke up: While "it is important to get the standards right, standards are only one part of a complex system" that includes curriculum, professional development, and testing. Some worry that a heavy emphasis on standards will subsume the needs of individual students. Others raised concerns about the transparency of the process, and potential conflicts of interest, issues we've covered at EdWeek.

What surprises, pleases, or disappoints you about the feedback so far?

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 3:06 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Texas state education commissioner Robert Scott is railing against the Obama administration's support for the common standards across states, saying it reveals a "desire for a federal takeover of public education."

Texas is one of only two states sitting out the multistate effort to establish common academic standards in language arts and math—Alaska is the other. Scott, in a story in the Austin American-Statesman, criticized the Obama administration for giving a competitive advantage in its Race to the Top stimulus funding package to states that join together to create common standards.

The U.S. Education Department appears to be "placing its desire for a federal takeover of public education above the interests of the 4.7 million schoolchildren in the state of Texas by setting two different starting lines—one for nearly every other state in the country and one for Texas," Scott wrote in a letter to the Texas' congressional delegation, according to the paper.

"Because Texas has chosen to preserve its sovereign authority to determine what is appropriate for Texas children to learn in its public schools," Scott added, "the state is now placed at a serious disadvantage in competing for its share of [the grant money]."

Leaders of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, as it is known, have emphasized continually that their effort is a state-, rather than federally driven one. In fact, they say the project should not be called even a "national" standards venture at all, but rather an attempt to set "common" academic expectations.

Scott, however, says the federal government's support for common standards through federal stimulus funding amounts to "coercion" of states.

It's worth noting that Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican who faces a primary challenge in his re-election bid from U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, has denounced Obama's overall policies in harsh terms, saying the administration is "hell-bent" on moving toward the creation of a "socialist country." The Statesman says Perry has also been critical of the common-standards effort specifically.

Some prominent Texans disagree with the views of Scott and Perry. U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat, is quoted in the article as saying that Texas is making a mistake in not joining the common-standards effort.

"Other states want to race to the top, but Gov. Perry remains determined to pursue an ideologically driven race to the bottom," Doggett said.

Leaders of the common-core effort, meanwhile, are launching a series of grassroots campaigns to build support for the project among parents, school board members, and teachers. They also believe that despite the regulatory and political obstacles in implementing the standards, the winds are at their backs.

"[S]upport is holding, and it's moving into the adoption phase," Gene Wilhoit, the executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, said at a forum I attended this week. "We do anticipate a large number of states to move forward with the adoption process, based on what we see now."

Correction: Perry and Hutchison are battling it out in the race for governor, not for U.S. Senate, as I originally wrote. Now fixed.

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Almost all of us agree that it's important to teach students the history of the American Revolution, and the basic principles that guided it. Yet the vast majority of Americans flunked a test on the basic facts surrounding that time period, and the liberties it spawned, a new survey finds.

The results were unveiled in a poll conducted by the American Revolution Center, a nonprofit organization that seeks to promote public understanding of those historical events and their legacy.

The organization conducted a nationwide poll of adults 18 and older, which had a four percent margin of error. The survey included a 27-question test, cobbled together with input from scholars and historians. Some questions were taken directly from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The results will no doubt appall professional and amateur historians alike. On average, Americans got just 44 percent of questions correct. Roughly 83 percent received a failing grade. Half did not get the historical chronology correct, believing, for instance, that the Civil War, or the War of 1812, preceded the American revolution.

As often occurs in surveys of this sort, the poll produced results that are both amusing and sad. More Americans knew that Michael Jackson sang "Beat It" and "Billie Jean" than knew that James Madison was the Father of the Constitution, or that Alexander Hamilton was the first Treasury Secretary. And more than half of those polled, when given the quote, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" identified either
George Washington, Thomas Paine, or Barack Obama as the author.

Think again, comrade. Karl Marx said that.

I suppose some will look at the results and wonder if they're really as dire as they seem. What if the authors had asked different questions, or worded them differently? But I also suspect that many readers react to these quizzes the way I do: with shame. I knew some of the answers on the test, but I was lost on others. Maybe the upside to these sort of surveys is that they goad the historically complacent among us to educate ourselves—through the innumerable books out there, or through documentaries, and the like.

Might make a good gift. After all, Christmas, an event that presumably needs no explanation, is just weeks away.

Image of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, above, and of Karl Marx, below, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 2:46 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

While reporting on the impact of Early Reading First, which was authorized by the No Child Left Behind Act and is the lesser-known relative of Reading First, I cast the net for what's been written about it.

In my story, soon to be published by Education Week, I describe findings from a federal national evaluation of the program and mention a technical analysis by Vanderbilt University researchers on eight child-care centers participating in the program.

Let me refer you in this blog to a few other studies, books, or papers that have been released, or are soon to be released about Early Reading First that I didn't mention in my EdWeek article.

—In October, researchers in psychology from Texas A&M University, College Station, published an evaluation of the program that found children acquired knowledge of the alphabet and print concepts. It also found that the program successfully promoted vocabulary knowledge. Read the abstract of the study, published in the journal Reading and Writing, here.

—Achieving Excellence in Preschool Literacy Instruction, a book published by Guilford Press in 2008, describes activities that educators are carrying out at various Early Reading First sites.

—Guilford Press plans to publish by April another book about the preschool program, Early Reading First Research, Resources, and Best Practices. Carol Vukelich, the director of the Delaware Center for Teacher Education at the University of Delaware, whom I interviewed for my story, just received the galleys for review.

Update: Here's a link to my story at edweek.org about Early Reading First.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I attended a forum on the common standards effort today in Washington. Originally it was supposed to be closed to the press, but the gates opened and journos were allowed in. The event drew people from across the DC education-policy circuit, but it was also attended by teachers, college faculty, and those otherwise curious about the progress of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

The event didn't yield much in the way of major revelations, though there were a few details worth noting:

—The American Federation of Teachers plans to partner with the Council of Great City Schools on a pilot project to examine how the standards can be implemented in schools. The project will focus on 10 districts, looking at issues such as aligning professional development with the standards that emerge, Patricia Sullivan of the AFT, told the audience at the forum.

—Along similar lines, the National Association of State Boards of Education is going to be staging four regional conferences that will focus on common standards sometime in early 2010. Brenda Wellburn, the executive director of the group, said the events will focus on helping their members understand the purpose of the state standards effort. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is providing some financial backing for those events, she said. State boards are a crucial audience for the common standards effort, because in most states those officials are expected to be the ones charged with deciding whether to adopt them.

—The organizers of the the standards effort originally predicted that a draft of the K-12 documents would be ready in mid-December. Now they're saying the release won't happen until early January. The draft K-12 document is already being reviewed by state officials, whose comments will be incorporated when the draft is unveiled, said Dane Linn, of the National Governors Association, who led the forum along with Gene Wilhoit of the Council of Chief State School Officers. Those two organizations, as most readers know, are guiding the standards effort.

—Wilhoit said that while not all states will accept the common standards at the same time, he expects a "considerable number of them to move forward" with adoption when the final standards are complete. Many states require that standards be put through a fairly extensive public comment and vetting phase, which could last anywhere between four and nine months, the CCSSO official noted. Despite that, "the support is holding, and it's moving into the adoption phase," Wilhoit told the audience. He added later: "We do anticipate a large number of states to move forward with the adoption process, based on what we see now."

Wilhoit also addressed a critical question: What does it mean for a state to "adopt" the Common Core standards? He suggested that the Common Core officials want to hold a fairly hard line on standards, requiring states to stick to much of the language and content of the final documents. The goal is to avoid "slippage" in terms of state standards not matching the Common Core. "Adoption means adoption," Wilhoit said. (Though the CCSSO/NGA have said previously that the Common Core will have to account for no less than 85 percent of the standards that the states implement.)

Readers who've been tracking this process will note that, in addition to the AFT and NASBE efforts, supporters of the standards are conducting outreach on at least one other front. As I wrote yesterday, the National PTA has announced plans for a campaign to build support for common standards in four states. While the campaigns discussed at the forum today target different audiences than the PTA's outreach, the overall goal seems to be similar.

UPDATE: I just heard from the Council of Great City Schools, which says the number of cities to participate in the standards-implementation project hasn't been determined yet. The cities will be chosen later. NASBE officials, meanwhile, say conferences on common standards will be held in Jacksonville, Fla., Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and St. Louis.

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

On the American Enterprise Institute's blog, former federal ed stats Commissioner Mark Schneider casts doubt on whether the Obama administration's "Educate to Innovate" campaign is likely to bring more students into math and science studies or the workforce in those fields.

The nation's most-pressing needs in those subjects, at least in math, appear to be in improving curriculum and the quality of teaching, Schneider says. The "Innovate" campaign seems focused on raising students' enthusiasm for those subjects, through technology and other means. But building enthusiasm is different from building academic skill, Schneider says. And Race to the Top funding isn't likely to right this ship long term, he says.

Meanwhile, the backers of the common-standards movement are taking their effort to the streets, or maybe I should say, to the states. With the help of a $1 million Gates Foundation grant, the 5.2-million member National PTA is organizing a grassroots campaign to build support for common standards. As I reported today, they're focusing on four states initially—Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, and North Carolina—though the PTA says more are likely to follow.

This is one of the clearest signs to date of how backers of the standards venture are planning for the actual implementation of standards in districts and classrooms. Whether these state and local efforts will stave off potential political opposition to the standards remains to be seen.

On a related note, the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association are hosting a private event today in Washington to talk about progress on the drafting of K-12 standards, state implementation, and other issues. Here's an interesting graphic the groups have put together, with their vision of how the standards process should play out.

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 9:29 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

High school and college students are known for being more keen on technology than many of their elders, but a blog post over at the Atlantic Wire suggests that Kindle textbooks and other kinds of e-books aren't catching on quickly with students. One reason, according to an article from Daily Finance picked up in the blog post, is that students are disappointed that e-books aren't substantially cheaper than print textbooks. (Hat tip to This Week in Education.)

The post is referring mostly to college students who purchase their own textbooks, not high school students, who don't make the decisions about whether their school districts purchase digital or print textbooks. But some of the information about financial trends with e-books included in the post may still apply to the K-12 education world.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:20 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is telling school district officials they should be poised to apply for grants to support the teaching of American history in their schools. "Get a jumpstart on your [Teaching American History] grant before the 2010 deadline is announced," says a press release that I received today.

The federal discretionary grant program, authorized under the No Child Left Behind Act, aims to support the teaching of American history as a separate academic subject through professional development for teachers.

The U.S. Department of Education usually announces the deadline for the grants in the fall, according to the institute. Well, since today is Dec. 1, fall is quickly running out. Anyway, the institute is suggesting that districts should start preparing their applications before the announcement is made that additional awards are being given out.

Of course, the institute is highlighting the grants competition because it has been a partner with school districts for the American history grants in the past and would like to cooperate with them in the next round.

The institute provides seminars in the summer for teachers on specific topics in American history, as well as other educational opportunities. Do you need to refresh your knowledge about the Salem witchcraft trials or what happened during the first 100 days of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt? The institute has posted free podcasts on those subjects.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 3:20 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend