February 2012 Archives

Louisville, Ky.

Precollegiate and postsecondary education have been like toddlers, playing side by side in the sandbox but not together, and they've got to start playing together if students are going to be well prepared for college and good jobs.

That was the message that Gene Wilhoit, the executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, carried to a national forum of K-12 and higher education officials here. The event is aimed at defining how two sectors that haven't historically worked closely together can collaborate in the interest of turning the new common standards into better teaching and learning. (The CCSSO and the National Governors Association co-led the initiative that resulted in the standards, which have now been adopted by all but four states.)

The toddler metaphor was offered by Wilhoit, whose wife works in early-childhood education. Using a term from that world, he said that higher ed. and K-12 have too often engaged in "parallel play." But with a new set of standards that substantially change the game for students and teachers, such disconnections can't continue, he said.

New expectations create a new urgency for cooperation, Wilhoit said. And the fact that the global economy now demands education beyond high school means that more students will have to pursue some form of higher education. For that reason, K-12 and higher education face one of their biggest challenges yet: preparing and serving a bigger, more diverse pool of students than ever.

To do that well, he said, they have to "form a trusting relationship with each other" and plunge into the cooperative work to create shared sets of expectations and processes to help students move successfully through secondary school and into some form of additional education. That will have to include a "redesign" of teacher-preparation programs, Wilhoit said.

Wilhoit's appearance at the forum, sponsored by the agencies that oversee Kentucky's K-12, higher education, and teacher-preparation systems, came in the former Kentucky schools chief's third week back to work after a Christmas Eve heart attack. He cracked a dark joke, in fact, about a possible connection between his health trouble and the work leading to the common-core standards.

"I would blame the recent intervention in my life on the common core," he told the roomful of educators. "It caused me to have that heart attack."

Talking with me during a break, he said that his recovery time allowed him to reflect on many things, and he returned to work with an intensified awareness of the need to bring all segments of education together on the common standards. He's also been busy at the CCSSO helping states draft and implement their applications for waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act, and "reconnecting" with members of Congress as they consider reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

He's gotten back to running and lifting weights, he said, but he said he just couldn't promise to do one thing his doctors advised.

"They told me, 'No more 15-hour days,' but that isn't gonna happen," Wilhoit said. "We have a lot of important things to do."

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Louisville, Ky.

Kentucky is widely seen as a model of how K-12 and higher education can work together to make sure teenagers are prepared to succeed in college. Folks are pretty happy about that distinction here, and they're putting on a forum to celebrate their work and respond to other states' clamoring for clues and guidance.

And many interesting examples of K-12 partnerships with higher ed. are being discussed, especially those with an eye toward implementing the common standards. They're being discussed in equal measure, though, with the very heavy lift involved in making the common standards more than a set of bound documents.

Before we get into examples, though, a quick refresher:

Kentucky was the first state to adopt the Common Core State Standards, and it made a more-than-symbolic move when it did so: It had top officials of precollegiate and postsecondary education pledge their commitment to the common-standards vision.

When it made that move in February 2010, it already had a fire at its back, because the state legislature had passed a sweeping education reform measure, Senate Bill 1, which required, among other things, that higher ed. and K-12 work together to prime students for success in college. That requirement, and the Commonwealth Commitment in the fall of that year, sparked dozens of pacts across the state between school districts and universities in response to the law's new demand for what the wonks like to call "intersegmental collaboration."

And there has been lots of buzz of the intersegmental-collaboration type in Kentucky. It has, for instance, created a common set of college-readiness indicators and outcomes that students can meet to skip over remedial work in the state's college and university system. What this means is that beginning this year, students who meet certain reading, writing, and mathematics cutoff scores on the ACT, SAT, ACT's Compass exam, or Kentucky's own online placement exam can enroll in credit-bearing courses once they are admitted to state colleges and universities.

There are knots of cooperative K-12/higher ed. activity all over the state, too. Western Kentucky University, for instance, showcased its partnership with the Shelby County school district, in which it trained district teachers to run a monthlong summer reading academy for rising 8th and 10th graders who were weak on their reading skills. Sixty percent of the students who took it improved by the equivalent of three months to a full year of instruction, and teachers who were trained to teach in it took many encouraging new ideas back to their own classrooms, said Kerry Fannin, the district's assistant superintendent.

Murray State University has created a program in which its faculty members team up with high school teachers from three local districts to discuss college-level expectations and share student work, said the university's Debbie Bell English.

In clusters of sessions all day long, however, participants in the forum kept identifying the challenges of getting students—and teachers—to the place envisioned by the common standards. The biggest single obstacle that participants in a session about the math standards identified was teachers' skills and content knowledge.

"The sheer quantity of stuff teachers have to teach [with the new standards] is a big change, and they're going to have to brush up on stuff they might not have been doing," said Michael Shires, a former math teacher who is now an elementary school principal in the Erlanger district. Several other participants in the workshop said that since some math topics have been moved into lower grades than they've typically been taught in, many teachers are now faced with teaching topics in which their own content knowledge isn't up to par.

Yes, said Jonathan Thomas, an assistant professor of mathematics education at Northern Kentucky University who was co-facilitating that session, "there's a lot of mathematical growth that has to happen very quickly, and I'm not even sure it's manageable." He noted the "mathematical fragility" of many candidates in teacher-preparation programs, who "go off the rail" when they reach fractions. "We're talking about doing fractions, not even teaching them," Thomas said. And yet gearing professional development for in-service teachers to content instead of instructional strategy might meet with resistance, he said.

In other sessions, participants identified yet another challenge to the common standards: getting statewide agreement on what college readiness means. While Kentucky is proceeding with an agreement that hangs on the scores and descriptions in its college-readiness indicators and outcomes, state department of education official Karen Kidwell acknowledged that getting widespread agreement on the interpretation of the common standards is a work in progress.

As one former higher education official said in one of the sessions: "We have multiple deans, departments, people, department chairs that all have their own ideas of what college readiness means."

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Should the federal government continue to require states to test students in science? That's one of the items on the agenda tomorrow as the House Education and the Workforce Committee takes up legislation to revamp the No Child Left Behind Act.

A Republican bill put forward by the chairman of the House education panel would end the science-testing requirement (but keep mandatory exams in reading and math). The action upset some STEM education advocates, who have been pressing lawmakers to retain science testing, which NCLB requires three times before graduation.

Rep. Richard Hanna of New York, also a Republican, is expected tomorrow to propose an amendment to save the science-testing mandate, my colleague Alyson Klein reports over at Politics K-12.

"Eliminating science testing sends an untimely message on national priorities at the very moment when we most need to educate our children to compete in these fields," Hanna said in a statement. "If we are to produce students who are able to succeed in an increasingly global society, we cannot ignore the educational and economic benefits of science education."

(I will say that the language on "national priorities" echoes language in a letter to lawmakers penned by the STEM Education Coalition.)

To be clear, the federal law does not require states to make accountability judgments for schools based on science testing.

As Politics K-12 explains, Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., the chairman of the House education committee, proposed ending the science requirement to ease the testing burden on schools.

We'll keep you posted on what happens during tomorrow's debate.

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Remember that bill we told you about yesterday in South Carolina? The one that would block implementation of the common standards? The one that got voted down in a state Senate subcommittee, but was still going to move on to the full education committee anyway?

News of its progress zapped up to Washington, where none other than U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan issued a statement that appears designed to dismantle support for the proposed legislation, S. 604.

Duncan takes a swipe at some of its supporters for seeing the common standards as a conspiracy, and invokes the names of Republican leaders who support the standards. He takes a swipe at South Carolina itself, too, saying that the state was particularly egregious in lowering its own performance standards for students.

This morning, the state's superintendent of education, Mick Zais, issued a statement agreeing with Duncan's accusation that South Carolina watered down its expectations for students. [UPDATE (2:15 p.m.)] In a statement to the local news media yesterday, Zais said he is opposed to the common standards, but will "faithfully" implement them, as decided by the state board of education, unless lawmakers reverse that decision.

It will be interesting to see what further effects Duncan's move will have on the debate in South Carolina. As we mentioned yesterday, Gov. Nikki Haley supports the bill to block the standards.

One of the strains of the common-standards dialogue most often cited by skeptics and opponents is the federal overreach argument. They note the incentives in the Race of the Top program for state adoption of the common core, and the federal investment in state consortia to design tests for the standards. With the No Child Left Behind waiver program in full swing, they also note another round of federal incentives to buy into common standards and assessments: the chance to get out from under some of NCLB's toughest requirements. (See a recent white paper on this.)

Where the bill goes from here will prove worth watching. The subcommittee could have killed it, but also had the option of allowing it to move to the full committee with an unfavorable recommendation, Sally Cauthen, the K-12 research director for the South Carolina Senate education committee, told me. That's what it did.

Stay tuned.

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A senate subcommittee in South Carolina today voted against a bill that would have barred implementation of the common standards. But it will proceed to a hearing before the full senate education committee.

Yup, you heard that right. It seems counter-intuitive, but it's true: The subcommittee voted 7-3 against Sen. Mike Fair's bill, S. 604, which we told you about when it came up for a hearing last week. A second hearing was held today, so more people could testify.

But even though the subcommittee went thumbs-down, the measure still gets a hearing before the full senate education committee, according to the Associated Press. I called the senate committee office, and folks there told me the same thing.

No hearing date is scheduled yet.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley supports Sen. Fair's bill, as she indicated in a letter last week.

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A provocative new blog post offers a sharp critique of the current state of educational publishing, with the author—a former longtime contributor to textbooks—explaining why she's abandoned that work and believes the quality of curricular materials has declined precipitously. (Hat tip to Robert Pondiscio from the CoreKnowledge blog for alerting me to this through a Tweet this morning.)

"Over the last few years, I've stopped developing and writing educational books; there's no longer any satisfaction in the work, no demand or appreciation for a product well crafted, no way to make a decent living or produce something that I feel proud to have my name attached to," writes Annie Kheegan in her Chronic Sense blog. The blogger said she worked for more than 20 years in educational publishing as a product developer, writer, and editor of curriculum materials for grades K-8.

The problem, Keeghan says, is the result of what she calls the "new normal" among "too many educational publishers": a severe lack of oversight of the quality of materials and apathy to do anything about it. She highlights the recent consolidation of the industry and describes an environment in which publishers rush their products to market before the competition, even if they're deeply flawed. She also contends in her blog post, titled "Afraid of Your Child's Math Textbook? You Should Be," that the balance between the budgets for marketing and product development has widened rapidly.

(Keeghan does not criticize all educational publishers, though she suggests those doing right are in the minority.)

Keeghan says the work of writing and editing textbooks is far less attractive than it used to be because of changes to the pay structure (e.g. less money) and the extreme demands to produce materials under very tight timelines. As a result, she says, many of the most talented people have abandoned this work.

This new indictment of educational publishing comes on the heels of a new book that I recently blogged about that also takes aim at problems with publishing, as well as the adoption and purchasing of curricular materials.

Keeghan's blog post already has generated more than three dozen comments, so it's clearly striking a chord with some readers.

In closing, she says parents should take a close look at the materials their children bring home, and that educators should beware.

"Look at what you're purchasing," she says. "Don't be satisfied with the classic 'thumb through' and don't take those marketing materials or the sales pitch at face value."

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More ripples today from a recent Brookings report projecting the failure of common standards. Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews details his conversion from common-core advocate to skeptic in a column today.

Mathews writes that he was at first impressed with "the brain power and good intentions" of the new standards and thought they would "elevate instruction" and help low-achieving states do better. But after talking to Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, he has concluded that the new standards represent "another big disappointment we should have figured out long ago." What really matters, he argues, is well-trained, well-supported teachers.

In case you missed Loveless' report, which caused a bit of a hubbub when it came out last week, he essentially argues that there is no evidence of a connection between states' own standards and student achievement, so there is no reason to believe that common standards would affect achievement.

In the wake of that argument, a flurry of folks rushed out to defend the standards. They noted, among other things, that it's really the curriculum and instruction that results from the standards that will make a difference. (See my blog post from Tuesday for that flurry, and also be sure to read the many comments that were posted in the blog in response to my reporting on the Loveless study. They included that curriculum-and-instruction note.)

Does anyone disagree that good curriculum and instruction are important? Would anyone dispute that well-trained, well-supported teachers are central to good learning? So it's standards, then, that are coming into question, at least in some quarters. An interesting development, since the standards movement has been defining education reform for nearly three decades now.

All of this floats the question: Are standards—common or otherwise—a necessary basis for good curriculum and instruction and well-trained, well-supported teachers?

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President Obama's top science adviser testified the other day on the administration's budgetary plans for STEM education, but encountered some skepticism from the Republican chairman of a key House committee, Rep. Ralph Hall of Texas.

Overall, the president's budget request would provide $3 billion for STEM education across the federal government, an increase of 2.6 percent over the current level, said John Holdren, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, during the Feb. 17 House hearing.

"The 2013 budget makes disciplined choices guided by drafts of the federal STEM education strategic plan, cutting back on lower-priority programs to make room for targeted increases and reducing duplication and overlap," he said in prepared testimony.

In fact, Holdren said the president's plan for fiscal 2013 would reduce the number of programs for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education from 235 to 209.

For his part, Hall, the chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, expressed concern about the price tag for the president's overall budgetary plans for science and technology plans, noting that current levels of funding across the government are "not sustainable."

"I continue to believe that while it is true that prudent investments in science and technology, including STEM education, will almost certainly yield future economic gains and help create new jobs of the future, it is also true that these gains can be hindered by poor decisionmaking," he said in prepared remarks. "Hard-working Americans expect and deserve better."

He added: "Blanket increases even for our federal science agencies are not the same as prudent investment and do not guarantee innovation. ... As stewards of the taxpayers' dollars, we must curtail runaway spending and prioritize programs that lay the foundation for entrepreneurial success."

Holdren also mentioned in his testimony that the White House this spring will finalize a new strategic plan to "increase coordination and collaboration among the 13 agencies that support STEM education and increase the efficiency and impact of the federal portfolio of STEM education programs."

Unfortunately, Holdren's prepared testimony did not identify which 26 programs would be eliminated or consolidated. But it's worth keeping in mind that the federal role in STEM education spans 13 federal agencies (yes, 13!). Beyond the obvious ones like the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation, others include the departments of Agriculture, Health & Human Services, Energy, Transportation, Commerce, and even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Holdren singled out a few initiatives for special attention in his testimony, including a proposal to set aside $80 million from the Effective Teachers and Leaders State Grants program for STEM teacher preparation, and $55 million for the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program. In addition, he noted a new proposal for a $60 million math education program to be jointly administered by NSF and the Education Department. This initiative, he said, would target "early research, development, validation, and scale-up of effective practices."

I recently provided a closer look at Obama's budget plans for the Education Department.

For NSF, the largest provider of federal aid for STEM education, his budget envisions an overall agency increase of 6.7 percent, for a total of $7.4 billion. Of that amount, $1.2 billion would be devoted to STEM education programs, according to budget documents. Another $263 million would support K-12 programs, an increase of 7.4 percent. Indeed, while K-12 still is short of spending levels for both undergraduate programs and "graduate and professional programs," its growth rate was the highest across all levels of education. Even so, that level is slightly below the $268 million for K-12 in fiscal 2011.

Meanwhile, the budget request would cut by 20 percent NSF spending on "outreach and informal education programs." (Word has it that this proposal is a big disappointment to advocates for informal science education, including science museums). For more on the NSF's role in informal science learning, check out this EdWeek story from last year.

Holdren said the Obama administration is committed to "look carefully at the effectiveness of all STEM programs and find ways to improve them."

No doubt Hall supports that idea, though the two may not agree exactly on what should stay and what should go, and how much the federal government should be spending on STEM education.

"Dr. Holdren, we remain open to working with you as we move forward," Hall said, "but we respectfully ask that you take the message back to the president that to say that we continue to have significant concerns with his priorities for our nation's precious and limited research and development dollars is a vast understatement."

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

An ambitious effort to improve STEM education in Alabama has generated academic gains for students, according to a study issued this week by the federal Institute of Education Sciences.

The study involved a randomized control trial to assess the effectiveness of the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative. The program, which was profiled in a 2009 EdWeek story, seeks to provide teachers with intensive professional development, access to quality instructional materials and technology, and in-school supports.

After one year, the effect on math achievement was positive and statistically significant, based on end-of-year scores on standardized tests, according to the new study. That impact amounted to a gain of 2 percentile points, the study says. The researchers helpfully sought to translate this for a general audience (as in reporters like me!) and said the gain was equivalent to 28 days of additional student progress in comparison with students receiving "conventional mathematics instruction." However, the effect on science achievement was not statistically significant after one year.

In reading, meanwhile, the study detected a gain of 2 percentile points for students participating in the STEM initiative.

Although the Alabama program targets students and schools across all grade levels, the study from U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences focuses on the effectiveness in grades 4-8.

An "exploratory investigation" of the two-year effect of the Alabama STEM program found a gain of 4 percentile points—equivalent to an estimated 50 days of additional student progress. In science, the gain was 5 percentile points. (The two-year effect is less reliable, the report says, because of changes to the control group. Or to put it in research-speak, the analyses after two years is "exploratory rather than confirmatory.")

The researchers also explored matters beyond test scores, including changes in classroom practices and teacher knowledge. It found that the STEM program "had a positive and statistically significant effect on classroom practices in mathematics and science after one year." Based on multiple teacher surveys, math teachers reported an average of an extra 50 minutes, every 10 days, in which they used "active learning strategies." For science teachers, the bump was 40 more minutes in comparison with teachers in the control group.

The study also looked at the impact of the initiative on teacher-reported content knowledge and here found no statistical difference in the level of such knowledge.

The Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative, which was described in my colleague Sean Cavanagh's 2009 story as "one of the largest and most ambitious state-run math and science programs in the country," was launched in 2002 and has seen increased participation across the state over time. As of 2009, the report says, it reached about 40 percent of the state's public schools.

Alabama's state schools superintendent, Tommy Bice, hailed the report's findings

"This is a day of affirmation, that what we've felt and known for almost a decade we've now had affirmed," he said, according to the Birmingham News. "Alabama's future is bright as these young minds are challenged to think critically and solve complex problems with no obvious answer—the 21st-century skills business and industry are asking of our graduates."

Posted by Erik Robelen at 4:33 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Last week's report by the Brookings Institution sure made a splash. As we reported to you, author Tom Loveless argued that the new common standards will have no effect on student achievement. He pointed out that there has been little connection between states' own standards and student performance on NAEP, and says there is little reason to contend that such a dynamic would change with a new set of standards, however common or uncommon.

As the comments section of our post suggested, the blogosphere wasn't content to let Loveless' report lie there uncontested.

Robert Rothman of the Alliance for Excellent Education, one of the common standards' most ardent supporters, argues that there is plenty of reason to hope that these new standards will change the game in education. For one, he notes, publishers are developing "innovative" new materials that they wouldn't have absent a national marketplace. States and districts are making new curricula, revising tests, and conducting professional development. Cross-state collaborations are taking shape, Rothman argues, such as one in which math educators have banded together to improve teacher preparation. All of this, he says, suggests that standards could indeed drive change for the better this time around.

Richard Lee Colvin at the Quick and the Ed calls Loveless' report a "pessimistic dead-end." Good standards that are well implemented and bring about change in many aspects of the education system are indeed cause for optimism, he argues.

Andy Rotherham at Eduwonk admits that implementation is critical if the new standards are going to make things better, but says that even questions about implementation aren't cause to make a case against the standards.

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A bill to prevent implementation of the common standards in South Carolina is rumbling through the state Senate.

According to the Associated Press, there were so many people that wanted to testify at yesterday's subcommittee hearing that another hearing was scheduled for next week.

The bill was introduced last year in the state Senate, as we reported to you.

Sponsored by Republican Mike Fair, S. 604 would bar the state from putting into practice the standards that were adopted by the state board of education in July 2010.

Interestingly, the hearing yesterday drew common-core opponents from out of state. A Senate education committee staffer was kind enough to supply me with a list of those who testified. Supporters of the bill include names that have appeared in EdWeek stories (see below):

Joe Mack and Jane Robbins (both from the American Principles Project); Williamson Evers (research fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University); Jim Stergios (executive director, Pioneer Institute); Ze'ev Wurman (California high-tech entrepreneur)..

The list of those testifying against the bill was heavy on school district folks, and didn't seem to include anyone from out of state:

Tripp Dukes (assistant superintendent for instruction, Anderson school district 5); Amy Hawkins (director of middle and high school programs, Anderson 5); Rose Wilder (superintendent, Clarendon school district 1); Cindy Smith (school board member, Lexington school district 1); Robbie Barnett (associate vice president for workforce, education and manufacturing policy, South Carolina Chamber of Commerce).

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One item tucked into President Obama's new budget request that you might have missed is a proposed cut to the esteemed "nation's report card."

The administration wants to trim $6 million from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a key measure of U.S. student achievement across disciplines relied upon by educators, policymakers, researchers, and, yes, journalists. The proposal comes as part of a $70 billion budget request for the U.S. Department of Education that, overall, would increase the agency's discretionary coffers by 2.5 percent. The NAEP cut would bring the testing budget down to $132 million, a reduction of 4.3 percent.

At the same time, the president's budget request would add $6 million—a strange coincidence, perhaps?—to create a pilot program for states to benchmark the performance of their 15-year-olds against that of students around the world on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA.

The Obama administration suggests the NAEP cut wouldn't have any noticeable impact.

"The administration believes that the funds requested are sufficient to enable NAEP to fulfill its mission and continue to provide the critically important information needed on student achievement over time," it says in a budget document.

But Cornelia Orr, the executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for NAEP, isn't so sure.

"I was really surprised myself," she said of the proposal, predicting that such a cut could lead to changes in the NAEP program, including possible testing delays.

"We might be asked to change the assessment schedule so an assessment doesn't occur in the year it's scheduled," she said. "We don't think any cuts are needed in the NAEP budget, and I don't think the [governing] board is going to enjoy having to have conversations about what to cut out of the NAEP program."

I should note that $1 million of the NAEP cut would come from the $8.7 million budget of the governing board itself.

As for the proposal for PISA, in essence, the pilot would allow "state-level results" on the international exam of 15-year-olds, the administration says. Participating states would be asked to pay a portion of the costs. The total cost per state would be about $600,000, the administration says.

Orr, however, suggested instead an approach that involves NAEP.

"I think that linking [PISA results] back to the NAEP scale would give more states access to that information," she said. Orr explained that even a state that wasn't part of the pilot could then look at its NAEP score and extrapolate from that to get a gauge on how its performance stacks up against other nations'.

The last round of PISA results came out in December 2010. The exam, which assesses literacy in reading, science, and math across dozens of countries, is given every three years. It will next be administered later this year, with a special focus this time on math.

Needless to say, it remains to be seen whether Congress will go along with a cut to the NAEP program, especially in a fiscal 2013 budget request that otherwise boosts overall spending at the Education Department.

For more analysis of the president's budget plans for education, check out this blog post on Obama's plans to trim back previous proposals for a set of "teaching and learning" funds. And for the bigger picture on the budget, check out our EdWeek story from the other day.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 8:17 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Although most states have adopted the common-core math standards, the debate over their value is by no means over. Today, the journal Education Next published a forum that brought together two experts to take up the matter.

In one corner, W. Stephen Wilson, a math professor at Johns Hopkins University who served on the "feedback group" for the math standards. In the other, Ze'ev Wurman, a Silicon Valley executive and former education official under President George W. Bush who served on a California commission that evaluated the suitability of the common standards for that state.

Here's a quick taste of what they had to say.

Are the standards "fewer, higher, and clearer?"

Wurman: "Common-core standards may in fact be clearer and more demanding than many, though not all, of the state standards they replaced. ... If one compares them to the better state mathematics standards like those of Minnesota or California, they are more numerous. ... They may be higher than some state standards, but they are certainly lower than the best of them. ... They may be clearer than many state mathematics standards, but they still tend to be wordy and hard to read."

Wilson: "There is much to criticize about [the math standards], and there are several sets of standards, including those in California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Indiana, and Washington, that are clearly better. Yet common core is vastly superior—not just a little bit better, but vastly superior—to the standards in more than 30 states."

Wurman and Wilson fielded a number of other questions from the editors at Education Next, including whether the common standards will put an end to the "math wars" and how the standards compare with those of the world's top-performing nations. You can read it all here.

Of course, you can also read the math standards for yourself right here, and draw your own conclusions.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Will the Common Core State Standards improve student achievement? Not according to a new study out today.

The crux of the argument in the Brookings Institution report is that there is not much of a connection between standards—even rigorous ones—and student achievement. If there was a connection, we would have seen signs of improvement from states' own individual standards—all states have had standards since 2003—but NAEP scores don't bear that out, author Tom Loveless argues.

Loveless also points to a 2009 Brookings study that found no connection between the quality of states' standards and their students' NAEP scores. Loveless examines NAEP scores from 2003 to 2009 and finds no correlation between the quality of states' standards and NAEP gains during that period.

Loveless also looks at performance standards, or the "cut points" set for proficiency on states' tests, to examine the argument that the presumed higher cut scores on the future tests for the common standards will help drive better student achievement. Again, he finds that cut scores are unrelated to NAEP performance.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

We all have our stereotypes about which subjects appeal more to girls or boys. Well, in perusing a new report on the Advanced Placement program, I was intrigued to discover some hard data to help shed light on the matter. In addition to reporting participation on AP exams by racial and ethnic groups, the College Board includes the gender breakdown for all subjects tested.

Some of what I learned may not surprise readers. Males dominate AP Computer Science and all three physics courses, for instance. Females dominate AP Art History and English Language and Composition.

But not all of the findings were obvious, and a few were even a little puzzling.

(Note: The data in this blog post all reflect the gender breakdown of AP tests taken by public-school graduates from the class of 2011. My source is the College Board's 8th annual "AP Report to the Nation.")

Participation in the popular Calculus AB program was about evenly divided, but in the Calculus BC course, males were more heavily weighted (59 percent) than females. (Calculus BC covers all of the content in the AB course, plus additional material.)

Meanwhile, AP Biology was more popular with females (59 percent), while males were apparently more into AP Music Theory (58 percent). AP Statistics is pretty evenly divided, with 52 percent female.

One striking finding is that in a majority of subjects, the gender preference appears to be fairly pronounced. In my not-very-scientific approach, I decided to count the number of AP subjects in which one gender represented at least 55 percent of test-takers.

The result? (Drumroll, please...) Twenty-three out of 37 AP subjects tested.

For more analysis of the latest "AP Report to the Nation," check out the EdWeek story, as well as this blog post, which takes a closer look at trends in AP participation, subject by subject. (Teaser: Subjects including geography, environmental science, and Chinese are rapidly growing in popularity.)

Back to gender differences, here's a sampling of subjects in which they seemed pretty significant for the class of 2011.

What girls like:
• Art history: 66 percent female
• Biology: 59 percent female
• English literature and composition: 63 percent female
• French language and culture: 69 percent female
• Psychology: 63 percent female
• Spanish Language: 63 percent female
• Studio Art: Drawing Portfolio: 74 percent female

What boys like:
• Calculus BC, 59 percent male
• Computer Science A: 80 percent male
• Computer Science AB: 86 percent male
• Music Theory: 58 percent male
• Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism: 77 percent male
• Physics C: Mechanics: 74 percent male

Among the AP subjects in which gender differences seemed marginal were 'Calculus AB,' Chemistry, European History, 'Latin:Vergil,' Statistics, and U.S. Government and Politics.

So, what does it all mean? Post a comment and let us know!

Posted by Erik Robelen at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Those of you who read here about the "close reading" exercise conducted by the Aspen Institute recently will be interested in a debate raging on the English Companion Ning. Teachers are debating, with no small degree of intensity, whether this key tenet of the common standards is a good thing. (Registration is required to read the conversations, but it's free.)

A quick recap: I went to a retreat of chief academic officers in Tampa last month, hosted by the Aspen Institute, and reported that they walked through a "close reading" exercise with one of the English teachers who helped shape the common standards. Read my blog post, and then story to catch up on that.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute's Kathleen Porter-Magee picked up on this and blogged about it (see here and here). And this picked up heat and rolled onto the English Companion Ning, where teachers are now arguing about the merits—and dangers—of an approach to literacy instruction that is heavy on "close reading" of text.

Some teachers are defending the new standards. Some are feeling suspicious that the standards writers, who took pains to say in the standards themselves that no one was telling teachers how to teach, are now doing exactly that. Some are questioning the bona fides of David Coleman, one of the lead writers of the English/language arts standards, who has been advancing the close-reading idea in appearances around the country but lacks classroom-teacher credentials. When I checked this morning, that thread had logged 180 comments. (Another thread about the common core, called, "Time for the gloves to come off"—yikes!—has more than 50.)

What's interesting—of many interesting things—in the thread about close reading is how it plays out the division in the ELA community about the common standards' approach to literacy instruction. There are echoes in there of what the International Reading Association's Rich Long said in my story: that the close-reading approach dispenses inappropriately with what the field knows about the value of students' background knowledge in reading. There are also echoes of broad disagreements about the standards in general, as reflected in the National Council of Teachers of English's position on them (we don't oppose or favor them, but will support teachers and students as they are implemented).

The debates among ELA teachers about the legitimacy of the standards' literacy approach bear close watching as nearly every state in the country starts work to implement it.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

President Obama's latest budget request, unveiled earlier this week, includes a healthy dose of new and recycled proposals at the U.S. Department of Education for improving STEM learning, as well as revisiting plans he's put forward to target various areas of the curriculum through three "Effective Teaching and Learning" funds.

But what's striking about those three funds—twice before rejected by Congress—is that the budget requests keep shrinking, especially this time around. The smaller requests also come in the context of a budget plan that overall would increase the Education Department's discretionary budget by 2.5 percent, to $69.8 billion.

(For the big picture on the budget, check out this EdWeek story.)

Two years ago, Obama requested $450 million for the Effective Teaching and Learning: Literacy fund. Last year, it dropped to $383 million. This year? Cut by about half to $187 million.

The new budget suggests that while Obama still appears to like the idea of a "well-rounded education," perhaps his enthusiasm is dwindling. He's requesting $90 million for the Effective Teaching and Learning for a Well-Rounded Education fund, barely a third of the $246 million last year, and $265 million the year before.

As for the STEM fund, the request is down to $150 million, from $206 million last year, and $300 million in fiscal 2010. But with STEM, this isn't the whole story. More on that in a moment.

All three Effective Teaching and Learning funds are intended to supply competitive grants to improve instruction. In its budget request, the Obama administration says the funds "would address the need to strengthen instruction and raise student achievement across the core academic content areas, especially in high-need [school districts], by replacing a patchwork of programs and funding streams in current law with three comprehensive, coherent programs that provide increased flexibility for states and [districts] to design, develop, and implement strategies that best meet the needs of their students."

You can read a more detailed analysis of the president's budget proposal last year for these funds here.

Back to STEM education. The president's budget also includes a variety of other plans. For one, he wants to set aside $80 million from a proposed Effective Teachers and Leaders program to recruit, train, and place recent college graduates and mid-career professionals in the STEM fields in high-need schools. In fact, the Education Department developed a special summary of its STEM education proposals.

The administration also wants to create a new, $30 million "evidence-based grant competition" focused on "developing, evaluating, and scaling proven practices that can help increase student achievement in K-12 STEM. And the budget also notes other places where STEM would be included as a priority, such as the Investing in Innovation program and a new Presidential Teaching Fellows program.

President Obama discussed some of these STEM proposals when he hosted his second White House Science Fair earlier this month.

Of course, as I always say when writing about the budget request, it's important to remember that this is only a request. Some of these proposals have been put forward before and rejected by Congress. And indeed, this year more than ever, political analysts suggest that the president's budget proposal is as much a political document outlining his priorities in what's sure to be an intense election year.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Gov. Jerry Brown of California is proposing to eliminate a second year of science from the state's requirements for high school graduation.

The measure was included in his recently released budget request for the coming fiscal year, according to a story in The Reporter newspaper of Vacaville, Calif. The article suggests that the Democratic governor's intent was to give school districts greater say in setting their priorities in spending state aid.

The story quotes officials from a couple of districts indicating that they had no plans to cut science courses.

In any case, the proposal may well face some stiff opposition, including from state Sen. Lois Wolk, a Democrat who chairs the Senate Government and Finance Committee.

"If anything, we should be going in the other direction," she told the newspaper. "We're falling behind in math and science. If we want to compete, we need students trained in math and science."

According to the state's department of education, to graduate currently in California, "a student must successfully complete at least two courses in science, including biological and physical sciences."

The development comes as the Virginia state Senate recently voted overwhelmingly to eliminate 3rd grade standardized testing in both science and history.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 8:38 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Question: What do geography, Chinese language and culture, computer science, world history, and environmental science have in common?

Answer: They're apparently becoming a lot more popular subjects in high school, at least based on one national measure.

Participation in Advanced Placement tests in these subjects has grown most rapidly—from a percentage standpoint—when comparing the number of tests taken by the graduating class of 2011 with the class of 2010. That's based on my quick analysis of new data from the College Board's 8th annual AP Report to the Nation, which provides an interesting window into subject preferences among schools and students.

Next question: What do language and culture offerings in French and German have in common?

Answer: Quel dommage! Interest in them appears to be waning, as measured by the same method. (Or, if not interest, at least opportunities to take those AP courses has dropped. I can't say for sure which is true. Meanwhile, several other AP tests have recently been phased out.)

The two most popular AP subjects by far, meanwhile, are U.S. history, with 326,282 tests taken by the class of 2011, and English language and composition, at 326,145. Both have seen a pretty steady rise over the years.

(Note: The College Board statistics count how many AP tests are taken by public school students in a given graduating class. I'm told that only a very small percentage of students takes the same test more than once.)

The new AP data show that most subjects tested saw increased participation with the class of 2011. At the same time, the actual passing rates among test-takers reveal a more mixed bag.

For example, the passing rate in environmental science dipped slightly compared with the class of 2010, from 49.3 percent to 47.6 percent. It dropped in macroeconomics from 52.1 percent to 50.2 percent.

By contrast, in European history, the trend in passing rates was upward, climbing from 61.2 percent to 64.5 percent. And in English language and composition, it rose from 58 percent to 59.2 percent.

(More technical stuff: AP tests are graded on a scale of 1 to 5. A score of 3 is considered a minimum passing score for predicting college success, according to the College Board.)

For the big picture on the latest AP report, check out my colleague Caralee Adams' story. She notes that the overall passing rate was about the same for the class of 2011 compared with the prior year, rising just 0.1 percent to 56.2 percent. Still, this figure is well down from the 60.8 percent who passed in 2001.

Caralee also explains that many students who had the academic potential to succeed in AP didn't take any of the exams, either by choice or because they attended a school that did not offer the subjects.

Of the 37 subjects tested, participation rates climbed in all but six for the class of 2011, compared with 2010 graduates. Here are some examples:

• Biology was up 7.6 percent, to 144,984
• Chinese language and culture was up 20.4 percent, to 4,126
• "Computer Science A" was up 15.2 percent, to 16,722
• English language and composition was up 11.6 percent, to 326,145
• Environmental science was up 14.8 percent, to 79,738
• "Human Geography" was up 30.3 percent, to 45,229
• "Latin: Vergil" was up 10 percent, to 3,402
• Macroeconomics was up 9.4 percent, to 73,898
• "Physics B" was up 11 percent, to 58,460
• Psychology was up 13.3 percent, to 163,284
• Statistics was up 9.7 percent, to 120,128
• World history was up 15 percent, to 132,458

Meanwhile, the areas of decline were far more limited:

• French language and culture was down 3.4 percent, to 13,558.
• German language and culture was down 3.3 percent, to 4,142.

Also, several subjects saw big declines because the tests were recently discontinued (which itself may signal a decline of interest in some cases), including "Computer Science AB," French literature, Latin literature, and Italian language and culture.

The Italian program, however, was reinstated in the 2011-12 school year after an intensive push, and fundraising campaign, from the Italian embassy in Washington.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The big education news out of Washington yesterday was that 10 states have been awarded waivers of key accountability provisions in the No Child Left Behind Act. This action by the U.S. Department of Education holds some potentially important implications for teaching and learning, as it essentially opens the door for states to rethink their priorities and approaches in evaluating schools (and districts). And accountability systems create a lot of pressure to influence what gets taught—and how—in the classroom.

In fact, seven of the 10 states that won a first-round waiver from the department proposed to include tests in subjects beyond reading and mathematics as part of their reconfigured accountability systems. I did a quick analysis of this in a previous blog post. The most popular was to include science assessments, but social studies and writing also were included in some cases. Those plans raise the question of whether the waivers might reverse the narrowing of the curriculum many educators and experts believe has been an outgrowth of the No Child Left Behind Act.

In addition, as a condition for getting waivers, states had to make a number of commitments, including to adopt college-and career-ready standards (for most states, this means the Common Core State Standards) and aligned assessments (for most, joining one of the two state consortia working on common exams). Many states had to revise their initial waiver proposals to win approval by spelling out in more detail how they would ensure the standards are carried out, from supporting teachers to specifically indicating how they would help English-language learners and students with disabilities.

The 10 states to win waivers are Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. (Waivers for Florida, Georgia, and Oklahoma were conditional, meaning they still must make improvements to their plans.) New Mexico was turned down, but federal officials said they are confident the state could still secure one with improvements to its application.

For the big picture on the waivers, check out this detailed EdWeek story.

A lot of the revised state waiver plans pay more attention to providing professional development to teachers in the common standards, as well as addressing how English-language learners and students with disabilities will reach the new standards. For a helpful analysis, check out Lesli Maxwell's post over at Learning the Language.

In describing the waiver process, the Education Department made clear that states must do more than simply adopt high standards. The waiver applications would be judged in part on states' plans to provide professional development and high-quality instructional materials for the new standards, among other things.

In a recent EdWeek story, my co-blogger Catherine Gewertz detailed what the 11 first-round applicants for NCLB waivers were planning to do. As she noted, many proposed large-scale efforts to train their educators in the new academic standards, create or oversee development of new instructional resources, and redesign their testing systems.

You can read for yourself what states are planning, as well as how those plans have been revised at this waiver page from the Education Department. For a quick and easy sense of what states agreed to change to win a waiver, click on the "Improvements to XX's Request" (fill in the blank with a particular state). The changes appear mainly to involve elaborating on what states have done and plan to do to help with implementing the common standards.

Here's a quick sampling from four states:

Colorado: The state described in more detail its plans to ensure that students with disabilities and English-language learners have access to rigorous content aligned with college-and career-ready standards, including how it will work with teachers to help them.

Georgia: Described in more detail the professional-development activities it has provided for principals on the implementation of the common standards.

Indiana: Demonstrated the outreach it has already conducted and that it will conduct with the common standards. For example, it described a Learning Connection portal, which provides access to resources and a place to discuss topics in weekly online forums. The state also described steps it's taking to ensure that English-learners and students with disabilities will be able to achieve college-and career-ready standards and "fully participate in aligned assessments."

New Jersey: Provided additional information on professional-development sessions that will occur over the coming year to help teachers transition to the common standards, including sessions focused on English-learners and students with disabilities. New Jersey also elaborated on its plans to collaborate with institutions of higher education to review the rigor of current end-of-course high school assessments.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by Ross Brenneman

For those who knew "when the tripods came," the Feb. 3 death of English author John Christopher hurt. Christopher, born Samuel Youd, was a prolific science fiction writer, penning over 50 books and several trilogies. He passed away at the age of 89.

While Christopher gained popularity with The Death of Grass in 1956, most kids would come to know him best from the Tripods trilogy, about an alien race that enslaves humankind sometime at the end of the 20th century. (Hopefully NASA is still on the lookout.) A young boy named Will, knowing no other life than one under Tripod control, stumbles upon a group of freedom fighters, whereupon adventures naturally ensue.

I read the first book in the trilogy, The White Mountains, due to a sixth-grade mandate. Our teacher narrated a lot of it out loud, which probably didn't do much to advance our literacy, but he had oratorical skills made for books-on-tape, so no one really minded.

Until this point, the depth of my sci-fi reading was Animorphs (kids turn into animals to fight mind-control alien slugs led by a centaur-scorpion hybrid—really neat stuff!); that we got to experience sci-fi as part of the curriculum, though, was something out of this world.

(Rimshot.)

When we finished the first book, I went out, bought the next two, and read them on my own. It was like reading was fun!

My public school district, probably like many others, didn't put too much science-fiction in the curriculum. This, despite the commercial tastes of society: the excellent Charles Dickens might recently have celebrated his 200th birthday, but according to IMDb.com, six of the 10 highest grossing films in the U.S. are science fiction: Avatar, The Dark Knight, Star Wars, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Star Wars: Episode I, and Spider-Man. It's not until you get to spot #24 on the list that a movie adapted from common school literature appears on the list, and that's only if you count The Lion King as a faithful representation of Hamlet. (Although Timon and Pumbaa fared much better than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.)

So as an avid fan, I hope that when April 16, 2122, rolls around, we're celebrating the 200th birthday of John Christopher. Unless, of course, the tripods were just a little late.

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

A new white paper raises questions about whether the U.S. Department of Education has violated prohibitions against a federally dictated curriculum in its work to support common standards and assessments across states. It also outlines steps to address the situation, including a call for congressional hearings and new legislation to explicitly prohibit "conditional waivers" under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (a.k.a. the No Child Left Behind Act).

The report from the Pioneer Institute, a free-market think tank that has been critical of the common standards, suggests that the Education Department is moving on "the road to a national curriculum," despite provisions across several federal laws to prohibit such intervention.

"The department has designed a system of discretionary grants and conditional waivers that effectively herds states into accepting specific standards and assessments favored by the department," coauthor Robert S. Eitel, a former deputy general counsel of education under President George W. Bush, said in a press release.

The paper's other two coauthors are Kent D. Talbert, who was general counsel at the Education Department from 2006-09, and Williamson M. Evers, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

The Pioneer Institute report says that provisions in several federal laws ban—with only minor exceptions—"federal departments and agencies from directing, supervising, or controlling elementary and secondary school curriculum, programs of instruction, and instructional materials." The paper cites such provisions in the ESEA, as well as the General Education Provisions Act and the Department of Education Organization Act.

The report says the Obama administration has used the federal Race to the Top Fund, as well as the Race to the Top Assessment Program, to pressure states to adopt standards and assessments that are substantially the same across nearly all states. It notes that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said the work of the testing consortia includes "developing curriculum frameworks" and "instructional modules."

"Frankly, this makes sense," said Eitel in the press release. "How can one design assessments without taking into account what is taught? But the legal concern is that these federally funded assessments will ultimately direct the course of elementary and secondary course content across the nation."

The report also said the conditional waiver initiative launched by the Obama administration to give states greater flexibility from accountability provisions under the ESEA is "driving the states toward a national K-12 curriculum and course content." (Just today, the administration announced that 10 states had been granted such waivers.)

The issue with waivers is a bit complicated. As my co-blogger Catherine Gewertz explained in a recent story, states seeking ESEA waivers must meet several conditions, including showing that they have rigorous academic standards, a solid plan to transform standards into good instruction, and tests that ensure students are ready for college or good jobs. They can meet the standards requirement by adopting the Common Core State Standards, which all but four states have done.

They can meet the testing requirements by belonging to a multi-state consortium that is designing common tests for those standards. All but five states are participating in those projects. Alternatively, states can demonstrate high standards by having their higher education systems certify that students who master them can skip remedial college courses. They can meet the testing requirement by presenting a plan to design high-quality assessments, or by submitting their current tests to the federal Education Department for peer review.

The Pioneer Institute report contends that the ESEA waiver conditions "will result in the department leveraging the states into a de facto long-term national system of curriculum, programs of instruction, and instructional materials, notwithstanding the absence of legal authority in the ESEA."

The Education Department has not yet responded to an email I sent this morning seeking comment on the report, but Secretary Duncan touched on the larger issue last spring in a speech.

"We have not and will not prescribe a national curriculum," Duncan said. "I want to repeat that."

To be sure, the federal government's role in promoting common standards and assessments has long been a point of contention in some education and political circles. See blog posts here and here for a quick taste. And, indeed, the same issue came up in the early days of the No Child Left Behind Act, with the federal Reading First program, as EdWeek reported back in 2003.

The Pioneer Institute led a campaign in 2010 to oppose adoption of the common standards, arguing that they contained weaker content in both mathematics and English language arts than existing state standards in Massachusetts and California.

The new white paper outlines a number of steps to address the concerns it highlights about the Education Department's actions. For one, it says Congress should "immediately pass" legislation clarifying that the Education Department cannot impose conditions in granting waivers to states under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It also urges lawmakers to hold hearings on the agency's implementation of the Race to the Top Fund, the Race to the Top Assessment Program, and the plans for conditional ESEA waivers to "ascertain the department's compliance" with several federal laws. Those include the ESEA, the GEPA, and the DEOA.

Further, it says Congress should "review the curriculum and related prohibitions in GEPA, the DEOA, and the ESEA to determine whether legislation should be introduced to strengthen the ban on federal involvement in elementary and secondary curriculum, programs of instruction, and instructional materials."

Posted by Erik Robelen at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

At a time when the news about arts education is usually that it's being cut, officials in Boston had a different message today.

An ambitious public-private effort first launched in 2009 to greatly expand access to quality arts education just got a philanthropic shot in the arm from the Wallace Foundation. The New York City-based grantmaker is committing $4 million over four years to improve and expand the city's Arts Expansion Initiative for public schools.

(The Wallace Foundation also provides financial support to Education Week.)

At a press conference today, city and school officials announced the grant and released new data showing a big increase in arts access for students during the school day. The data indicate that an additional 14,000 students in the Boston school district now have regular access to visual and performing arts instruction, compared with three years ago.

"In Boston, we have defined arts education as part of a quality education for all students," said Superintendent Carol R. Johnson in a press release. "Our focus on expanding high-quality, equitably distributed arts learning opportunities for our young people is a key piece of our agenda to transform our schools."

The Arts Expansion Initiative is a collaboration among a variety of entities, including local (private) funders, the city school district, arts organizations, the mayor's office, and EdVestors, a Boston-based nonprofit organization involved in school improvement efforts. The new Wallace grant comes on top of more than $4 million in commitments from private funders in the city through 2015. In addition, since 2009, the Boston district has provided an additional $2 million each year for arts education.

The Wallace grant will help build capacity in the district to "expand and sustain high-quality arts education for all BPS students through new approaches to arts instruction, curriculum, professional development, partnership coordination, and student and family engagement," the press release says.

The effort in Boston goes against the grain of current momentum around much of the nation, amid tight school budgets, to diminish opportunities for arts learning in schools, said Laura Perille, the executive director of EdVestors, which helped to develop the Arts Expansion Initiative and is playing a lead role in its implementation.

"Boston is bucking the trend nationally," she said in an interview. "Just in the last month or two, we've seen proposals to cut the arts" in some other urban school systems.

The Boston initiative has three core goals:

• Expanding direct instruction in the arts in schools;

• Building the capacity of the school system to support school-based arts programs; and

• Enhancing partnerships between schools and arts groups, as well as higher education institutions.

Perille said that on the issue of access, the goal is no less than ensuring "universal" access to "weekly, yearlong arts education" for students in grades K-8, along with a big increase in access at the high school level.

Today's event took place at Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School, which has seen access to arts education soar since 2009. At that time, just half of students were receiving weekly arts instruction throughout the school year, but now the figure is 96 percent, Perille said. The school now has four full-time arts specialists, and has partnerships with both the Huntington Theater Co., for theater workshops, and the Boston Ballet, which is running a dance program for male students, Perille said.

Beyond increasing arts access, another change driven by the city's Arts Expansion Initiative is annual reporting on access to arts learning in schools.

"In Boston, we created the first-ever systemwide inventory that measures how many kids got what art disciplines by minute in every school," Perille told me. "We publicly publish and document by school, by percentage. We believe in the power of transparency."

You can find out plenty more about the initiative and see recent school-by-school data on arts access here.

Perille said another important dimension of the arts-expansion effort—and one to be supported by the new Wallace grant—is "engaging students and families to build long-term demand for the arts, because what families want and what students want in a choice-driven district is an important part of how schools make decisions."

In fact, plans are under way to create and administer surveys to both students and their families about their preferences in arts education.

"We think this is a critical piece of the strategy," she said of student and family engagement, "to make sure this sticks."

Posted by Erik Robelen at 5:45 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A new survey finds that parents, teachers, and school district administrators find far more value in formative and interim tests than they do in summative assessments. You can read the highlights of the report in my story.

The main themes, from all three groups surveyed, are pretty straightforward: Tests are valuable to us when they let us know how well students are learning and what kinds of help they need, and when they let us know that stuff quickly. And it's formative and interim tests—not so much the year-end summative tests—that do this best, the survey respondents said.

Something intriguing that I couldn't fit into the story, though, is that folks are pretty confused about the three types of testing. They seem to have a basic grasp on the difference between gauging learning after teaching is done and gauging it while it's going on. But much beyond that, there is some real muddy water.

Take a look at Page 21 of the survey report (the link is in my story, above). Researchers presented teachers and district administrators with five testing scenarios and asked them to say whether they were formative, interim, or summative tests. No more than 60 percent categorized any one of the testing-type scenarios correctly.

"There is little clarity among teachers and district administrators about the standard types and purposes of different assessments," the report says. "Do teachers and district administrators have the knowledge and skills they need to put different assessments to their best use?"

Good question, and highly relevant as the assessment landscape is being reshaped.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

President Obama hosted the second White House science fair today, using the event both to highlight the work of talented youth and to roll out a series of plans from his administration—and from private partners—to give a boost to STEM education.

One item on the president's agenda is an $80 million proposal for a new federal competition to support "effective STEM teacher preparation programs," according to a White House press release. In addition, the president is seeking to create a $60 million fund to improve mathematics education, to be jointly administered by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation.

Also, an upcoming Race to the Top competition will once again include STEM education as an area of focus in the criteria. And the Education Department will devote "a portion" of its next $300 million Teacher Incentive Fund competition to support local efforts to improve compensation, evaluation, and professional development systems for STEM educators, the White House release says.

In reference to plans to have the Superbowl-winning New York Giants come to the White House, President Obama said: "If we are recognizing athletic achievement, we should also be recognizing academic achievement, and science achievement."

During the science fair, Obama got a chance to see firsthand some of the inventions developed by enterprising students. In fact, he even helped to shoot a marshmallow out of an air cannon (as you can see in the photos here).

"You're in 6th grade? You guys are already inventing stuff?" the president said to students at one display. "I'm very impressed."

Regarding a student who developed a system for detecting nuclear threats, Obama quipped to his science adviser, John Holdren: "John, hire this man."

The president also used the event to highlight private-sector efforts to improve STEM education.

"When I took office, I called for an all-hands-on-deck aproach to science, technology, engineering, and math," Obama said, "to make sure these fields get the respect and attention that they deserve. ... The private sector has answered that call as well."

Fourteen organizations, including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Google, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, among others, have just announced a $22 million fund for STEM teacher preparation and support. The effort is part of an initiative dubbed 100Kin10, an initiative created to attract and prepare 100,000 excellent STEM teachers over a decade.

The White House press release also highlighted other activities. For example:

• The National Math and Science Initiative will prepare 4,000 new STEM teachers from 31 UTeach sites by 2015;

• Teach For America will recruit 11,000 STEM corps members by 2015; and

• DonorsChoose will seek to inspire 50,000 citizens to sponsor projects in math and science classrooms over the next two years, delivering $15 million in classroom resources.

President Obama first hosted a White House science fair in October 2010. As we've noted before, the president has repeatedly used the bully pulpit to promote STEM education.

The White House today provided a brief description of some of the new plans put forward. For example, the $80 million teacher-preparation program would focus on such approaches as allowing students to simultaneously earn a STEM degree and a teaching certificate, and provide undergraduates with early and intensive classroom experiences to hone their skills, the White House news release said.

The new K-16 math program would seek to "develop, validate, and scale up evidence-based approaches to improve student learning at the K-12 and undergraduate levels through a 'tiered-evidence framework' to maximize [the] impact," the White House said.

Of course, these two proposals, as well as some others outlined, will require sign-off by Congress, including the Republican-led House, to become law. Next Monday, Obama will put forward his full budget request for fiscal 2013.

Given what's likely to be considerable pressure to reduce federal spending overall, it may be a tough sell to introduce still more new programs. Indeed, House Republicans have already made clear their preference to abolish many existing education programs and instead provide a smaller set of more flexible programs for states and school districts.

Photos: President Barack Obama checks out the "Extreme Marshmallow Cannon" designed by Joey Hudy of Phoenix, Ariz., during a tour of the White House Science Fair. Susan Walsh/AP and Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 2:09 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

As a former English major, I feel a special duty and obligation today to honor the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens. (Bias Alert: Dickens is one of my all-time favorite authors. My favorite book? Bleak House, of course.)

Needless to say, the bicentennial offers a perfect teachable moment. So, to justify this as a Curriculum Matters blog post, I'll start with some educational resources.

• The Guardian newspaper of England has assembled a nice collection of resources on 'How to Teach ... Charles Dickens.'

• The New York Times also has a page of teaching resources and materials of interest. In fact, they've even got the original NYT obituary from June 11, 1870: Death of the Great Novelist.

• Here's some materials from the British Council, including lesson plans and recent blog posts on the 200th anniversary.

• The Washington Post has reviewed three new illustrated books for children about Dickens.

I'm sure there's plenty more out there. Know of something good? Please post a comment below.

The Associated Press quotes Dickens biographer Claire Tomalin on one dimension of Dickens' staying power.

"You only have to look around our society and everything he wrote about in the 1840s is still relevant," said Tomalin. "The great gulf between the rich and poor, corrupt financiers, corrupt Members of Parliament. ... You name it, he said it."

And now for the fun part: Some quotes from the Dickens canon, starting with a few words of wisdom—of course—on education. (Thanks to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations for assistance!)

--"I took a good deal o' pains with his eddication, sir; let him run in the streets when he was very young, and shift for hisself. It's the only way to make a boy sharp, sir." (Pickwick Papers)

--"Experientia does it—as Papa used to say." (David Copperfield)

--"He is an honorable, obstinate, truthful, high-spirited, intensely prejudiced, perfectly reasonable man." (Bleak House)

--"Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else." (Hard Times)

--"There is a wisdom of the head, and ... a wisdom of the heart." (Hard Times)

--"In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice." (Great Expectations)

--"Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule." (Great Expectations)

--"It's a mad world. Mad as Bedlam." (David Copperfield)

--"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." (David Copperfield)

Happy Birthday, Mr. Dickens.

Photo: Charles Dickens in an 1861 photo engraving. New York Public Library via AP

Posted by Erik Robelen at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The South Dakota board of education adopted the Common Core State Standards in November of 2010, after a public comment period. But some of its state lawmakers think that process didn't afford the state's citizens enough time to speak up. So they are considering requiring the board to hold a second public comment period.

Local media there report that the state's House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly yesterday in favor of a bill that would require at least four additional hearings around the state. The state senate has yet to vote.

The South Dakota department of education has launched a three-year professional-development project to prepare its teachers for the standards, and is a member of the SMARTER Balanced assessment consortium, one of two groups of states designing tests for the new standards.

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

Those of you who were interested in the close-reading exercise that I reported on last week might want to read what Understanding-By-Design guru Grant Wiggins has to say about it in his blog.

A quick refresher: chief academic officers from 14 big school districts walked through a lesson on close reading at an Aspen Institute retreat in Florida. It's a very different way of teaching than most teachers are used to, and the CAOs had both admiration for and concern about implementing the technique in their districts. Read my story about it here.

Wiggins argues that close reading is hardly new, and expresses amazement that more instructional leaders don't know about it. (Some of the comments posted to my story include echoes of Wiggins' point, as well.)

The fact that this technique has been used in private schools, and in public schools with the Junior Great Books program, is notable. But flip that over and see where you end up: the fact that it isn't more widely used—especially in places where students are most in need of terrific instruction, and rich experiences with language—is perhaps what is really worth noting. And the breadth of the challenge involved in doing so across such a varied landscape isn't insignificant, either. What happens now is the question.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Unless you've slept through most of your visits to Curriculum Matters, you know already that two big groups of states are using federal Race to the Top money to design tests for the new common standards. Both have pledged to give teachers a prominent role in helping shape those tests.

In that vein, one of the two consortia has put out a procurement solicitation for help developing teams of teacher-leaders. These teachers would wear two hats, according to what officials from PARCC have said previously: they would become ambassadors of sorts for PARCC's assessment system, helping colleagues around their state understand and use it. And they would help the consortium design instructional resources to bridge the tests with the common standards on which they're based.

All of this is detailed in PARCC's Invitation to Negotiate (that's what they call a request for proposals in Florida, which is PARCC's fiscal agent) here.

You'll notice that the help that PARCC seeks through this ITN is not about making tests. It's to "support the PARCC states' transition to and long term success of the Common Core State Standards." It's easy to forget that these assessment consortia are not just making tests. They are working on constellations of stuff that are meant to build a bridge from the standards to the tests. That's a lot of stuff in between, including curriculum resources like model instructional units. (But goodness knows, they've steered clear of saying they are designing complete curricula. Delicate subject.)

This transition-to-standards work is something that both consortia won $30 million in additional Race to the Top money to do. In case any of you have forgotten, both groups submitted supplemental applications to do this kind of work. We wrote about their plans here.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 9:16 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A Republican proposal to end the federal mandate for science testing in public schools is coming under fire from a broad-based coalition that supports improved STEM education.

"Removing the existing requirement ... sends a powerful, negative, and unambiguous signal to U.S. schools and the public that science—along with all of its related subdisciplines—is no longer a national priority," says the STEM Education Coalition in a letter sent today to members of the House Education and the Workforce Committee.

A draft bill released last month by Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., the chairman of the House education committee, would abolish the current requirement in the No Child Left Behind Act that states test students in science three times before they graduate high school. It would keep, however, the law's mandate for testing English/language arts and mathematics in grades 3-8 and once in high school. The GOP proposal was part of legislation to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. (NCLB is the latest version of the 1965 law.)

"If the requirement for science testing is eliminated, schools will shift their limited resources away from science classes, less time will be devoted to science, and professional development for science educators will suffer," says the coalition, which describes itself as an alliance of more than 500 business, professional, and education organizations. Members include Microsoft Corp., the American Chemical Society, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and Time Warner Cable.

James Brown, the executive director of the STEM Education Coalition, told me that members of the group are speaking with the offices of House lawmakers on the committee "every day" to make known their concerns about the GOP bill.

The coalition also complains that the draft bill would strip out the $150 million Mathematics and Science Partnerships program at the U.S. Department of Education without offering any new, STEM-focused program in its place.

"While we recognize the bill's goal of streamlining a myriad of education programs," the coalition says, "we disagree with the absence of any strong STEM education focus for Title II [of the ESEA] grants or any significant linkage between Title II activities and workforce needs."

The letter seeks to make an emphatic connection between STEM education and the workforce.

"In short," the coalition says, "we believe that education reforms that are strongly focused on the STEM subjects are reforms that are strongly focused on jobs and economic recovery."

Posted by Erik Robelen at 4:31 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The situation Achievement First—a nationally-recognized charter schools network—finds itself in today exemplifies one conundrum of the push towards common standards and tests. And that is, the assessments will be a little less common.

As most readers surely know by now, most states have adopted the common-core standards for English/language arts and mathematics. But two separate state consortia are developing assessments to match.

According to my quick count, SMARTER Balanced now has 29 state members; PARCC has 23 plus the District of Columbia. (A handful are hedging their bets.)

And therein lies the rub for Achievement First, which operates charter schools in both New York and Connecticut. Yes, indeed: the Empire State joined one assessment consortia, Connecticut joined the other.

I was chatting this week with Nancy Livingston, the vice president of teaching and learning at Achievement First, for an upcoming story about the new math standards. She's a big fan of the document. ("Yes, a resounding yes," she replied emphatically, when I asked if she liked the math standards.)

But Livingston lamented that her network's 20 schools won't be taking the same state assessments, at least as of now, because of the states' decisions in choosing a new testing route.

"They opted into two different assessment consortia," Livingston told me. "I would like to convince Connecticut to move to PARCC. That is step one. But we're planning right now that it will be two."

She added: "We've had [our schools] operating under two different assessments historically, so it's not that different. But it's a little sad in getting to common standards that we're not getting to common assessments."

Posted by Erik Robelen at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Should states develop a creativity index for their schools? When I first learned that Massachusetts was exploring the idea, I was intrigued. What would it look like? How would it work? Are any other states interested?

I examine these and other issues in an EdWeek story published online today.

The idea of such an index comes as many political and business leaders have become increasingly concerned about the need to better foster creativity and innovative thinking among today's students. It also comes as a lot of educators worry that the pressure of high-stakes testing may be squeezing out opportunities for students to develop those very qualities.

The concept of a creativity/innovation index, at least at this point, is about educational "inputs," not "outputs." That is, it's meant to gauge the extent to which schools provide opportunities that will foster creativity and innovation in young people.

In Massachusetts, a new state commission began meeting last fall to draft recommendations for such an index for all public schools. The action came in response to a 2010 law. (I'm told that the legislature would have to pass another measure to actually require that the index be implemented.)

Meanwhile, the California Senate in late January approved a bill calling for the development of a voluntary Creative and Innovative Education Index.

And Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin recently announced plans for a public-private partnership to produce an innovation index for schools, which she described as a "public measurement of the opportunities for our students to engage in innovative work."

As my story explains, a variety of experts and participants in the state efforts caution that no one is exactly sure what a creativity index should look like. The Massachusetts legislation suggests that it might include such indicators as access in schools to arts education, debate clubs, science fairs, filmmaking, and independent research. But several people I interviewed say they want to be sure the index goes beyond a superficial checklist. And they emphasized that creativity can be nurtured in all sorts of activities and subjects, from robotics to mathematics.

How educators and schools would respond to a creativity index remains to be seen. Certainly, some folks are likely to be leery of adding still another public measurement for schools. But the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association said his union is supportive of the idea, arguing that it fits with the desire of many teachers to move toward a "multiple measures" approach to evaluating schools that gets beyond test scores in reading and math.

In any case, a creativity index is certainly a provocative idea, and one that is starting to be taken seriously in at least a few states. But the efforts are still in their very early stages. Stay tuned.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Our colleague Jackie Zubrzycki has some interesting news over at the Inside School Research blog: the International Reading Association is setting up a panel of experts that will draw on research to create a set of best-practices recommendations for literacy instruction.

Aside from the list of panelists, there are few details yet about the panel's plans. Those, apparently, are forthcoming at the IRA's conference this spring.

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

The first public glimpse of a draft of common science standards for states will come in early spring, we've just learned.

Currently, 26 states are playing a lead role in helping to develop the Next Generation Science Standards, which organizers of the effort hope will eventually be adopted by all—or at least most—states.

The plan is that by late March or April, the draft standards will be made available for public comment, according to Stephen Pruitt, a vice president at Achieve, the Washington-based group facilitating the standards-writing process.

"We are hard at work. We are preparing for a public draft," he told me yesterday.

There will actually be two rounds of public comment on the standards document, said Pruitt, who previously was a science supervisor at the Georgia Department of Education. The second public review will occur in the "third quarter" of the year, he predicted. And the final document, he said, will be completed by year's end.

The states are working in partnership with the National Research Council, the National Science Teachers Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science to develop the new standards. Last summer, an NRC panel of experts wrapped up work on a framework to guide the development of the standards. The framework identifies the core ideas and practices in the natural sciences and engineering that all students should know by the time they graduate.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by Jackie Zubrzycki

The loops and tails of cursive letters this week came a step closer to being resurrected in Indiana schools. A bill authored by Republican state Senator Jean Leising that would require the state's public schools (and private schools that receive vouchers) to teach cursive was unanimously approved by the Senate education committee Thursday and sailed through the Senate yesterday (while other education bills deadlocked). It's now awaiting debate in the House. We reported that the bill was being considered in a story considering the larger debate about teaching cursive handwriting in schools.

Cursive was included in Indiana's standards until last June, when the state adopted the Common Core State Standards and did not specifically add cursive, which the standards do not now include. There was an outcry from the public after news media picked up on the story—Sen. Leising said she heard from constituents immediately, and grew increasingly concerned. "By not teaching cursive, we will establish a new kind illiteracy," she said, citing potential workplace dilemmas that might arise when those schooled in cursive try to communicate with the unschooled.

In an interview in early January, Sen. Leising said she had already heard from about eight state Senators from both parties. "If you end up with that many [supporters] before the bill's even scheduled for a hearing, that means people are discussing this issue in the rest of Indiana." She said she had sent an online poll to 6,000 of her constituents, and 90 percent of the respondents said cursive should be mandatory.

At the time, Ross McMullin, a spokesman for the Indiana Department of Education, said: "To be clear, no one is forcing schools to stop teaching cursive. School corporations may still include cursive in their curriculum offerings if they want to." The department couldn't be reached for a new comment this week.

Researcher Steve Graham, of Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, said in an interview for the Education Week story that he believes cursive should be taught, but that the debate clearly goes beyond any academic or cognitive benefits of different styles of penmanship. "I've never seen anything in writing that people feel so passionate about," Graham said. "On the one hand, I like it—we want people to be passionate about writing. On the other, you're mystified about why the passion is on this one, single subskill."

The passion's widespread, it seems—the bill passed 45-5 in the Senate, and the House may take it up as early as next week.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

[UPDATED, 3:07 p.m.] The GE Foundation's $18 million common-standards grant, announced this morning, will focus on helping teachers understand the shifts in instruction necessary for the new standards, and will build a storehouse of free resources for them to use.

The foundation's "Developing Futures" districts—seven school districts that it has been working with to improve math and science instruction—will be key beneficiaries of the "immersion institutes" that Student Achievement Partners will hold as part of the four-year grant, officials of the philanthropy and the nonprofit group said in a conference call. But those institutes will be held nationally as well, in an attempt to spread understanding of the standards and develop "teacher champions" who can work with colleagues around the country.

Some of the grant money will be used for the training institutes, they said, and some will be used for "direct collaboration" with teachers nationally, in person and on the Web, to produce examples of good instruction on the standards. Some of the grant will be used to build a new website, www.achievethecore.org, with free resources for teachers. These already include videotapes of instructional units in math or English/language arts, and will expand to include tools to help teachers track and evaluate students' work, and other as-yet-unspecified resources.

David Coleman, co-founder and CEO of Student Achievement Partners, and one of the lead writers of the common standards in English/language arts, said that SAP will collaborate with teachers and national teachers unions, and groups such as the Council of Chief State School Officers and the Council of the Great City Schools, to develop and share resources that will help "make the common core real" for teachers. Only the best of what is submitted will be posted online, he said; he envisions a collection of resources that is carefully "curated" by SAP and expert teachers.

Whatever Student Achievement Partners develops in support of the common standards will be available for free, Coleman said. On achievethecore.org, SAP says that it will not hold any intellectual property in what it develops, will not accept money from publishers, and will not compete for state and district contracts.

I asked whether this will be the case in all SAP work in support of the common core, whether part of the GE Foundation grant or not. Coleman said that those principles would apply to all its work.

Student Achievement Partners relies on philanthropic grants and contracts for its support, Coleman told me. It currently has three contracts with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, together worth $4.1 million, to do common-core related work. Those projects include creating ways to measure the complexity of texts, developing instructional units for teachers in reading and writing, developing publisher's criteria for the standards, and creating a common digital language for cross-referencing them online.

The New York City-based nonprofit, as we told you earlier, was founded by three of the lead writers of the common standards: Coleman, and Susan Pimentel (English/language arts), and Jason Zimba (math). It counts the other lead math writer, William McCallum, and a member of the math-writing panel, Phil Daro, as advisors.

The $18 million grant is one of the biggest that the GE Foundation has made in education, its president and chairman, Robert L. Corcoran, said during the conference call. It has made five-year grants of between $20 million and $25 million to several of its large "Developing Futures" districts, focused narrowly on specific aims, he said. The grant to Student Achievement Partners is an investment in "infrastructure," to enable "something that can help millions of children" over many years, he said.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend