March 2011 Archives

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has received a private gift of $8 million to expand its national education program, including the creation of a new education center, the institution announced today.

The 2,300-square-foot facility, to be housed in the museum's main building, will feature discussions on the exhibits, a video-conferencing system, and professional workshops for educators, among other offerings. The center is expected to open in the spring of 2012.

The Smithsonian did not immediately disclose who provided the gift, according to an Associated Press story.

"The museum presents its extraordinary collection of American art as a basis for learning at all levels, using original artworks to teach about the American experience," said Elizabeth Broun, the director of the art museum, in the press release.

The donation will also support the museum's plans to create new U.S. history and civics resources for students and teachers based on the best artworks in the collection, it says.

The museum reaches a lot of students already. In the 2009-10 academic year, more than 16,000 students engaged with the museum's collection through its educational programs. Besides programs for students, the museum also offers the Clarice Smith National Teacher Institutes, in which teams of educators learn to integrate artwork across the curricula.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 2:44 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Have you heard? President Barack Obama thinks we should test students less often. Maybe not even annually. He shared this and other thoughts on testing at a town hall meeting here in Washington earlier this week. His comments were reported by the Associated Press, and zinged around the globe accordingly.

Our own Politics K-12 bloggers wondered whether these thoughts squared entirely with what Obama's own education department has been saying, so Alyson Klein asked the department for a clarification. Oh no, came the response, annual testing is very much a part of the administration's vision.

Others in the blogosphere picked up on the possible disconnect in the messaging, too. Edweek.org blogger Anthony Cody opined that Obama was blasting his own education policies.

The president's comments surely rippled through the assessment consortia. Remember them? They're the two big groups of states that have $360 million in federal Race to the Top money to design testing systems for the new common standards. Whether their visions will result in more testing is something that intelligent people can certainly argue about, and some of that argument will revolve around whether you think one summative test—strung out in several parts and types during the year—constitutes "more" testing. But they are certainly going to feature annual tests. (Refresher: check here for graphic and Power Point descriptions of the consortia's plans.)

On the other hand, both consortia intend to address something the president complained about: tests that require students to "fill out a little bubble." They will indeed have computer-based, quick-turnaround tests as part of their systems, but both also envision performance tasks that require students to engage in more extended activities.

The consortia are closely monitoring the assessment dialogue on Capitol Hill as ESEA reauthorization nears, because they have to adapt to whatever Congress requires for federal accountability. You might recall that the question marks over that process led the federal government to award the consortia money not as a grant, but under a "cooperative agreement," which allows for shifts in plans as needed. (Check the last three paragraphs of this story.) This is, I'm guessing, sort of like trying to build a house on a tight deadline and being told, possibly several times during the process, that you need to revamp your blueprints, tossing out the second floor in favor of a rambling ranch design, adding a guesthouse, or completely reworking the plumbing.

How and when the accountability-and-testing policy takes shape with ESEA will have a huge impact on the consortia, which have to put out RFPs for test design as all of this is unfolding. Tricky questions, tricky policy, tricky timing. Stay tuned.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Chinese is in. Latin and French, it seems, are out. And Spanish is still, well, el jefe. (Translation: the boss or chief.) That's my quick-and-dirty takeaway from new data on the study of foreign languages by U.S. students.

In another sign of China's growing prominence on the world stage, the number of U.S. students learning Mandarin Chinese has tripled in recent years, according to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. But the roughly 60,000 young people studying it as of the 2007-08 academic year was dwarfed by the millions learning Spanish, by far the most popular language.

Overall, the data released today show that enrollment in foreign-language courses and programs has increased slightly. That may sound like good news, but as officials at the council are quick to note, it's nothing to celebrate, as fewer than one-in-five American students at the K-12 level are enrolled in foreign-language education. That's right, only 18.5 percent in 2007-08, or 8.9 million students, up from 18 percent in 2004-05.

"We're still woefully behind almost all other countries of the world, particularly industrialized countries," Marty Abbott, the education director at ACTFL, told me in an interview. "When you look at all the countries that surpass us on the PISA tests, they all have early-language programs, they start children learning language in elementary schools."

She added: "In Europe, the whole effort is to learn another language besides your language to a near-native level, and a third or fourth at what they call a 'functional proficiency level,' " she said.

Abbott did note that the data are more favorable when looking at the middle and high school levels, where most U.S. students study foreign languages. In grades 7-12, 32 percent were taking a foreign language. But that still suggests that most students will graduate from high school without ever having studied a foreign language.

As for Mandarin, Abbott said she's not surprised to see more students studying it, noting that this is consistent with previous trends when the rise in a nation's prominence led to more U.S. students studying the language. In the 1960s, she said, there was a big rise in the study of Russian, and Japanese in the 1980s. (I wrote last fall about the growing role of the Chinese government itself in promoting Mandarin-language instruction in the United States.)

I also spoke with Bret Lovejoy, the executive director of the ACTFL. He said the question is whether Mandarin will remain popular.

"The problem I see is that, and this can be with any language that seems to grab the attention of a lot of people, is how well is it going to be sustained over time," he told me. "And too often, what we see is that a new language program is installed in a school system or a school, and that one that's there and that may be very successful is eliminated."

Here's a snapshot of key findings, based on comparing 2004-05 enrollment with 2007-08. The languages that saw an increase include:

• Mandarin, up 195 percent to 60,000;
• Japanese, up 18 percent to 73,000;
• German, up 8 percent to 395,000;
• Russian, up 3 percent to 12,000; and
• Spanish, up 2 percent, to 6.42 million.

Meanwhile:

• French is down 3 percent to 1.25 million; and
• Latin is down 9 percent to 205,000.

There are plenty more data to mine in this report, so you should check it out.

One other thing. President Barack Obama just yesterday promoted the learning of foreign languages in a speech at a District of Columbia public school.

"For all the young people here, I want you guys to be studying hard because it is critical for all American students to have language skills. And I want everybody here to be working hard to make sure that you don't just speak one language, you speak a bunch of languages."

Lovejoy said he was pleased by the plug for learning other languages, but said he's been disappointed by the president when it comes to action.

"He's saying the right things, but we're not really seeing this translate into policy," Lovejoy told me.

He highlighted the fact that President Obama has proposed to consolidate funding for the $27 million Foreign Language Assistance Program at the U.S. Department of Education into a broader, competitive fund focused on promoting a "well-rounded education."

"The only proposal we've seen is to fold the FLAP into the well-rounded child [program]," Lovejoy said, "and I think that will lead to less money for languages."

Posted by Erik Robelen at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The American Civil Liberties Union is firing off letters to schools, warning that it is illegal to block students' access to websites that advocate gay and lesbian rights while allowing access to sites that advocate changing a gay person's sexual orientation.

This week, the civil-rights group sent letters to the superintendents of the Rochester Community school district in Michigan and the North Kansas City district in Missouri, warning that their web-filtering procedures violate federal law.

It took issue with policies that block sites such as the national Gay-Straight Alliance Network, which connects such student alliances to one another, and Day of Silence, which organizes a national day of protest against anti-gay harassment, while allowing access to sites operated by People Can Change and Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays, which advocate changing gay people's sexual orientation.

The letters are part of a "Don't Filter Me" campaign the ACLU launched last month with Yale Law School. It asked students to check to see whether Internet content pertaining to lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender issues was blocked on their schools' computers.

The ACLU was at it even before the formal launch of the campaign, with letters to schools in Maryland and in Tennessee, among other places.

In an email to the ACLU on Monday, Rochester Superintendent David Pruneau said that his district's web-filtering software works by screening out "broad categories" of sites, rather than individual sites. But, having been alerted to the problem, the district has begun reviewing the filtering rules in the software, Mr. Pruneau said.

The North Kansas City district issued a statement saying there is "no reason" for the websites cited in the ACLU letter to be blocked. The district doesn't block website access on the basis of gay-related content and has a policy ensuring fair treatment of all students, regardless of sexual orientation, it said.

District officials are looking into the possibility that their filtering software created a "technical problem," since a similar issue arose recently with the website that connects students to information about the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) for college, North Kansas City district officials said.

Additionally, the district's statement said, its policies allow students to request that websites be unblocked, and it honors that policy "daily."

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 8:36 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

There are plenty of rumblings from folks who say they are developing curriculum for the common standards. We already know that people mean many different things when they say this.

We've got the big publishers adapting or creating instructional materials for the new standards, as well as a flock of folks financed by the Gates Foundation, and the federally funded assessment consortia. We've got the AFT pushing for shared curricula (though not specifying yet who would write it). Curriculum folks out in the states and districts are training an eye on the landscape ahead, as well. A chunk of New York City's pilot on common core, for instance, involves curriculum alignment.

Now comes word that a group of school districts in California isn't waiting around for the state to build curriculum frameworks and such (hat tip to John Fensterwald of the Educated Guess blog). John tells us that CORE, a group of seven districts that pushed forward California's Race to the Top application, is rallying teachers to build instructional materials and formative assessments for the standards, which California and most other states have adopted.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 2:33 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Maybe I've just been here too long. But once again, I see that old but unsurprising theme cropping up: If we pay attention, we can spot students' academic struggles early on and intervene to help.

The latest echo comes in a report about college, actually. The Colorado Department of Education studied K-12 and higher education data and concluded that students who need remediation in college could have been identified as early as 6th grade, just by looking at their scores on state tests.

A couple of recent laws in Colorado required, among other things, the sharing of data between K-12 and higher ed. That's what facilitated this study. It showed that results of the state tests in grade 10 and the ACT college-admissions exam in grade 11 are pretty clear indicators of the likelihood of remediation in college.

That could give high schools valuable information in addressing students' weaknesses before they leave. (Researchers also found that the ACT's "college ready" cutoff score didn't always match up with placement test scores at Colorado colleges, either; some of the "college ready" students still needed remediation, and some of those not "college ready" on the exam didn't.)

State test data provided some important flashing lights far earlier, as well. Researchers found that more than two-thirds of the students who needed reading remediation in two-year colleges, and nearly half of those who needed it in four-year colleges, scored below proficient on state tests in 6th and 8th grades. This delivers crucial information into the hands of middle schools, who can target help where it's most needed.

If the early warning idea sounds stunningly straightforward and obvious to you, I'm sure you're not alone. But the pileup of studies and early-warning programs (see a couple of examples here and here) still has not gotten the message across with the kind of broad market penetration one might hope for. It's still the few-and-far-between places that are putting these ideas into practice. Of course, assembling the longitudinal data systems needed to see the picture clearly is a big stumbling block, but states are making progress on that front, as the Data Quality Campaign has been telling us.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The state board of education in Virginia has approved an overhaul of its textbook-approval process after officials recently discovered a raft of errors in two elementary-level history books, according to the Associated Press.

For background on the situation, see this post, and this one.

The board today agreed to install more safeguards in the review process, the story explains. It now will place the primary burden on publishers to ensure the accuracy of textbooks for which they seek state approval. In addition, the publishers would have to certify that all textbooks had been reviewed for accuracy by at least three qualified subject-matter experts. And they must detail the internal quality-control procedures they use for factual accuracy, as well as spelling and grammar.

I'll highlight one of the many problems identified, since it ties in with the Civil War, a popular theme for me this week! A 4th grade book being used in some Virginia classrooms, called Our Virginia: Past and Present, from Five Ponds Press, includes a contention, widely disputed by historians, that thousands of blacks took arms on behalf of the Confederacy.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 5:03 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

With the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War only weeks away, I've got more news on efforts to help students learn about the seminal conflict. (For my first round, check out this post.)

A leading battlefield preservation organization, the Civil War Trust, this week unveiled a free set of lesson plans and supplementary materials, with an emphasis on promoting critical-thinking skills and tapping into a wealth of primary sources, including period documents, photographs, and maps.

The curriculum is designed to be presented over a two-week period, and is supplied at three different skill levels appropriate to elementary, middle, and high school, according to a press release. It features nine learning goals that allow students to "explore the causes and effects of the Civil War on political, economic, military, and cultural levels."

The Civil War Trust, which bills itself as "the largest nonprofit battlefield preservation organization in the United States," also offers a variety of other educational materials, and even runs a four-day teacher institute each summer. The organization's mission is to "preserve our nation's endangered Civil War battlefields and to promote appreciation of these hallowed grounds. To date, it has preserved more than 30,000 acres of battlefield land in 20 states.

Meanwhile, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History recently developed a special Web page pegged to the war's 150th anniversary with a wealth of material. This nonprofit organization, founded in 1994, supports "the study and love of American history through a wide range of programs and resources for students, teachers, scholars, and history enthusiasts throughout the nation."

Also, here are a few blogs I've just discovered that are worth a look:

• Disunion, a new blog from The New York Times that "revisits and reconsiders America's most perilous period—using contemporary accounts, diaries, images, and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded."

• Teaching the Civil War With Technology, a blog written by Jim Beeghley, an adjunct professor who teaches graduate-level education courses at Wilson College and Wilkes University in Pennsylvania.

• Civil War Memory, a blog by Kevin Levin, who chairs the history department at St. Anne's-Belfield School in Charlottesville, Va.

Know of any other helpful resources online? (Believe me, I have NO DOUBT there's tons more, and that I'm only just skimming the surface.) Post a comment!

Image: Dead Confederate soldier in Devil's Den, July, 1863, Gettysburg, Pa.
Alexander Gardner/Library of Congress

Posted by Erik Robelen at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Colleges and universities must shape their work with a keen eye toward the demands of the marketplace, a new study from the National Governors Association tells us.

It urges governors to "align higher education with state economic goals" by letting colleges and universities know that they're expected to contribute to their state's economic well-being by helping prepare a 21st-century workforce. Governors should create incentives for their state colleges and universities to draw on labor-market research and employers' input to help them set their priorities and to track their impact on student employment and employer satisfaction.

It boils down to this, the report says: The college-completion conversation should focus not just on getting degrees, but also on what jobs those degrees are well matched for. It discusses work in Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, and Washington state that's geared in that direction.

This sort of shift echoes discussions at the middle and high school level, as educators ask how schools can best serve a variety of students' goals and aspirations without setting expectations too low for anyone. How, for instance, should K-12 rearrange itself to serve students who aim for a prestigious four-year university, those who envision themselves at a broad-access state school, those who are exploring the options of a local community college, and those who wish to obtain certification in an occupation that doesn't require an associate's degree?

I hear some strains of these conversations in the new career and tech-ed. movement, which is anything but your grandmother's voc-ed. I also hear strains in the dialogue about a recent report from Harvard, which argued that a "college for all" orientation can deprive too many students of good training for solid jobs that require less than a bachelor's degree.

One common theme running through these discussions at the K-12 and higher-ed levels is that education ignores the needs of the marketplace at its own peril. How this squares with broad areas of study that aren't neatly linked to employment is a part of the discussion that hasn't become entirely clear yet.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 3:40 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Talk about a teachable moment. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, and there will surely be no shortage of activities under way to commemorate—and educate.

Just this morning I learned about a couple of things.

First, high school students who know their Civil War history will get a chance to compete for a college scholarship as part of an initiative announced today by education publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and HISTORY, the cable network. The National Civil War Student Challenge, a timed online competition, will award more than $30,000 in college scholarships, including $15,000 for the grand prize winner.

The online quiz will be conducted April 7-9, with the 30 top-scoring finalists invited to take an in-school final exam.

Second, the National Park Service has developed a new online feature called the Civil War Reporter. It will offer daily Twitter dispatches from Beglan O'Brien, a fictitious Civil War era correspondent, who will chronicle the people and events of the war.

"We hope this 'real-time' reporting will give modern day Americans a unique insight into the war as O'Brien follows the story wherever it takes him, from assignments embedded with Union and Confederate soldiers, to covering President Lincoln at Gettysburg," National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis said in a press release.

The National Park Service also has a variety of other activities planned to commemorate the 150th anniversary.

Finally, last week I learned that the National Council for History Education has a national conference fast approaching with the theme, "The Causes and Consequences of Civil Wars." The March 31-April 2 conference will be held in Charleston, S.C., not far from where the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter on April 14, 1861.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Calls are mounting for the development of shared curriculum for the common standards. The two most recently examples come from the American Federation of Teachers, and the Albert Shanker Institute. The second, in particular, has drawn a lot of attention and a bit of backlash.

The debate has been captured nicely in one particular round of exchanges in the blogosphere. It has been unfolding largely between Robert Pondiscio at the Core Knowledge blog and a few bloggers at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's blog, Flypaper, with former Gates Foundation education chief and EdReformer's Tom Vander Ark and the Cato Institute's Neal McCluskey weighing in, too.

Pondiscio kicked it off with applause for the common curriculum call. Not surprising, since Core Knowledge has long pushed for shared, sequenced curriculum spelling out the content it believes all children should know.

Vander Ark responded by saying that one common curriculum is precisely what we shouldn't be doing; technology enables individualized student learning plans, a far better approach, he said, than creating one big set of learning goals that don't consider students' varying needs. Pondiscio goes on the counter-attack against Vander Ark.

Flypaper's Peter Meyer argues that common curriculum doesn't equal loss of local control, a position McCluskey calls an "assault on logic."

Kathleen Porter-Magee from Flypaper jumps in, arguing that making curriculum decisions at the state or national level is deeply misguided. Her boss, Checker Finn, tries in his way to get everyone to calm down. Come on, people, he says, shared curriculum does not mean the world is coming to an end.

None of that has a calming effect on Pondiscio, however, who contends that Porter-Magee is confused. Porter-Magee responds with some distinctions, saying that it is fine for states or a nationally shared curriculum to define the scope of what students learn, but when they get into prescribing the sequence, they're crossing the line into what should be decided closer to the classroom. Let the states get the standards and accountability pieces right, she says, and let the districts and schools figure out the curriculum pieces that get students there.

Pondiscio from Core Knowledge jumps back in, expressing doubt about Porter-Magee's argument that state standards and accountability are enough to drive a content-rich curriculum locally.

Flypaper's Meyer wonders why everyone is "so afraid of curriculum." In another post, Meyer expresses relief that after years of shying away from content discussions, colleagues in his school district seem to be coming together around it.

I'm sure there will much more to come in the shared-curriculum debate. What thoughts do these exchanges prompt for you?

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

We hear from Missouri that they are cutting out the writing and performance tasks students have been required to do as part of the state's standardized-test system. Shock of the century: It's all about money.

The longer writing sections are gone, as are the extended tasks or problems students did in science and math. This stuff has to be evaluated by real humans, and it takes time, which equals money. And as we all know, money is in extremely short supply in the states right now.

Maryland dumped its respected but controversial MSPAP exams for similar reasons in 2002, to the disappointment of some educators who saw those tests as more well-rounded gauges of what students had learned. That exam made a fundamental shift away from multiple-choice responses to constructed responses. (Here's an interesting paper about the MSPAP's rise and fall by the state's former assessment director, one of the exam's designers.)

The two state consortia designing tests for the new common standards envision performance tasks and extended essay writing as part of their systems. They have federal money to design the tests and get them off the ground, but not for ongoing administration. Forty-five states are participating in these consortia, though we don't know yet how many will hang in there and agree to use the assessment systems by the time it all shakes out in 2014-15. Still, for the ones that do, how will they sustain types of assessments that some states have found too expensive and time-consuming to sustain?

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A new report from the school system in New York City offers a fairly exhaustive look at trends in arts instruction, with a mix of encouraging and discouraging findings for those who believe the arts are essential to a good education.

We reporters, of course, love to emphasize the bad news, but today I'll resist that temptation and begin with what sounds promising for the arts, in part because I find it rather surprising. And that is: By many measures, access to arts education in this cultural Mecca appears to have risen considerably over the four most recent years (ending in 2009-10).

After all, it was only last month that I reported some national survey data suggesting a steady decline in access to arts education over the decades.

The school-level data from New York City shows that the amount of arts instruction appears to have grown pretty steadily at the elementary and middle school level, based on four years of data running from the 2006-07 academic year to 2009-10. Also, schools are increasingly offering multiple types of arts instruction, whether visual arts, music, dance, or theater.

For example, 60 percent of elementary schools reported providing some instruction in all four of those disciplines in 2009-10, compared with 35 percent four years earlier, when counting arts teachers and/or cultural organizations. (99 percent provided instruction in at least one discipline.) There was also substantial growth when it comes to providing instruction in all four disciplines across ALL grades in an elementary school, reaching 19 percent in 2006-7 compared with just 3 percent four years earlier.

I should note, however, that with a few exceptions, this growth seems to have plateaued between 2008-09 and the following year at both the elementary and middle-school levels. In high school, meanwhile, arts instruction mostly grew over the four-year time span, but there was generally a small drop over the two most recent years.

Of course, there's plenty of bad news for the arts, too. The overall fiscal 2010 budget for the arts in schools decreased by 4.3 percent compared with the prior year. Schools experienced a decrease in per capita budgeting for the arts from $316 per student to $301.

Not surprisingly, then, the number of certified arts teachers in the city's public schools also declined by 5.2 percent between 2008-09 and the following year, though the number of theater teachers actually rose by 16.7 percent.

On average, three-quarters of all public schools that responded to the survey reported having at least one full-time certified arts teacher.

There is truly a ton of data in this report, so I'm only skimming the surface to give you a flavor. I'll close with a press release issued by the Center for Arts Education in New York City, which saw much to be concerned about in the data.

"While there was some positive news in the report, the clear message from the data is that arts education is in the midst of a difficult storm," it says. "In addition to significant declines in arts budgets, the number of certified arts teachers in city schools is declining as well, and far too many schools are still not providing the arts instruction required according to state education law."

Posted by Erik Robelen at 9:21 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

You've heard it before: Students aren't getting enough instruction in history (or XX, or YY) as part of their formal education, especially in an era of high-stakes testing that's dominated by attention to achievement in math and reading.

Well, we may not be alone. The Daily Telegraph newspaper of London reported this week that "children's understanding of the past is being undermined by crowded timetables and poor history teaching.

That dire conclusion may be a little strong if you take a read of the actual government report cited by the story. However, that report by government inspectors does show some reasons for concern. For instance, at the secondary level, about one-fourth of 58 schools examined had placed "constraints" on teaching history. In some of these cases, "history was becoming marginalized."

The watchdog agency also said that England was the only country in Europe where schoolchildren were allowed to stop studying history at age 13.

At the primary level, the report found that some pupils found it difficult to place historical episodes in a "coherent, long-term narrative." That's apparently because "many primary teachers did not themselves have adequate subject knowledge beyond the specific elements of history that they taught." Most of the primary schools, in fact, lacked sufficient professional development to help teachers in this regard.

On the positive side, the report found that history was generally a "popular and successful subject." Achievement was deemed "good or outstanding" in 63 out of 83 primary schools and 59 out of 83 secondary schools. (Careful readers may notice there are more secondary schools included in this measure than on the earlier question with regard to the teaching of history. I'm not clear on why that is.)

Moreover, the report concludes: "The view that too little British history is taught in secondary schools in England is a myth," though it said the large majority of the time was spent on English history rather than wider British history.

In response to the report, the Telegraph story reports, the British government has launched a review of the National Curriculum, with the likely outcome of specifying key dates, events, and historical figures that all students should learn.

As I hinted above, and as most readers surely know, there's been growing concern in recent years as to whether subjects like history are getting pushed aside in this country amid the emphasis on English and math in the No Child Left Behind Act.

In fact, the American Historical Association in 2007 issued a statement saying it supported adding both U.S. and world history to the assessment and accountability provisions under the federal law, even as the AHA noted that it came to this conclusion reluctantly.

Background materials supporting the statement indicated that the AHA's teaching division "takes this position without any enthusiasm for high-stakes testing in general or any conviction that adequate assessment instruments exist. Our main point is that if history is to be a high-priority subject in the public school curriculum, then it must be assessed and evaluated."

Posted by Erik Robelen at 4:51 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

An intriguing study out today finds that a one-hour exercise to boost students' confidence can improve the grades of minority college students. This and another recent study showing that coaching can make a difference in whether students complete college raise obvious questions about whether similar weapons could be deployed to help high school students.

First, let's back up and give you the basics on the two studies, both out of Stanford University. The coaching study looked at an individualized student-coaching service called InsideTrack, which helped students in their first year at public and private universities to clarify their goals, develop their skills, and handle their outside-of-school lives. Students who received that coaching were about 5 percentage points more likely to be in school a year later than those who did not. The effect held on, though diminished somewhat, for another year, as well. Four years later, the graduation rates of the coached students were four percentage points higher than those of uncoached students. The authors also found this approach to be more cost-effective than other retention strategies such as offering more financial aid.

(You can read more about the coaching study at my colleague Caralee Adams' College Bound blog, and at the College Puzzle blog, written by Stanford's Mike Kirst.)

The second Stanford study, scheduled for publication tomorrow in the journal Science, looks at the effects of an exercise designed by psychologists. It was intended to address the doubts that minority students can feel as they enter college. Professors Greg Walton and Geoffrey Cohen studied 90 second-semester freshmen, dividing them into control and treatment groups, each of which included black and white students. Students in the treatment group read surveys of and essays by upperclassmen of various races and ethnicities, describing their struggles getting help, and interacting well with professors and friends during their first year in college. The upperclassmen relayed that in time, they tackled those problems and felt confident and successful.

In essays of their own, the treatment-group members wrote about why they thought the upperclassmen's experiences changed over time. They folded their own experiences into the essays as well, later revising them into videotaped speeches that could be watched by younger students.

The idea, Walton said in a statement, was to encourage black students to see their adjustment experiences as universal rather than unique to them individually or to their racial group.

Tracking the experiment's students for several years, the professors found that the exercise made no difference for white students, but made an impact on black students. The black students in the treatment group had higher GPAs and class rankings and reported a greater sense of belonging and better physical health than those in the control group.

The social-belonging exercise alone certainly isn't the answer to solving the achievement-gap problem, Cohen said in the official Stanford release, but it contributes to the field's knowledge of the kinds of things that can help.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 2:51 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Remember those controversial social studies standards enacted last year in Texas? Well, according to the San Antonio Express-News, bipartisan pressure in the state legislature is mounting to revisit them. For a reminder on the debate, check out my wrap-up article from last June.

The new story from the San Antonio paper notes that three Republicans with leadership roles in the Texas House of Representatives, including the chairmen of the appropriations and the public education committees, have criticized the new standards and how they were developed.

Critics fault the Texas board of education for considering nearly 200 last-hour amendments before taking a final vote last year, the story explains. (The standards were ultimately approved on a series of party line votes of 9-5, with all Democrats opposed. The exception was a 14-0 vote on economics standards.)

"These standards and the way they were developed just don't pass the common-sense test," Rep. Charlie Geren, the chairman of the House Administration Committee, told the newspaper. "The law has a process laid out for how to write our state's curriculum, and they thumbed their nose at it and wrote standards themselves.."

Another of the Republicans cited a recent report on state history standards from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute as influencing his stance.

"When groups like the Fordham Institute call our standards 'a politicized distortion of history' and 'an unwieldy tangle of social studies categories,' we have a problem," Rep. Rob Eissler was quoted as saying.

GOP state board member David Bradley, a leading champion of the new standards, told the newspaper that he doubts the votes are there to reopen the standards.

The standards attracted national attention—and criticism—so stay tuned for further developments. Also, if this is a topic is of interest, you can decide for yourself whether the new standards were worthy of Texas students or not, by actually reading them.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

On the beat I cover, I long ago lost count of the number of times I have heard people express worry that adopting the common standards will mean that they lose local control over what they teach. The response from common-core supporters has been that the new standards articulate the strengths your students must have, but don't tell you exactly what must be taught or how to teach it.

That's part of the message Georgia is sending to its districts. We learn from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the state board of education voted this week to stop requiring districts to use the "integrated" approach to math, which blends the teaching of algebra, geometry and other math topics, and has created a bit of unhappiness in that state.

With the state board's vote, districts can now decide whether to take the integrated approach, use a more traditional course-by-course approach, or offer a choice to incoming freshmen. (The state department of education's official statement on the vote is here.)

An irate math teacher wrote to the Journal-Constitution to point out that using a "traditional" math pathway will not "fix" problems with Georgia's integrated approach. Regardless of approach, teachers will have to lift students to the common core standards, since Georgia is one of the 44 states that have adopted them. And the two approaches, he suggests, might not be as different from each other as people think.

The idea of carving out local options for how to reach the standards is much-discussed, and I'm sure this is hardly the last we will hear of it. With more than 14,000 school districts in the U.S., and scads of people working on curriculum—or curricular "materials," "resources," "frameworks," "guidelines," and whatever other curriculum descriptors you want to name—this is bound to be a journey with many interesting developments.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

OK, I've got a critical mass of STEM-related developments to catch up on, so here goes.

First, NASA recently produced more than 100 educational "eClips" intended to give students a firsthand look at projects the space agency is currently developing. The videos are hosted by top NASA scientists and mathematicians.

Second, a 10-year study finds that Project Exploration, an effort outside of school to connect urban teenagers with scientists, has had a significant and lasting effect on the students' educational achievements and career aspirations in science. Each year, the Chicago-based organization works with 250 of the city's middle and high schoolers, predominantly minority girls from low-income families.

Third, the March issue of The Science Teacher focuses on the theme of "Science for All." It includes a close look at teaching science to English-language learners. Another article in the journal, published by the National Science Teachers Association, highlights a Family Science program organized by Texas A&M—Corpus Christi and co-hosted with local schools. (By the way, in an upcoming story for Education Week, I'll be highlighting the Family Science Nights hosted by Explora, a science museum based in Albuquerque, N.M. That initiative is a partnership with the city's public school system.)

p.s. Happy (belated) Pi Day!

Posted by Erik Robelen at 3:07 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

As you probably know by now, the common standards in English/language arts emphasize students' ability to master progressively complex texts as they progress through the grades. (Appendix A of the standards is where they delve into this stuff.)

I blogged the other day about watching teachers in New York City grapple with this, and with learning strategies for teaching students how to read well in the disciplines. There is much more detail in my story, which is now out on our website.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 1:47 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

GED testing centers in four states will begin offering the option of taking the high school equivalency exam via computer this spring.

That was one of the tidbits reporters learned yesterday in a conference call with folks from the American Council on Education, which administers the GED.

The ACE's plan to revamp the exam has been known for some time; it was originally slated to come out in 2012, but that plan was delayed so the test could be aligned to the common standards that have now been adopted by all but seven states. The new test is now slated for 2014.

Additional details previewed for reporters yesterday included the fact that ACE is partnering with Pearson to develop the new test. I asked how the material on the new exam would differ from that on the current one. Nicole Chestang, the executive director of the GED Testing Service, said that was still being figured out, but that the new exam will "track with" trends in increasingly rigorous standards. Randy Trask, senior vice president at Pearson, did drop one interesting tidbit: that the new test will likely include performance items (questions that can't be answered just by filling in a bubble).

Some of the testing centers in Georgia, California, Texas, and Florida will begin offering the option of taking the test by computer in April or May, Chestang said. The ACE hopes to have the computer-based option available in 11 states by the end of the year and to keep expanding well into 2013. Officials emphasized that the computer option will be in addition to—not instead of—the current paper-and-pencil format. That approach will eventually be phased out, they said, but not right away. They also emphasized that a computer-based option doesn't mean the test can be taken at home, online; it has to be proctored in a GED testing center.

Even as computer-based testing is phased in, those taking the test will still be taking the 2002 version. The reworked version will not be out until 2014.

In addition to reworking the test and rolling out the computer-based option, the ACE and Pearson plan to offer a national GED exam preparation program and create a "transition network" of counseling and other services to link those taking the GED with career and postsecondary options, officials said. New York City's District 79 announced last December that it is piloting an "accelerated learning program" to prepare young adults for the GED and for careers and college.

By undertaking a major reworking of the GED, the ACE and Pearson hope to reach more people who could benefit from the pathway it offers to jobs and postsecondary education, said ACE President Molly Corbett Broad. Chestang said the ACE wants to "erase the question from anyone's mind that the GED is equivalent in every way to a high school diploma."

"Pretty much you can go anywhere a diploma holder can go," she said.

I asked for numbers detailing what portion of GED passers go on to enroll in four-year colleges, two-year colleges, and certificate or training programs. But ACE officials didn't have all those numbers broken down. An ACE report from last year, "Crossing the Bridge," (which we wrote about when it came out), showed that 43 percent of GED passers went on to pursue some form of postsecondary education within six years. But that includes all the above options. The only breakdown we are given is this: Of those who pass the GED and go on to postsecondary, three quarters choose options of two or or fewer years.

Table 13, on Page 25 of the report, gets at a different face of this idea: not where GED passers enroll, but where they obtain their certificates or degrees. The biggest chunk (47.5 percent) are associate's degrees. One-quarter are bachelor's degrees. (Keep in mind that this considers only the GED passers who complete a postsecondary option. The report tells us clearly, and lamentably, that completion rates among GED passers are low; only half return for a second semester.)

Reworking the GED and its attendant supports is aimed at boosting the number of those who use the exam as a pole vault into something that will offer them a viable and rewarding way of life. With research telling us that each higher level of education carries greater potential earnings, the power of a new GED to improve young adults' futures will be something worth watching.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The U.S. Department of Education last week officially put out word that it's accepting applications for $189 million in grants for a new literacy initiative. Forty-six states have been working on statewide literacy plans for children ages zero to grade 12 in anticipation of pursuing one of the competitive grants under the Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy program. (Those states received a share of $10 million from the department to get started.)

The grant announcement comes as most federal aid for literacy at the Education Department—including for Striving Readers—was wiped out as part of a stopgap spending bill enacted earlier this month. Here's my big-picture story on what's going on there.

A little confused? Well, the $189 million is actually money Congress appropriated in fiscal 2010 but the Education Department has still not obligated. (Some observers have complained that the agency has dragged its feet in moving forward with the new program.) For the moment, that money is still intact. The cuts enacted earlier this month are for fiscal 2011, which began in October.

Also, to further confuse you, even though President Barack Obama signed the stopgap spending bill, Senate Democrats have already signaled their intention to try to restore most of the Striving Readers aid for the current fiscal year. Whether they will succeed remains to be seen.

However, the $189 million is apparently still in jeopardy. That's because a larger fiscal 2011 budget plan passed in February by the Republican-controlled House would go back and retroactively strip away that $189 million. After all, as I noted, the Education Department has yet to obligate it in the form of grants to states. Some observers suggest the Obama administration itself may have opened the door for this step. Last summer, the White House agreed to sacrifice $50 million of the original $250 million in fiscal 2010 for Striving Readers to help pay for an education-jobs package.

Even more confused? Simply put, future funding for Striving Readers is in question. And so is the $189 million in grants the Education Department just announced.

Here's another piece to confuse matters. Keep in mind that the Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy program is NOT the same thing as Striving Readers. The latter is a research pilot program spearheaded by the Bush administration that focused specifically on adolescent literacy. The new program aims to build on that work, taking lessons learned and promoting a broader agenda of literacy from birth until high school graduation. It was actually created as part of the fiscal 2010 appropriations process, which is an unusual way to launch a program.

Anyway, the department said last week that it will award anywhere from three to 18 grants to states under the new Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy program. (Larger states who win would get a lot more money.) The grants will be for a four-year period, and would range from as little as $3 million to as much as $70 million.

In a letter to states, the department explains: "Activities should align with a comprehensive state literacy plan designed to improve student outcomes and have the characteristics of an effective literacy program, such as professional development, screening and assessment, targeted interventions for students reading below grade level, and other research-based methods of improving classroom instruction and practice."

The department says that a "comprehensive" literacy plan includes preliteracy, reading and writing skills for all students, including disadvantaged students, limited-English proficient students, and students with disabilities, from birth to grade 12.

The closing date for applications is May 9, assuming, of course, that the money hasn't been stripped away by then.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

What does the "career" part of college and career readiness mean? Good question, and it's not one that's gotten as much attention as the "college" part.

Some of the leading thinkers on career readiness gathered this week for a webinar on the topic that produced some good food for thought. Gathered by the Alliance for Excellent Education, an organization here in Washington that focuses on high school improvement, the group included Robert Schwartz, a Harvard education school professor who co-authored a recent report that sparked tons of debate when it questioned the college-for-all rhetoric that often dominates debate.

It also featured Gene Bottoms of the Southern Regional Education Board, which has been expanding the definition of career and tech ed in 1,200 schools in 30 Southern states for many years, and Gary Hoachlander of ConnectEd, which has been doing its own version of that work in California. David Conley, a University of Oregon professor who has pushed to broaden our ideas about what skills students need for college and work, rounded out the panel.

One of the intriguing things that emerges during this discussion is the merging of career and technical education with college prep. This flies in the face of the old notions we have had about vocational or career and technical education. But that's exactly the point: The more places I go in this work, the more I hear that these are dated concepts that need to be trashed, frankly, while we are all brought sharply up to date on our thinking.

As you listen to this webinar, keep an ear out for this convergence. Take for example what Hoachlander said when Alliance President Bob Wise asked him who the key partners are in the work to provide students with meaningful, applied learning. He said career and tech ed in 2011 is about "preparing students for college and career," which is "a major shift in the way we talk and think about this." Doing that requires joining together with higher education and the workplace to build curriculum, he said.

Bottoms drove that point home with some compelling numbers: Almost 80 percent of the career-oriented students in SREB's network plan to go on to some form of further study, he said, "so you have to think about a double purpose"—both college and work. As a result, he said, curricula for his network schools are created by professors from two- and four-year colleges, private industry, and K-12 "all at the table." His students' pathways, he said, are "increasingly linked" to community and four-year colleges. Fully 60 percent of the students in the SREB network schools enroll in four-year college.

So much for one more quaint notion: That it's either college or career.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 3:55 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Ever since that morning I spent in a basement in New York's Chelsea neighborhood a few weeks ago, I can't get text complexity off my mind. Nor can I shake the image of the opening slide in a PowerPoint presentation about "disciplinary literacy": a curvaceous woman in leather and high boots, carrying a whip.

Contrary to what you might think, I did not make that up to get your attention. It really happened. I was hanging out with teachers from a high school in the Bronx at a professional-development day that was part of a city pilot on secondary literacy.

The pilot was prompted by New York's adoption of the common standards, which harp heavily on the need for students to be much stronger at grappling with complicated informational and literary texts, and the need for teachers to learn "disciplinary literacy" strategies to help students decode the challenging grammar, vocabulary, writing, and ways of thinking specific to each subject.

In other words: It's not enough to teach kids how to "read hard stuff." You have to show them how reading hard stuff in AP Literature is different than reading hard stuff in biology, European history, or trigonometry.

The gal in leather was a joke, actually; a whimsical way of entering the presentation on strategies for reading in the disciplines. Timothy and Cynthia Shanahan, a husband-wife team of reading experts from the University of Illinois-Chicago, started their PowerPoint with that image, asking, "What is disciplinary literacy?" It got a chuckle out of the teachers, but then they moved on to the serious stuff of answering the question. They detailed the multiple ways that reading requires subject-specific strategies, arguing that in order to read well in all the disciplines, students need to understand not only how those experts write, but how they build knowledge.

The text-complexity work plunged the teachers into using a new—and still evolving—rubric to evaluate five aspects of difficulty in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It wasn't as simple as running the text through a computer analysis attuned to word length, sentence length, and word familiarity. This analysis involved thorny discussions about the book's structure, plot, syntax, content, and the background knowledge students might need to really understand it. And it became clear that some aspects of the novel are far more complex than others, making a single numerical rating seem too simplistic.

I keep thinking about those teachers. They were far from mastering this stuff, but they were deep in it, thrashing around and forcing new kinds of thinking. Watching them, I kept thinking about how my high school years might have been different if my teachers had been wrestling with those kinds of things, and how my college years might have been deeper as a result. I guess time will tell if these areas of focus yield a shift of ground in literacy, or whether they were just a passing idea du jour. But until we get that clarity, there is a lot to watch and contemplate.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 3:02 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

As I've said here pretty often, President Obama loves to talk about math and science education. But given the recent news about big cuts to federal literacy aid, you'd think he might give a quick plug for good old, you know, readin' and writin'.

And so, I decided to check out his speech yesterday at a public school in Boston. It was all about education, its importance, and about his determination to fight the push by congressional Republicans to slash education aid. Once again, he emphasized the need for improved math and science education repeatedly. But, to my knowledge, there was not one mention of literacy. That word, or "reading" or "writing" never came up. The same is true of his recent State of the Union Address, which also included a lot of talk of education, with considerable emphasis on math and science.

Who knows? Maybe the president feels that the importance of literacy is so obvious that it doesn't need articulation. But at least some observers have argued to me that the issue doesn't seem to be a very high priority for the Obama administration. And it could be that House Republicans picked up on that when they were looking for their first round of cuts for the current fiscal year. (I can tell you that, by contrast, former President George W. Bush talked about the need to improve reading all the time. And even while some of his plans proved rather controversial, he was prepared to put a lot of money behind the effort.)

The literacy programs wiped away as part of the stopgap spending bill enacted last week were all ones that President Obama has signaled were not priorities for him. He has proposed to replace them with a broader, competitive fund called Effective Teaching and Learning: Literacy. He requested $450 million for that new funding stream in fiscal 2011. The stopgap spending measure, of course, was all about cutting spending, so it did not replace them with a new literacy fund. And to my knowledge, there were not cuts to math and science education in the short-term deal to keep the government operating.

I should note that even while President Obama did agree to sign the stopgap spending bill with the cuts for literacy, it seems pretty clear that there were larger political forces at play that prompted that decision.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from Obama's remarks yesterday at TechBoston.

"What's needed is higher standards and higher expectations; more time in the classroom, and greater focus on subjects like math and science," he said. "What's needed are outstanding teachers and leaders like Skip who get more flexibility ... in exchange for more accountability. And all those ingredients are present here at TechBoston."

The president also made clear in his speech that he would fight Republican plans to cut education spending.

Obama did say he is prepared to reduce government spending.

"But," he was quick to add, "and I want everybody to pay attention, even as we find ways to cut spending, we cannot cut back on job-creating investments like education. We cannot cut back on the very investments that will help our economy grow and our nation compete and make sure that these young people succeed."

A plan put forward by Senate Democrats would restore one portion of the cuts for literacy, some $200 million for the Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy program.

What's not clear is whether Obama will press hard to restore that funding, or perhaps push for a budget compromise that includes some money for the new literacy fund he envisions. If that's his intention, he's not talking about it.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Our story and blog post about a high-profile call for common curriculum sparked a good amount of interest from you all. Those of you following this issue might want to take in some interesting blogosphere dialog about it as well.

Robert Pondiscio, over at the Core Knowledge blog, which has long advocated shared curriculum, weighed in about its value, and former Gates Foundation ed chief Tom Vander Ark, whose EdReformer blog advocates highly personalized learning via technology, opined that such a path takes us in completely the wrong direction. Pondiscio delivers a pointed response. Kathleen Porter-Magee, at the Flypaper blog, argues that states should focus on assessments, not curriculum.

Other things of interest around the curriculum world in the last couple of days:

• Core Knowledge tells us something about the potent role background knowledge plays in reading skill.

• The American School Board Journal devotes an entire issue to common standards.

• My colleague Sean Cavanagh over at the State EdWatch blog finds that states are increasingly constructing promotion gates around 3rd grade reading skill.

• Formative assessment, a topic of intense interest on our website and in this blog space, gets more discussion at Teacher Magazine.

• A retired testing expert in California raises a laundry list of intriguing questions for the state assessment consortia as that state's board of education ponders which consortia to participate in (California is currently a member only of the PARCC consortium).

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 9:22 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Ever wonder if the test-score gains produced by some schools seem a little miraculous? Well, a story published this week in USA Today suggests there may be a lot of cases in which the jumps are no educational miracle after all, but have a deeply troubling explanation: Cheating.

The newspaper investigated the standardized tests of millions of students in six states and the District of Columbia, and identified "1,610 examples of anomalies in which public school classes—a school's entire fifth grade, for example—boasted what analysts regard as statistically rare, perhaps suspect, gains on state tests."

The "anomalies" surfaced in all of those states (including D.C.). In addition, there were 317 more examples of equally large, year-to-year declines in an entire grade's scores.

To be sure, a big jump is possible without cheating, as the story is quick to note. But it says large year-to-year jumps in test scores by an entire grade should raise red flags, especially if the scores tumble in later grades.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The big cuts enacted last week for federal literacy aid may not be a done deal after all, though some analysts have suggested it could be a tough climb to restore even some of them. What may have the best hope of surviving—if still perhaps a faint hope—is a portion of the funds for the Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy program.

Over at Politics K-12, my colleague Alyson Klein reports that Senate Democrats introduced a measure Friday that would reverse at least some of the education cuts.

President Barack Obama on March 2 signed a stopgap spending measure that would keep the government open for an additional two weeks while the administration and Congress negotiate the provisions of an overdue budget for fiscal 2011, which began Oct. 1. Essentially, Republicans insisted on a set of cuts totaling $4 billion as part of that extension, including to a variety of education programs. But literacy took an especially hard hit.

The plan put forward on Friday by Democrats from the Senate Appropriations Committee would include $200 million for the Striving Readers program. It apparently would not restore any money for the $67 million Even Start family-literacy program. Also, the plan would not restore aid for Reading Is Fundamental and the National Writing Project, though Richard Long, the government-relations director at the International Reading Association, tells me that the Senate plan would allow those two national organizations to compete for funding under the federal i3, or Investing in Innovation, program. Of course, that assumes that Congress will agree to continue i3, which was created under the federal stimulus legislation from 2009.

One other thing I wanted to note here. Striving Readers is not the same program it used to be. Originally, this was a plan spearheaded by the Bush administration to target adolescent literacy. But starting in fiscal 2010, Congress essentially reinvented the program to support comprehensive approaches to literacy from birth to grade 12. In fact, the name, mentioned at the top of this blog post, is a little longer now: The Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy Program.

The Alliance for Excellent Education recently put together a policy brief describing this new program and what's been happening. It notes that "46 states are developing comprehensive policies and strategies to strengthen literacy among the nation's students." In an interview, Phillip Lovell, the alliance's vice president for federal advocacy, tells me that the problem for these plans isn't just funding for the current fiscal year. The bigger budget bill recently approved by the House for fiscal 2011 (on a largely party-line vote) would actually go back and eliminate nearly $200 million in fiscal 2010 dollars for the program. Lovell said the U.S. Department of Education still has yet to distribute most of that aid.

Meanwhile, my colleague Sarah Sparks last week reported on the findings from research on the original Striving Readers program.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 3:05 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Today marks the second time in a month that I'm hearing calls for common curriculum for the common standards. Seventy-five leaders in education, government, and business released a statement today calling for development of such curriculum (see my story on our website). A couple of weeks ago, folks at a common-standards committee meeting of the American Federation of Teachers said there has got to be some good curriculum between the standards and the new tests being designed for them. And that doesn't even count the AFT's call, in the winter edition of its quarterly magazine, for common curriculum.

The minute anyone says "common curriculum," or anything like it ("shared" curriculum, "national" curriculum), there is an instantaneous reaction in some quarters that envisions every 3rd grader in America reading from the exact same page of the exact same textbook at the exact same moment on a given Tuesday in February.

This perception is exactly what the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers bent over backwards to offset when organizing the common-standards movement. They studiously avoided the phrase "national curriculum" because it stirs up folks' blood. They repeated endlessly that states had designed the standards along with content experts.

Common-standards lovers argued that just because states share standards doesn't mean everyone needs to walk in lock-step on curriculum. There are many different ways to get to the same learning goals, they argued. Even with a solid "roadmap" to guide teachers, they still have plenty of creative space to decide how best to teach their students, AFT President Randi Weingarten told me after the committee meeting, in arguing for "common, sequential curriculum" for the new standards.

That's a point that's reiterated in the statement released today by the Albert Shanker Institute. The document goes so far as to illustrate multiple ways teachers could impart a 4th grade unit on the solar system to teach the same goal in a shared curriculum.

In reporting the discussions about curriculum, I have begun to notice people struggling with semantics and using varied definitions. Take as an example an exchange I reported on last month. I was in Atlanta for a meeting about through-course summative assessment, a feature of the common assessments currently under design. One consortium representative happened to mention that both state test-design consortia were using supplemental federal funds to design curriculum resources for the standards (see my story on that here). That tidbit changed the tenor in the room; suddenly everyone was interested. The question was raised: Doesn't federal law bar you from using federal money to create curriculum? The response: Well, we're not designing an entire curriculum; we are creating curricular resources and materials. It would be up to teachers, districts, and states to use these as building blocks to create complete curricula. This is one type of distinction I'm hearing drawn a lot lately.

Stanford University professor Linda Darling-Hammond, hardly one to agree to teachers reading from a scripted curriculum, told me last week that people in the United States think curriculum is a very tight, prescriptive thing, while those in some other countries, like Japan and Singapore, think of it as a very lean set of goals—more like an outline teachers fill in with their own professional judgment. Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, and a cranky skeptic of many things, including anything that smells like loss of choice, told me that he doesn't see why people get all riled up over "national standards" or "national curriculum" if those standards and curriculum are 1) high quality and 2) voluntary.

So I've been thinking, in these roiling currents, is our problem here just a semantic one? If we were to agree on exactly what we mean by all these phrases ("curricular resources," "curriculum," etc.), would we still have a highly charged debate on our hands?

I don't see any national clarity on what "curriculum" means, since in some places a textbook serves as curriculum, where in others, teachers work together and draw on a variety of intriguing resources to forge flexible, creative, and responsive learning plans for their students. Is there a chance we could get past all these words—or clarify the distinctions among their meanings—and actually figure out what rankles us in these debates and how to resolve those concerns?

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 8:48 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

It's no small thing to transition from one state assessment system to another. So it will be interesting to see what happens as 45 states and the District of Columbia figure out how to transition from their current accountability tests to the assessments being designed for the common standards. (Quick refresher: all but five states are participating in consortia to design tests for the common standards.)

Case in point: Kansas has applied to the U.S. Department of Education for permission to hold its testing targets at 2009-10 levels until 2014-15, the year the common assessments are supposed to be up and running. (See a news report about this here, and the state board's letter requesting the waiver here.)

One district in Kansas, McPherson, actually has won a rather unusual testing waiver from the U.S. Department of Education, we are hearing today. The waiver lets the district dump state tests in grades 6-12 for federal accountability purposes, replacing them with the ACT's series (Explore, Plan, WorkKeys, and the college admissions exam). The state will calculate AYP for that district based upon the ACT tests, state DOE spokeswoman Kathy Toelkes told me. I wonder how this will all work out once Kansas, a governing state in the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium, phases in the common assessments.

Other states are clearly starting to scratch their heads over how to move from current testing systems to common tests. North Carolina, we are told, is poised to dump some of its end-of-course tests in high school, saying it's just too much testing when combined with the common-standards tests.

Pennsylvania, on the other hand, says it doesn't plan to change its testing system, because it's already "aligned" to the common standards. (Aside: please discuss among yourselves: what, exactly, is the meaning of "alignment"? Is that a science, or an art?) The Keystone State articulated this view in a recent white paper about transitioning to the common standards. In the second paragraph on Page 3, it says the Pennsylvania Department of Education doesn't plan to "adjust the eligible content or design" of its state tests before the effective date of the Common Core. But lower down on the same page, it says it will be "collaborating with teachers at all grade levels as well as higher education faculty from both math and [English/language arts] in revising assessments (emphasis mine) to align with the Common Core."

Is it my imagination, or is this a bit of a contradiction? Perhaps it's just part of the confusing journey from one testing system to the next?

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 3:38 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

UPDATED

Federal support for literacy was dealt a heavy blow today.

This afternoon, President Barack Obama signed into law a stopgap spending bill that ends federal funding for several literacy programs at the U.S. Department of Education, part of a planned government-wide reduction of $4 billion. The measure also eliminated or trimmed spending for a variety of other education programs.

The plan originated in the House, where Republican leaders insisted that cuts be part of the deal to keep the government running for two more weeks. Passage of the legislation buys lawmakers and the White House more time to negotiate on a longer-term budget plan for fiscal 2011. It passed the House yesterday by a vote of 335-91 and the Senate this morning by a vote of 91-9.

The cuts include all funding for the $250 million Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy program, the $67 million Even Start family-literacy program, the $25 million Reading Is Fundamental program, and the $26 million National Writing Project.

To be clear, the cuts will affect funding for the current fiscal year, which began last October. (Yes, it's fair to say Congress is a little behind schedule.)

For the big picture, check out my colleague Alyson Klein's post over at Politics K-12.

President Obama himself has repeatedly proposed essentially eliminating discrete funding for these individual programs, but with an important caveat: He wants to replace them with a broader, more flexible pot of competitive dollars for what he's called the Effective Teaching and Learning: Literacy Fund. (He also has proposed to consolidate other programs into two related funds for Effective Teaching and Learning in STEM education and a "Well-Rounded Education.") Of course, the bill approved yesterday in the House, which was supported by nearly all Republicans and more than half of the chamber's Democrats, includes no such larger literacy program.

The legislation President Obama signed today also eliminates federal aid for a number of other Education Department offerings, including the $40 million Arts in Education program, the $88 million Smaller Learning Communities program, and the $64 million Leveraging Educational Assistance Partnerships, or LEAP, program.

One literacy program at the Education Department that was spared from any cuts was the $19 million Improving Literacy Through School Libraries program.

Speaking of literacy and the federal government, my co-blogger here, Catherine, wrote earlier this week about a new guide to federal aid for grade-level reading proficiency. (Something tells me the guide may need a few tweaks after this week is over.) Catherine also wrote about remarks Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made this week about early reading.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The United States has failed to prepare its youngest children for academic success in a "coordinated, strategic way," and as a result, far too many are behind in the reading skills that are pivotal to their future success, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told a gathering of literacy funders this morning.

Speaking to the inaugural gathering of the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading here in Washington, Duncan said he doesn't need to see any more studies to convince him of the importance of strong early learning and consistent school attendance, or of the setback students experience by not going to school all summer long. These are the priorities of the campaign, a group of 70 philanthropies and other organizations that aim to put a higher profile on the importance of having all children read proficiently by 3rd grade. Key to that goal are grappling with summer learning loss, chronic absenteeism, and gaps in early learning.

To ensure students are capable and competitive, he said, the country has to "get out of the catch-up business," whether it be at the university, high school, or middle school level. "If we want to get out of the remediation business," he said, "we have to get our babies off to a good start."

He noted that some kids come to kindergarten reading fluently, while others "don't know the front of the book from the back of the book." Those sorts of gaps play out for years to come, he said, putting too many students at a disadvantage.

"If we could level the playing field, we could have our babies ready to learn by 3rd grade and we could really start talking about every child going on to college," Duncan said.

Monitoring and responding to chronic absenteeism are key, he said. "We know in pre-K and kindergarten who the kids most at risk are," he said. They're the ones missing 25 to 30 days a year. And "if we don't intervene, those are our future dropouts."

Summer learning loss must be tackled as well, said Duncan, who has called in the past for rethinking the school calendar. Students "come back further behind in the fall than they were when they left. Are we going to do something different about that, or continue to function on an agrarian calendar when children no longer need to work the fields?"

Literacy hasn't been a particularly high-profile issue for Duncan's ed department, and funding for literacy currently has a big question mark hovering over it as budget conversations swirl on Capitol Hill. But Duncan made it clear that he sees reading in the birth-through-8 years as a crucial underpinning to a goal that has consumed a large swath of the administration's rhetoric on education: college and career readiness.

"I would love to hear what we can do to be a good partner" in the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, he told the funders. He urged them to share their ideas about what the department should do to "drive the conversation... drive changes in behavior, district interventions, systemic strategies."

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