April 2012 Archives

As more states commit to one of two assessment consortia, Colorado is resisting.

According to media reports, the state board of education is digging in its heels against the state legislature, where lawmakers are considering a bill to make the state commit to the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium or the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). The state board will have none of it, though; the panel voted 4-3 on Friday to oppose that bill, even after a pitch from its coauthors.

The vote furthers a schism between the board, on the one side, and the legislature and governor on the other. Last year, the board lost a bid for $26 million to develop new assessments in all core subjects, but Gov. John Hickenlooper sided against them, and lawmakers provided only $6 million, and only for tests in social studies, science, and other areas that didn't include mathematics and English/language arts, the two subjects targeted by the federally funded, multi-state assessment consortia.

Colorado is one of a dwindling number of "participating" states—five, at the moment—that still belong to both consortia. That role allows the state to be in on conversations about test design without having voting power. It also doesn't commit the state to using the tests. "Governing" states have voting power but must also promise to use the tests when they become operational in 2014-15.

The bill, cosponsored by Sens. Mike Johnston and Nancy Spence, would require Colorado to become a governing state in one or the other consortium.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Test scores in reading and math may not have as much of a monopoly over school accountability anymore, based on the plans some states have put forward to win waivers under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

That's the crux of a new EdWeek story I just wrapped up.

Of the 11 states to already gain a waiver, seven say they will factor achievement in extra subjects in revising their accountability systems. In a second round of waiver applications awaiting a final decision by the U.S. Department of Education, nearly a dozen states are looking to do the same.

Science is the most popular subject to add, followed by writing and social studies.

I first blogged about this issue in December, raising the question of whether it might help reverse a perceived narrowing of the curriculum many see as a consequence of NCLB's intensive focus on reading and math scores.

In my new story, drawing on interviews in a variety of states, including Oklahoma, Georgia, Florida, and Colorado, I take a closer look at what exactly these states are planning to do, and why.

To be sure, standardized tests will remain the driving force of school accountability under these plans (though some also call for taking into account other factors). And reading and math scores—the main criteria for making adequate yearly progress under NCLB—will still count for a lot and typically be weighted more heavily than results in other subjects.

In any case, I've heard from plenty of folks over time, especially science educators, who say that in a world where test scores really matter, it's preferable to have their subject be part of the mix.

As Kelly Price, the president of the Georgia Science Teachers Association, told me of Georgia's plan to factor science into its new school performance index: "We're excited about it because we notice that with [the NCLB law], the topics that got the priority of instruction were those that were tested and those whose tests had high stakes."

In fact, a recent informal survey conducted by the National Science Teachers Association found that of the roughly 600 teachers who replied, 63 percent said science should be factored into AYP.

One important point here is that, leaving federal policy aside, some states for years have factored one or more subjects beyond reading and math into separate state accountability systems. But, to my knowledge, nearly all states have focused exclusively on reading and math when it comes to determining whether schools make AYP. Through their waiver plans, these states are aiming to end the problem of having two sets of competing demands by creating a unified system, and one that would consistently count the same subjects.

A question to ponder is why most states have never before counted subjects like science or social studies under NCLB. After all, as it was explained to me, the federal law does not prohibit this. It simply doesn't require it. (And, in fact, the law did require science testing at three grade levels.)

One explanation may be that given long-standing reservations about the NCLB approach to accountability, most states simply had no interest in going beyond what the law explicitly mandated, especially if it meant possibly roping more schools into the federal statute's set of consequences for schools not making AYP. Now that the Feds are prepared to hand states a lot more leeway in designing accountability systems, states may feel more comfortable introducing more factors into the recipe.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 2:48 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Those of you in the English/language arts swatch of the edu-verse might be interested in a couple of webinars we're hosting next week.

As my colleague Anthony Rebora notes over at Teaching Now, the first one is on Tuesday, May 1, at 2 p.m. EST. I'm hosting that one; it features two literacy experts from adjoining school districts in Northern Kentucky, who are putting the Literacy Design Collaborative tools into practice. The story I wrote about my visit to Kentucky to observe that work is online if you'd like to read it before the webinar. It was part of our special report on implementing the common standards, which just came out this week.

The second webinar is Thursday, May 3, from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern time, features the 2010 National Teacher of the Year, Sarah Brown Wessling, discussing the new standards. I've heard her speak, written about her approach to teaching the new standards, and I know that she is an interesting and dynamic speaker.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Poetry workshops. Composing and performing operas. Studying sculpture and still-life painting. Staging Shakespeare in the schools. Creating an animated film. Even getting an introduction, yes, to "theatrical circus arts."

These are among the activities inside and outside schools slated to get an infusion of federal support under a new round of federal grants announced yesterday by the National Endowment for the Arts.

In all, the independent federal agency announced plans to award 928 grants totaling $77 million to nonprofit organizations nationwide. Although the grants go far beyond arts education, that particular domain is getting plenty of attention.

In all, more than 100 of the grants are explicitly categorized by the endowment as "arts education," but in scanning the database of grants, it became clear that this didn't tell the whole story. Plenty of examples outside that realm had a connection to schools and students as well.

"The arts should be a part of everyday life," Rocco Landesman, the chairman of the endowment, said in a press release on the new grants. "Whether it's seeing a performance, visiting a gallery, participating in an art class, or simply taking a walk around a neighborhood enhanced by public art, these grants are ensuring that across the nation, the public is able to experience how art works."

The announcement comes several weeks after the federal agency issued a report finding that at-risk youths with a history of intensive arts experiences enjoy better academic outcomes and are more civicly engaged than disadvantaged students who largely miss out on the arts.

The endowment grants offer a window into some intriguing examples of arts education in schools and communities nationwide. Here's a quick sampling:

• $35,000: Architecture Resource Center (New Haven, Conn.)
To support a design education initiative that brings architects, city planners, and museum educators together with teachers to help integrate the design arts into the classroom curriculum.

• $33,000: Atlanta Shakespeare Co.
Middle and high school students will learn all aspects of performance and theater, attend professional productions, and mount fully staged productions at school and in the community.

• $25,000: Bethune Theatredanse (Los Angeles)
To support a dance-instruction program for special-needs students, in partnership with the Pasadena (Calif.) school district.

• $20,000: Circus Day Foundation (Florissant, Mo.)
To support Circus Harmony, a theatrical circus-arts program. Students work with professional circus educators, choreographers, costume designers, and musicians to learn theatrical circus skills through skills-based classes and perform for the public.

• $20,000: Country Music Foundation (Nashville, Tenn.)
To support Words and Music, a program teaching students in grades 3-12 to write original songs. As part of the program, language arts and music teachers will be trained to guide students through the process of lyrics writing.

• Jacob Burns Film Center: $25,000 (Pleasantville, N.Y.)
In partnership with the Yonkers (N.Y.) school district, professional animators will work with students to create an animated film and present the work to the community at a "red carpet premiere."

• $75,000 Metropolitan Opera Guild (New York City)
To support opera-based teaching and learning in public elementary schools in New York City, New Jersey, and Boston. Students will be supported in composing and performing their own operas.

• $22,000: Sonoran Art Foundation (Tucson, Ariz.)
Students will learn "centuries-old" glassmaking techniques through this youth glass-arts-education program.

• $34,000: Street Poets (Los Angeles)
To support poetry-writing workshops targeting high-risk youths in Los Angeles high schools, juvenile detentions, and community centers.

Who knows? Maybe I can talk my editor into sending me out to take a closer look at one or two of these initiatives in practice!

Posted by Erik Robelen at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Is environmental literacy a priority of the Obama administration? Observers could be forgiven for scratching their heads in confusion.

On one hand, the administration this week announced the first set of winners of the Green Ribbon Schools program, a new Obama initiative that recognizes schools that have done exemplary work in promoting environmental literacy and developing eco-friendly practices. And last week, it hosted what was billed as the first-ever White House summit on environmental education.

On the other hand, the president is seeking substantial cuts in federal aid to promote green literacy among young people. This situation was first brought to my attention the other day by the National Wildlife Federation, an advocacy group that has analyzed Obama's fiscal 2013 budget request.

First, the president's budget plan would wipe out EPA's $9.7 million Environmental Education program (though the agency announced plans at the summit to soften that blow). In addition, it would zero out two programs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Those are the $7.2 million Bay-Watershed Education and Training program, described by NOAA as promoting "place-based, experiential learning) and $8 million for environmental-literacy grants, according to the National Wildlife Federation. In addition, the group said $10 million in NASA funding for climate change education would be cut, and federal aid would be dramatically reduced for the same subject at the National Science Foundation.

Max Greenberg, a spokesman for the National Wildlife Federation, said his organization was especially alarmed about the proposed EPA cuts, which he argues "could cause a ripple effect throughout the environmental education community."

The EPA budget request explains that "due to competing budgetary priorities, the agency is eliminating funding from the Environmental Education program to support other mission critical programs, initiatives, and activities that more directly support the administration's highest priorities."

No doubt, it was a little awkward for EPA officials, including Administrator Lisa Jackson, to gather at an environmental education summit with a backdrop of agency plans to gut the budget for that activity. Perhaps recognizing the irony, Jackson apparently signaled that the administration had a change of heart and would find $5 million to ensure the EPA program was not abolished (though funding still would be nearly cut in half).

I inquired with EPA's press office about this announcement and asked for comment. The official who fielded my request never got back to me and never explained where the extra $5 million would come from, since it's not in the official budget request.

To be sure, the president's request isn't the last word. He'll have to work with Congress on a final spending package for the coming fiscal year.

In any case, it's often said that a budget request is a good gauge of an administration's priorities. If that's true, advocates for environmental education have reason to be perplexed.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 2:28 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Those of you who follow us here might recall that I told you about a brouhaha over the Common Core State Standards' alleged ban on prereading.

Intrigued by the fervor of the arguments online, I looked into it a bit further. See what I found: The story is up on our website today.

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

The new tests for the common standards aren't expected to be fully operational for three more years, but schools are already wondering what they'll need to do, technologically speaking, to be ready for the new assessments.

The answer is rolling out in stages, but one stage rolled out today: The two consortia of states that are designing the tests issued joint technology-purchasing guidelines to help schools and districts as they buy technology now. The outline helps them decide on hardware and operating systems that lend themselves to the new tests.

For instance, they specify that computers should have processors that run at 1 GHz or faster, and have at least 1 gigabyte of RAM. Computers should be running Windows 7 or Mac 10.7 (other operating systems are listed, too) and have a wired or wireless network connection. Desktops and laptops aren't the only acceptable devices, either; tablets and netbooks that meet the specifications are fine, too. For the full run-down of specifications, see the guidelines themselves.

This isn't the full and final list of specifications, though. The two groups have a survey out in the field right now that will help them determine where states and districts are in their technological readiness for the new tests. That will help inform a more detailed set of guidelines, which will include information on bandwidth, test system security and alternate input devices, according to consortia officials.

The two groups also plan to put out guidance on how to support technology that doesn't meet the specifications they suggest for the forthcoming tests.

More about today's guidelines can be found on the SMARTER Balanced site and on the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) site.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Although mastering algebra is widely seen as a gateway to higher mathematics, and as a stepping stone to being prepared for college, new studies suggest that taking the subject in middle school may not be such a great idea for low-performing students, my colleague Sarah D. Sparks reports.

Separate studies in California and North Carolina's Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district find that placing struggling urban middle schoolers into algebra not only fails to improve their achievement on state math tests, but also reduces the likelihood that they will take and pass higher-level math courses in high school.

California's state board in 2008 enacted a policy that includes algebra as part of the state's 8th grade end-of-year math test (though it has not been fully implemented because of a legal challenge), Sarah notes in her article. Charlotte-Mecklenburg in 2002 launched a policy to shift Algebra I from a high school to an 8th grade course. However, the drop in scores and coursetaking for low-achieving students was so dramatic, the EdWeek story explains, that the North Carolina district changed its policy two years later. The district now allows—but does not require—students to take accelerated algebra.

Be sure to read not only the story but a growing set of comments posted by EdWeek readers.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 8:33 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Turning the Common Core State Standards into better teaching and learning is a massive undertaking that is touching nearly every state in the country. It's reaching into teacher evaluation, assessment, instructional materials. It's raising questions about teacher preparation, and shifting the focus of professional development for in-service teachers. And even as all that happens, it's still controversial, with persistent questions about federal intrusion and the new standards' academic demands.

We've got a special report out this week on common-core implementation. It explores the overall terrain of what lies ahead, and it explores the way states and districts are implementing the math and English/language arts standards, as well as how they are grappling with applying the standards to English-learners and special education students. It takes a look at the big challenge of professional development.

Check here for the overview to the report. From there, you can check the blue box for individual stories on the topics I mentioned.

You'll probably also be interested in taking a look at a year's review of common-core-related commentaries, posted here.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A set of eight academically troubled public schools spanning the nation will get a big dose of arts education support to help them turn around—not to mention access to a little star power from the likes of Yo-Yo Ma and Sarah Jessica Parker—under a new public-private partnership announced today by a White House advisory panel.

The effort aims not only to assist the struggling schools but also to serve as a test bed for the idea that high-quality, integrated arts education can play a valuable role in motivating students, improving school climate, and improving academic achievement across disciplines.

"It's not only a flower, it's a wrench," Rachel Goslins, the executive director of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, said of arts education. "We will have a stable of standout case studies for schools ... that used the arts as one of their tools," she told me in an interview.

The public elementary and middle schools selected, from Boston and New Orleans to Lame Deer, Mont., and Portland Ore., are among the lowest-achieving 5 percent in their respective states. They are already recipients of grant support under the federal School Improvement Grants program. (For an early and in-depth look at the $3 billion SIG program, check out our recent EdWeek coverage.)

The so-called Turnaround Arts initiative is the brainchild of the presidential committee, and was developed in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Education and the White House Domestic Policy Council. Last year, the committee issued a report calling for policymakers to "reinvest" in arts education, arguing that the arts hold great potential to boost student engagement and academic achievement across disciplines. The initiative offers a chance to explore that potential, and will be the subject of an external evaluation.

Over the next two years, the schools will receive an infusion of arts education resources and expertise to support teachers and the school leadership in using the arts as a pillar of their turnaround strategies, a press release explains. This will include access to summer leadership programs, as well as in-school professional development, and support in forming partnerships with community arts and cultural organizations. The schools also will get access to art supplies and musical instruments.

The range of private partners supporting the Turnaround Arts initiative include the Ford Foundation, the Herb Alpert Foundation, Crayola, the NAMM (National Association of Musical Merchants) Foundation, the Aspen Institute, and Booz Allen Hamilton, which will conduct the research. The initiative will be managed by the Arts Education Partnership, a national advocacy coalition.

Goslins said that all told, the private assistance will amount to about $1 million per year, though most of that will come in the form of in-kind services, support, and supplies.

Andrew Bott, the principal of Orchard Gardens K-8 School in Boston, said he believes his school's participation in the initiative will help to ensure its work to improve is "deepened and expanded."

"Students in Orchard Gardens are like students everywhere," he said in a press release. "Despite poverty, continual staff turnover, and complicated issues at home, these kids want a place to focus and learn. They deserve to have music, art, and theater available to them." (It just so happens that Orchard Gardens is one of the schools profiled as part of the EdWeek coverage of the SIG program.)

Each school will also be paired with one (or more) members of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, including painter and photographer Chuck Close; actresses Sarah Jessica Parker, Kerry Washington, and Alfre Woodard; actor Forest Whitaker; dancer Damian Woetzell; and cellist Yo-Yo Ma. These celebrities will work with the schools and communities and help highlight their achievements.

(The committee, established in 1982 by President Reagan, includes more than 30 private members, plus a dozen 'ex-officio' members from federal agencies and departments, including U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. First lady Michelle Obama is the honorary chair of the committee.)

Candidate schools were nominated by state and municipal authorities, according to a fact sheet, through a selection process coordinated with the federal Education Department. In the end, Goslins said that there were about 25 contenders. PCAH members and staff conducted site visits at 14 finalist schools.

The focus, the fact sheet said, was on identifying schools with a "need and opportunity" for the arts, "great principals with district support, and a commitment to the idea that arts education is part of the solution." The selection process also aimed to identify a set of schools with geographic and demographic diversity.

Goslins also noted that applicant schools were required to have at least one full-time arts or music teacher already in place. "If arts education is going to have a home, there must be someone there full-time with a vision for that," she said.

Of course, observers are likely to have plenty of questions about the Turnaround Arts initiative's ultimate value and what lessons it can impart. For one, the level of intensive arts supports these schools will enjoy is not likely to be universally available to struggling schools any time soon, if ever. Also, given that these SIG schools are already getting academic and financial assistance in other areas thanks to the separate federal grants program, it may prove difficult to tease out through the research what contribution the arts component makes.

Finally, if the Turnaround Arts initiative proves to make a real difference, there's always the question of what happens to these schools when it ends. Can the momentum be sustained once the flood of extra resources dries up, as well as the early excitement and energy, not to mention the celebrity partners to help rally a community?

Goslins said she's keenly aware of the need to ensure that the initiative lays the ground work for something truly sustainable. And she suggests that a key ingredient is forging and solidifying partnerships with local arts and cultural institutions that can and will stick around for the long haul.

In the end, Goslins said she's not suggesting that the arts alone will somehow save struggling schools.

"The arts are absolutely not a silver bullet for these schools," she said. "No single thing is. ... But when you add in the arts as part of your basic toolkit," she contends, "you're going to get better results than if you don't."

Posted by Erik Robelen at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Texas state board of education—which said "no" to joining 45 other states in adopting Common Core State Standards in mathematics—today delivered a unanimous "yes" to a new state framework that will set the course for K-12 math education over the next decade.

Board members approved more than 100 amendments to the standards this week, which in draft form had encountered sharp criticism from the Texas Association of Business, as well as from the editorial board of the Dallas Morning News. Key concerns cited were that the standards lacked sufficient coherence and rigor. The leader of the Texas business group, Bill Hammond, told the Associated Press he was not yet prepared to comment on the final version, given all the last-minute changes.

In the end, some board members gave the final plan high marks.

"I think we have adopted ... very good standards," Bob Craig, a Republican, said in a press release from the Texas Education Agency.

"Texas is making a strong statement that it can write its own standards," said board Chairwoman Barbara Cargill, also a Republican.

But the Thomas B. Fordham Institute begged to differ.

"By going it alone, Texas had hoped to develop a set of standards that was clearer and more rigorous than the common core," said Kathleen Porter-Magee, a senior director at the Washington-based think tank. "Unfortunately, they missed the mark. The new standards are clear and well organized, but there are simply far too many of them, which makes it difficult to discern what's most important for students to learn at each grade. Worse, they put far too great an emphasis on process over content."

(The Fordham Institute earlier this week issued a review of the standards before board members amended them.)

The new standards will be implemented for grades K-8 by the 2014-15 school year, and a year later for high school. The state education agency said the dates were staggered to ensure that funds were available to purchase new textbooks and other instructional materials.

The agency press release said the amendments made this week were designed to "clarify and streamline" the new standards.

Hammond told me last week that the Texas Association of Business wanted the board to postpone final action, given what he saw as the need for "massive revisions."

But board members were not prepared to wait. Indeed, one member, Thomas Ratliff, complained about what he called the "11th hour" critique of standards that had been in the works for more than a year.

One amendment the board approved yesterday aims to encourage schools to prohibit students in grades K-5 from using calculators and other electronic devices to help with math work.

"We hear more and more from parents that their kids in school are being allowed to rely on calculators without actually memorizing their math facts and building that firm foundation," said Cargill, according to a story in the Dallas Morning News.

The only dissenting vote on that measure, the newspaper said, came from Democrat Mavis Knight.

"These are the tools [students] will be using as they advance through school and into the work world," she said, according to the Dallas Morning News.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 3:34 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Reporting from Atlanta

A state consortium that is designing tests for the Common Core State Standards had been planning to design model instructional units for the standards, but it has decided not to do that, officials said at a meeting of states today.

Updating participants on the progress of the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, Allison Barr said that so many states are already working on making instructional units that the consortium decided that its energy would be better spent developing professional-development modules aimed at supporting educators as they create or adapt materials for their curricular units.

"This is a shift in focus from where we started," said Barr, a senior program associate at Achieve, which is the project-management partner for PARCC.

PARCC's intention to produce model units hasn't been without controversy, as we told you when we reported the group's plans to do this work—with federal Race to the Top funds—in January 2011. In the face of questions about whether one federally funded curriculum was going to be imposed on states in the consortium, its leaders were quick to clarify that the units were voluntary, and were just that—units, or pieces of a possible curriculum, not an entire curriculum in and of themselves.

Whether those sorts of political landmines influenced PARCC's decision to shift focus wasn't addressed at this meeting, hosted by the Council of Chief State School Officers for states implementing the common standards. (See our post yesterday on the meeting.) But the gathering did offer a forum for updates such as this one.

Additionally, PARCC reported that it is revising its model content frameworks, which generated truckloads of attention for the early signals they gave about the assessment system it's designing. Those updated frameworks should be posted online this summer, said Tony Eitel, the director of assessment administration for Georgia, a PARCC state.

The other assessment consortium, SMARTER Balanced, offered its own update for the states. Lynette Russell, an assistant state superintendent in Wisconsin, outlined the group's plans to create a bank of formative assessment exemplars. Group leaders are still trying to get educators to understand, she said, that formative assessment is not a pop quiz or some other fixed, formatted test, but a "process" aimed at getting feedback from students and adjusting instruction. SMARTER Balanced hopes the exemplars will help illustrate that process.

Those of you interested in checking the Requests for Proposals issued by SMARTER Balanced can see those on a special page of its website. Recent procurements for PARCC are listed on a special page of its website as well. It also has links to its procurement timeline, and descriptions of its current and planned procurements.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

With revised Texas math standards expected to face a final vote this week, a board member yesterday expressed exasperation with critics who are seeking big changes.

"I am concerned this process has been in motion for a year, and a week before our meeting, we get this long list of things from your expert," Republican board member Thomas Ratliff told the head of the Texas Association of Business, according to the Dallas Morning News. "We should not be trying to rewrite the [standards] at the 11th hour."

Texas is one of a small handful of states that have chosen not to adopt the Common Core State Standards in math and English/language arts.

Although the critique has arrived late in the game, the Texas business group is actually calling for the vote to be postponed to allow time for major revisions, rather than to debate a lot of amendments this week. (For more on its concerns, as well as others voiced by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, see my blog post yesterday.)

Its president and CEO, Bill Hammond, testified yesterday against the standards as crafted.

Hammond told the board that the proposed standards mention "far too many issues" and lack the depth that some experts believe is needed to help students attain strong math skills, the newspaper reported. (Incidentally, the editorial board of the Dallas Morning News issued an editorial this week raising concerns about the standards.)

Several members of the Texas Association of Supervisors of Mathematics also spoke at the hearing, the Associated Press reports, and largely defended the proposed standards.

"You're pushing that rigor envelope within a grade level. That's a good thing," said Caren Sorrells, the president of the math association, according to the AP.

UPDATE: (1:46 p.m.)

The AP is now reporting that Texas education commissioner Robert Scott told the board today that it should hammer out new math standards that are better than the Common Core State Standards, or delay approving them until it can. Indeed, he suggested the board may consider calling a special meeting in May to ensure adequate time get the job done.

Also, I just learned that the board has already begun to amend the proposed standards. You can follow the blow-by-blow by checking out the Texas Education Agency's Twitter feed.

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

Reporting From Atlanta

States must recognize that they have some heavy-duty work to do before they can put the Common Core State Standards into practice. But they hold key powers that could prove pivotal in making the necessary changes: the authority to regulate teacher preparation and licensing and the ability to collect and publicize data that show how well those programs are doing.

That was the bracing message delivered today by Gene Wilhoit, the executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, at a gathering of states that are meeting here to share ideas on how best to implement the common standards.

It was frank talk about the rough spots on the road to implementation. And it's particularly notable because it comes not from a pundit or observer, but from someone who knows intimately the workings of state education agencies and has been a chief himself (Kentucky). Wilhoit is one of the common core's biggest advocates, of course, since his group spearheaded their development (with the National Governors Association). But he is also not shy about pointing out the warts in the system that now has the burden of implementing them.

"If we are honest with ourselves, we know we are not ready to deliver against this promise," he told teams from 27 states. "The vast majority of teachers don't have the skill set" needed to teach to the new expectations. They need support to improve both their pedagogical skills and their content knowledge, he said.

Echoing a point made in an address to the group Wednesday evening by the 2010 National Teacher of the Year, Sarah Brown Wessling, Wilhoit said that states must take care not to impose pedagogical methods on teachers, but to find ways to empower them to attain the necessary mix of skills and content knowledge. One way that states could consider doing that, he said, is by creating networks of particularly skilled teachers that could help guide their peers.

Principal preparation needs particular attention, Wilhoit said, as states begin to examine the best ways to help educators ramp up their skills for the common core. Such programs have been "the ugly stepchild" of educator preparation and do not sufficiently prepare school leaders to walk through classrooms and recognize the kind of teaching that should be taking place to reflect the new standards, he said.

Three key levers can be of use to states as they venture into common-standards implementation, Wilhoit said. One is the power to approve teacher-preparation programs. Too often, he said, state education agencies surrender this power to accrediting organizations "that too often emphasize process over content," but they can take it back in order to ensure that the programs are operating the way they should be, he said.

Another potentially powerful lever for states is their authority over teacher-licensing programs, Wilhoit said. Finally, they can collect and publicize data about such programs that will show how well they are doing their jobs, he said.

"No preparation program that is producing inferior teachers should continue to exist," he said, and high-quality programs "should be out in the sunshine."

Wilhoit acknowledged that weeding out weak programs is an uphill battle, politically. He noted that "many state legislators" would rather continue weak programs than close them down. But he urged state education agencies to engage this fight and exploit the power they have to shape preparation and licensing programs.

Helping only a small portion of teachers improve would fall short of the common standards' promise, he said. The point is to improve teaching and learning "at scale," in state education systems.

"The work depends on impacting all teachers, not just a few," he said. "This is systems work, and we are the system.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The proposed math standards the Texas State Board of Education is expected to take up today are starting to draw more criticism.

On Monday, the editorial board of the Dallas Morning News urged the 15 members of the state board to "stop their rush" to approve the revamped math standards this week. In doing so, it relied largely upon objections raised by the Texas Association of Business (and a math expert that group consulted), which I blogged about last week.

And yesterday, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute served up its own critique of the draft standards for Texas, one of just a handful of states that have opted NOT to adopt the Common Core State Standards. The Washington-based think tank called the draft document an improvement over the state's existing math standards (which Fordham previously graded a C), but identified a number of problems.

"Unfortunately, Texas has overcorrected its minimalist problem by adding too many standards—many of which descend inappropriately into pedagogy—and including a lot of unnecessary repetition," says the review, written by W. Stephen Wilson, a professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins University. "Worse, the new draft standards overemphasize process, and arithmetic is not given suitable priority."

In fact, it closes with a comparison to the common-core standards. "[T]hough this comment may cut little ice in Texas, the present draft lags behind the Common Core math standards on a number of fronts." (For the record, Fordham said the common-core math standards deserve an A-.)

Bill Hammond, the president and CEO of the Texas Association of Business is on the list of Texans scheduled to testify today before the state board about the standards.

As of now, the plan is for the standards to be debated—and possibly amended—over the next two days, with a final vote expected on Friday.

Hammond's organization enlisted Ze'ev Wurman, a former U.S. Department of Education official under President George W. Bush, to review the draft standards, which Wurman sharply criticized as lacking in coherence and rigor.

In its editorial, the Dallas newspaper invokes that review.

"Not every standard must be rewritten," the April 16 editorial says. "But the 15 members of the state's education board need to listen to the critique of mathematicians like Wurman."

The editorial continues: "We don't mean just ram another standard or two in there to please the critics. We mean let mathematicians guide the discussion so the state has an approach to math that is relevant and clear."

The board notes that if the state ends up adopting standards that are insufficiently clear and demanding, "it will have validated the criticism that gave rise to the national standards movement. That is, states are not serious about setting rigorous ones."

Debbie Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency, did not comment on the critique of the standards, but did say she was a little surprised to hear opposition arising so late in the game.

"These had been in the works, been on the last two board agendas, and gotten very little ... negative comment up until the last week," she said.

Ratcliffe said she was not sure how board members would respond.

"I don't really know where the board is on that," she said. "My sense is that they want to press forward."

Posted by Erik Robelen at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Would you rather have an actual person score your carefully crafted essay, or an automated software program designed for that purpose?

I'd still take the flawed human being any day—assuming, of course, the proper expertise and that he or she is operating on a good night's sleep—but a new study suggests there is little, if any, difference in the reliability and accuracy of the computer approach.

And this may be good news for those who believe essays are an essential component of state testing systems, since the cost-savings may well encourage more states to embrace the use of such test items to balance out multiple-choice questions.

"The demonstration showed conclusively that automated essay-scoring systems are fast, accurate, and cost-effective," said Tom Vander Ark, the chief executive officer of Open Education Solutions, and a co-director of the study, in a press release. (Vander Ark is also a former top education official at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)

The study is described in the news release as the "first comprehensive, multivendor trial to test" claims by companies that provide automated essay-scoring software. It challenged nine companies to compare their capabilities. More than 16,000 essays were released from six participating states, with each set of essays varying in length, type, and grading protocols. The essays had already been hand-scored, and the challenge was for the companies to approximate established scores through their software.

The study was funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which also provides financial support for Education Week coverage.

It grew out of a contest Hewlett is sponsoring called the Automated Student Assessment Prize, to evaluate the current state of automated testing and to encourage further developments in the field.

The study comes as two state testing consortia are working to develop new assessment systems pegged to the Common Core State Standards in reading and mathematics. In fact, the two consortia are supporting the Hewlett effort, and three PARCC states and three SMARTER Balanced states supplied student essays for the current study.

"The results demonstrated that overall, automated essay scoring was capable of producing scores similar to human scores for extended-response writing items with equal performance for both source-based and traditional writing genre," says the study, co-authored by Mark Shermis, the dean of the University of Akron's college of education, and Ben Hammer of Kaggle, a private firm that provides a platform for predictive modeling and analytics competitions.

Barbara Chow, the education program director at Hewlett, said in the press release that she believes the results will encourage states to include a greater dose of writing in their state assessments.

And she believes this is good for education.

"The more we can use essays to assess what students have learned," she said, "the greater likelihood they'll master important academic content, critical thinking, and effective communication."

Posted by Erik Robelen at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

You might recall that a New Jersey middle-school principal caused a stir recently when he declared his school to be a no-hugging zone. We're hearing today that he's resigned.

No word on what approach his successor will take to the hugging question.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Peter Cohen, the chief executive officer of Pearson's K-12 division, stopped by on Monday for a wide-ranging chat with us at EdWeek. Since I hear so much skepticism on my beat about publishers' claims that their materials are "aligned" with the common standards, I asked him if this was something of a speed bump in the company's work to provide resources for the new standards.

It really isn't, Cohen said. He noted that Pearson and other big educational publishing-and-services companies have been adapting or creating materials in response to states' shifting standards for years now, so they're used to that process. And it's not as if the common standards "dropped from the sky," he said.

"These weren't brand new," he said. "It's not as if we weren't teaching people to read for a long time before that, and people still need to learn how to read."

What's more, Cohen noted, some of Pearson's authors served on the panels that shaped the standards, allowing the company to create or adapt materials in a way that reflected the guidelines as they were taking shape. The word he used is "coherent"—so that Pearson materials are "coherent with" the new standards.

Pearson spokeswoman Kate Miller, who accompanied Cohen to the meeting, explained that they favor that phrasing over two previously used versions: "aligned to" or "compliant with" the standards. Those phrases, she said, carried too much negative baggage.

Whatever phrasing you want to use, Cohen said he is "confident" that Pearson's adapted and newly created materials embody the requirements of the common standards.

"I'm not hearing from schools and districts [as they review Pearson materials] that there is a misalignment" between the materials and the standards, he said. "We hear it from the press and from pundits," he added with a laugh, "but not from schools and districts."

(Here at EdWeek, we hear it a lot. Whether it's generalized, uninformed, skeptical grumbling or based on a real comparison of materials with standards is an open question. But the alignment question floats around a lot. Check this story for one teacher's account of that alignment gap, and this blog post for the perspective of a professor studying common-core implementation.)

Cohen said that Pearson is "committed" to continuing to adapt its materials once the assessments for the standards are developed.

"We've done as good as job as we can for the standards, but we're blind to the assessments, because they're not out yet," he said. "We won't know if we've hit the mark" until those tests, due to be fully operational in 2014-15, are created.

Even as Pearson moves more heavily into professional development, and expands into data analytics, online portals, and personalized digital approaches that let educators build their own curricula, Cohen said he doesn't foresee Pearson moving away from its established role as producer of curriculum programs anytime soon.

Especially with the specter of accountability for student achievement looming, the instructional-materials stakes are high, he said, leading most districts to buy programs and use them as is or modify them. Relatively few choose to build them from scratch with open-source resources, he said.

"Companies that deliver coherent programs will be around for a while," Cohen said.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 2:56 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Texas—one of a handful of states that did not sign on to adopt the Common Core State Standards—is getting some pushback from the business community on proposed new state standards in mathematics.

The Texas Association of Business is urging the state board of education to go back to the drawing board on the standards, which the 15-member state panel is expected to take up next week.

The proposed math standards are "far from in-line with Texas' goal of raising educational standards; in fact, the currently proposed standards are actually worse and less rigorous than the Common Core Standards," the group's president and CEO Bill Hammond wrote in an April 9 letter to board members.

As some readers may recall, this is certainly not the first time Texas standards have come under fire. The elected state board encountered fierce debate over 2010 revisions to state standards in social studies, when a bloc of social conservatives largely succeeded in putting its imprint on them.

In an interview, Hammond said his group hopes the state board will "stop the process" for debating (and possibly approving) the new math standards, arguing that they require "massive revisions."

"Obviously, the leadership in Texas decided we're not going to go with the common-core standards, and we don't have an issue with that as long as we have excellent standards, well-written, rigorous standards," said Hammond, whose organization represents more than 3,000 business members across Texas, as well as more than 200 local chambers of commerce.

Hammond added that his organization's main concern is "about creating a workforce that will meet the needs of our employers."

The Texas board of education gave preliminary approval to the revised math standards in January, then put them out for public comment. A press release from the Texas Education Agency said that the revised standards drew from the state's existing standards "as well as math standards from Massachusetts, Minnesota, and international standards from places such as Singapore, which are all believed to have some of the world's best math curriculum standards."

The Texas business group asked Ze'ev Wurman, a vocal critic of the common math standards, to analyze the proposed Texas standards. Wurman, a Silicon Valley executive and former education official under President George W. Bush, recently served on a California commission that evaluated the suitability of the common standards for that state. (I recently blogged about a forum in which Wurman debated the common standards with a math professor.)

Wurman's analysis concludes that the Texas draft "picks many nice ideas from the common core, yet it also introduces errors and clumsiness. ... The draft creates a wordy, sometimes incoherent, and often garbled document, particularly in K-8, that shows the disparate fingerprints of the various groups and committees that influenced it through its development."

Ultimately, Wurman contends that the math document is inferior, in terms of "coherence and rigor," to both the common-core standards as well as "many of the better state standards. I am hard-pressed, indeed, to say that it represents an improvement over the existing [Texas standards]."

Despite the concerns, Hammond said the math standards are unlikely to generate near the attention as the embattled state social studies standards.

"Those standards are so much more political," he said. "And while not everybody has an opinion on math standards, everybody has an opinion on social studies."

Posted by Erik Robelen at 2:03 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A Tennessee measure that critics—among them leading scientists, as well as science teachers—say will undermine the teaching of evolution in public schools is set to become law, though Republican Gov. Bill Haslam declined to sign the legislation.

Approved by lopsided votes in the Republican-controlled House and Senate, the bill would protect teachers who discuss with students the "scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses" of existing theories, such as on evolution and global warming.

Haslam made clear his misgivings about the legislation, even while he stopped short of issuing a veto.

The Republican governor said that while he doesn't think the bill changes scientific standards or the state's science curriculum, he also believes that "good legislation should bring clarity and not confusion," the Associated Press reports.

"My concern is that this bill has not met this objective," he said. "For that reason, I will not sign the bill but will allow it to become law without my signature."

Proponents say the legislation is aimed at fostering "critical thinking" in the classroom. Republican Sen. Bo Watson, the leading Senate sponsor, charged that any confusion about the legislation's purpose "comes from the opponents of the bill, who have mischaracterized a lot of what the law would actually do," according to a story in the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

But the bill has come under fire from a variety of organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Tennessee Science Teachers Association, and the National Association of Biology Teachers.

Three prominent scientists from Tennessee, all members of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote a letter published in the Tennessean newspaper that derided the legislation as "misleading, unnecessary, likely to provoke unnecessary and divisive legal proceedings." Harkening back to the Scopes trial of 1925, they said, "the Tennessee legislature is doing the unbelievable: attempting to roll the clock back to 1925 by attempting to insert religious beliefs in the teaching of science."

Watson told the Times Free Press that he hopes the legislation will lead to more student interest in science.

"Perhaps if science classes allow for less rote memorization and student regurgitation and more discussion, students might get excited about science and understand that it's not just about memorizing facts and data," he said, "that actually there is debate and conversation that occurs in the science class."

But Eugenie C. Scott, the executive director of the National Center for Science Education, said that "telling students that evolution and climate change are scientifically controversial is miseducating them. Good science teachers know that. But the Tennessee legislature has now made it significantly harder to ensure that science is taught responsibly in the state's public schools."

Posted by Erik Robelen at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

You've created—or purchased—curriculum materials for your district, school or classroom. How much do you know about their effectiveness?

Researchers from the Brookings Institution argue in a new white paper that instructional materials affect student achievement as much as any key factor, including effective teaching, and yet the research base is weak or nonexistent for most of the materials used in classrooms. That, they argue, must be remedied by changes in policy.

The paper, "Choosing Blindly: Instructional Materials, Teacher Effectiveness, and the Common Core," comes to you from the same think tank that recently produced a report projecting that the common standards will have little effect on student achievement. One of the co-authors of this week's paper, Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, the U.S. Department of Education's former research chief, has done earlier work for Brookings that found it's curriculum, not standards, that can make an impact on student achievement. With co-author Matthew Chingos, he's mining than same vein of work here.

Whitehurst and Chingos argue that our relative ignorance about curricula's effectiveness is "scandalous," especially as the Common Core State Standards drive creation of new instructional materials. But it's something that can be remedied if states, the federal government, philanthropies and nonprofits team up to focus on it, they write.

To start with, states should survey their districts to see what materials are being used in classrooms, the two researchers argue. The federal government's National Center for Education Statistics can help this effort by creating data-collection templates and offering guidance.

They envision organizations like the Data Quality Campaign playing a role by urging states to collect the information and helping them make sense of it once it's collected. Foundations that are big into education could help with monetary support.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

From guest blogger Hannah Rose Sacks

Last week I wrote about the controversy surrounding the winner of the Nevada Science Olympiad.

After the conclusion of the March 3 contest, Clark High School, in Las Vegas, was named the winner and invited to represent Nevada at the National Science Olympiad, which will be held next month in Orlando, Fla. A week or so after the conclusion of the contest, Centennial High School, the Las Vegas school that was named the runner up in the state competition, discovered a scoring error that, if corrected, would make it the Olympiad champion.

Since the discovery of the scoring error, both the Clark and Centennial teams have held tightly to claims of victory and therefore earned the right to compete at the national competition.

After Nevada State Olympiad Director Richard Vineyard's request to send both teams as Nevada representatives to the National Science Olympiad was denied, the teams were unable to come to a resolution.

Now, the National Science Olympiad has finally made a ruling, reports the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The final verdict acknowledges the Centennial team as the state champion, but states that Clark High School will represent Nevada at the national competition.

The verdict, while a split decision, was a complicated one to call.

Clark Coach James Miller asserted that the Centennial team did not correctly follow the rules in several events, saying Centennial's scores in those events should have been discounted. Centennial's score was discounted in one event.

Ultimately, the national body ruled that because the scoring error was not challenged until March 15, the results declaring Clark High School the winners were already final. Official National Science Olympiad rules state teams have 24 hours to dispute scores. A printer malfunction, however, delayed the scoring reports to teams by 10 days.

Centennial officials had initially threatened to bring legal action if the team was not allowed to compete at the national competition, but they have since decided not to pursue further action, Centennial Principal Trent Day told the Review-Journal.

"They still feel they are the Nevada state champions ... but have decided that the dispute has gone on long enough," Day said.

Posted by Hannah Sacks at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A bill designed to unravel South Carolina's adoption of the Common Core State Standards is dead in the water, at least for now.

That's what the measure's sponsor, Sen. Mike Fair, told me in a phone call today.

I called the Republican senator to find out what happened with his bill, S. 604, in a hearing last week. You might recall that this legislation caused a national kerfuffle when a Senate subcommittee moved it on to the full education committee (albeit with an unfavorable report) for consideration.

That move prompted U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan to issue a statement scolding South Carolina for its low academic expectations. That, in turn, sparked an outpouring from the conservative blogosphere, which saw the move as confirmation that federal officials had overstepped their authority in pressing states to toe the line on the common core.

The education committee considered the bill in late February, but decided to hold another hearing for more input. That was the hearing I called Sen. Fair to check on.

It turns out that committee members decided to "carry over" the bill when they saw no prospect of building sufficient support for it, Fair told me. He explained that "carrying it over" has the same effect as tabling the measure.

"There was no way we could have passed that bill [in the full Senate], even if the [education] committee voted in favor," he said. "So rather than voting at all, we just carried it over."

Fair, who sits on the Senate's finance and education committees, said that he hopes to attack the issue another way. Before the state legislature adjourns in June, he wants to insert a proviso into that chamber's version of the budget that would forbid the state from implementing the standards.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

From Alexandria, Va.

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers made a key move yesterday: It decided that higher education representatives from its member states will become voting members of PARCC on core decisions about how the forthcoming tests will reflect college readiness.

At its quarterly meeting yesterday, PARCC's governing board—the education chiefs of its 24 member states—decided unanimously to allow higher ed. representatives to vote on a handful of issues: who will set the cutoff score for the tests, what evidence will be used to decide on cutoff scores, how to describe the expected performance levels on the test, and the million-dollar question: what the cutoff score will be.

Let's stop for a second to do a quick refresher for those of you whose eyes are already glazing over: PARCC is one of two big groups of states that have federal Race to the Top money to design assessments (and instructional resources and other stuff) for the common standards. The other group is the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium.

When the U.S. Department of Education handed out $360 million to these two groups, it wanted a lot of things for its money, as we told you when the competition opened in April 2010. It wanted tests that can measure student achievement as well as student growth, tests that can be used to judge teacher and school performance, tests that offer teachers formative feedback to help them guide instruction. But it also wanted tests that reflect whether students are ready—or are on track to be ready—to make smooth transitions into college and good jobs.

A key basket of work in this regard is getting colleges and universities on board to accept the two consortia's tests as solid indicators that students can skip remedial work and go right into entry-level, credit-bearing courses. What, after all, does a test of college readiness mean if colleges don't agree that it indeed connotes readiness for college-level work?

The idea, then, was that involvement of higher education in the consortia's work would be crucial to reaching consensus on what a test would need to do to show that a student who passes it is college-ready. One of the federal government's requirements in offering the Race to Top money, in fact, was that state consortia show a hefty pledge of support for their work from public college and university systems. Both did so.

But it's one thing for a university system to pledge support for the work of test design, and another to see it unfold in such a way that it can be embraced as a substitute for entry-level course placement. This is what the PARCC vote aims to address.

The move puts the consortium's Advisory Committee on College Readiness at the voting table, right alongside its decisionmaking body, the governing board, when it comes to the most pivotal issues about how the tests reflect college readiness. Established last July, the group is composed mostly of the highest-ranking official from one state system of colleges or universities in each PARCC state.

The ACCR and PARCC's Higher Education Leadership Team, made up of additional postsecondary officials, are key vehicles for its outreach strategy to build college and university support and confidence in its tests.

Bringing top university officials to the voting table as the college-readiness decisions are made represents "a huge step toward operationalizing" the consortium's work on that aspect of the assessment, Massachusetts Commissioner of Education Mitchell D. Chester, the chair of PARCC's governing board, told the group yesterday just before the vote.

Discussion later in the meeting offered hints about how thorny the process will be. Working its way down the agenda, the governing board took on the issue of how to set performance standards (cutoff scores) for the tests. Mary Ann Snider, Rhode Island's chief of educator quality, solicited feedback on this question from the board, with the hope that guidelines for performance-standard-setting might be voted on at the board's June meeting.

To get a quick gauge of the board's inclinations, she asked how many performance levels they thought the test should have: three, four, five, or some other number. Most states voted for four levels, largely mirroring the current practice in most PARCC states. Then she asked them when indicators of being "on track" for college readiness should first appear on test results: elementary school, middle school, or high school. Most voted for elementary school.

Snider also asked whether the test should indicate only how well students have mastered material from their current grade level, or whether it should show how well they've mastered content from the previous grade level, too. These answers came back deeply divided.

The question was aimed at a key part of the dialogue about the new assessment systems: how to design them so they show parents, teachers, and others how students are progressing over time, rather than a simple determination of proficiency (or lack thereof) at the moment. But the prospect of having, say, 4th grade tests reflect students' mastery of 3rd grade content raised some serious doubts.

"If I'm a 5th grade teacher, am I now responsible for 4th grade content in my evaluation?" asked James Palmer, an interim division administrator in student assessment at the Illinois state board of education.

Gayle Potter, director of student assessment in Arkansas, said that it's important to give parents and teachers important information about where students are in their learning. But she also said she worried about "giving teachers mixed signals" about their responsibility for lower grades' content.

Some board members noted that indicators of mastery of the previous year's content would be helpful in adjusting instruction. But others expressed doubt about whether a summative test was the best way to do that. Perhaps, they said, that function is better handled by other portions of the planned assessment system, such as the optional midyear assessments.

Discussing when to put career-readiness indicators on the test, too, proved thorny. Deborah Gist, Rhode Island's schools chief, said that placing an "on track to career readiness" indicator on an elementary student's test results worries her.

"It starts to feel like tracking when kids are still so young," she said. Educators and parents do need to know whether students are on a productive pathway to success in college and work, she said, "but labeling makes me nervous."

Precisely what the test will say about career readiness also is not yet clear. Michael Cohen, the president of Achieve, a Washington-based group serving as PARCC's managing partner, urged the governing board to be cautious about how it writes the career-readiness "claims" for the test. "It's hard to imagine" employers using the test results to judge candidates' readiness for work, he said.

He explained after the meeting that care should be taken to avoid creating the impression that employers will use the test results to determine if applicants are qualified for a given job. The tests will not measure every single skill that employers and professors seek, only the academic skills, he said. So making accurate claims about what the tests do and don't measure will be critical, Cohen said.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 4:17 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In a new issue brief, the National Governors Association identifies science learning outside the classroom—often called "informal science education"—as a frequently overlooked vehicle for helping states advance their STEM goals.

The document urges governors to "explicitly" include informal science education on their action agenda to improve STEM learning among young people and have representatives from informal science institutions (such as museums and zoos) be a part of state STEM advisory councils.

"Informal science education extends student learning beyond the classroom through hands-on activities that let youth discover and practice STEM concepts," the NGA brief says.

Opportunities for such "informal" learning come through a variety of venues and activities, such as science centers and museums, zoos, robotics and rocketry clubs, online games, and science competitions, to name a few.

The NGA brief identifies some additional actions for states, including:

• Continue to support quality informal science programs in the state, such as those offered by museums and science centers;

• Encourage school districts to support more project-based STEM learning in after-school environments; and

• Encourage the governor's STEM council or state education agency to oversee the creation of an online catalog of informal science activities offered throughout the state and a compendium of program evaluations.

Last year, EdWeek published a special report, Science Learning Outside the Classroom, in which we examined what informal science education looks like in practice, what we know about its impact, its potential, and the challenges it faces to have a broader reach. We found that the field is gaining broader recognition for its role in helping young people acquire scientific knowledge and skills. (One of the most notable examples is a major report from the National Research Council issued in 2009, which noted that "beyond the schoolhouse door, opportunities for science learning abound.")

(Our report on informal science education was supported in part by a grant from the Noyce Foundation, which also underwrote the new NGA brief.)

The NGA issue brief suggests that "informal science offers states a powerful, low-cost way to help achieve the goals of an overall STEM strategy." It notes that most quality programs "involve little if any direct state funding and do not compete with other state education dollars or classroom time." (That said, many advocates for informal science education argue that additional funding is critical to help expand the influence and reach of their work. After all, somebody has to pay the bills for these programs and institutions.)

The brief argues that a key challenge is that many states fail to recognize and promote the role informal science learning activities can play in "buttressing" other state activities in STEM, or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

"Thus, the state may be adopting more rigorous math and science standards, and providing more rigorous preparation for STEM students, while not taking full advantage of after-school programs or teacher professional-development opportunities provided through informal science institutions," the report says. "As a result, school districts engage with the informal science community in a patchwork fashion, with robust activities in some areas and none in others."

Posted by Erik Robelen at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

At-risk youths with a history of intensive arts experiences enjoy better academic outcomes and are more civicly engaged than disadvantaged students who largely miss out on the arts, finds a new report from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The benefits can be seen across a variety of measures, from test scores and school grades to honors-society memberships, high school graduation, and college enrollment and attainment. In addition, these young people are more likely to get involved with volunteer activities and local politics.

To be clear, this research does NOT provide evidence that extensive arts engagement causes those positive outcomes in at-risk young people. Rather, the two are associated. In other words, it could simply be that youths who are more apt to be highly engaged in the arts also are more prone toward academic and civic prowess. We don't really know for sure.

"That's the money question," Sunil Iyengar, the director of research and analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts, told me. "We don't know if, in fact, there is something [about] these kids that would prompt them to be more engaged in a variety of ways, including the arts."

At the same time, Iyengar added: "There is a consistency here that is remarkable. ... In almost no case did we see anything counter [to this correlation]."

The new study comes as the National Center for Education Statistics issued a major report about access to arts education. That study, which suggests that the oft-repeated claims that the arts have been squeezed out of the curriculum are overstated, does point to persistent gaps in access to the arts by income level. That is, schools with the highest poverty levels tend to have lower availability of arts instruction. That said, in some cases, high-poverty schools have started to gain ground and close the gap in terms of access, when compared with low-poverty schools.

What's especially interesting about the National Endowment study—led by James S. Catteral, a professor emeritus of education at UCLA—is its reliance on several longitudinal databases, so that changes in behavior can be observed over the long haul.

So, enough of my jabbering. How about we look at some of the data?

Here's a sampling of the results, when comparing at-risk youths with low levels of arts exposure to those with high exposure.

• 10th graders who went on to complete a calculus course:
Low arts (23 percent)
High arts (33 percent)

• Mean GPA of high school students:
Low arts (2.55)
High arts (2.94)

• 10th graders who went on to enroll in a bachelor's degree program:
Low arts (19 percent)
High arts (32 percent)

• Young adults who earned a bachelor's degree
Low arts (5 percent)
High arts (17 percent)

• High schoolers who participated in student government:
Low arts (4 percent)
High arts (16 percent)

• Young adults who volunteered within the last two years:
Low arts (26 percent)
High arts (47 percent)

• Young adults who voted in the 2004 national election:
Low arts (31 percent)
High arts (45 percent)

(For all you researchers and policy wonks, here's a quick overview of definitions for the info above. The results refer to students in the bottom quarter for socioeconomic status as defined mainly by family income, parental education level, and parental job status. The report offers a definition for "arts engagement" centered on occurrences of arts activities, whether in-class or extracurricular, with extra points for recurring exposure. The various federal data sets examined had some differences, but key activities included attending concerts, visiting museums, participating in band or orchestra, and taking art, music, or dance classes. The report does not, however, get at the quality of those experiences.)

In an introduction, endowment Chairman Rocco Landesman offers his thoughts on the report.

"This report is quick to caution that it does not make the case for a causal relationship between the arts and these outcomes, but as a nonresearcher, I have no hesitation about drawing my own conclusions," he writes. "I firmly believe that when a school delivers the complete education to which every child is entitled—an education that very much includes the arts—the whole child blossoms."

Posted by Erik Robelen at 1:27 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Rumors of the death of arts education in public schools have been greatly exaggerated, new data suggest.

Over the past decade, the availability of music and visual arts instruction has changed little, and remains high, according to a comprehensive new federal report. (Dance and theater, however, are fast becoming endangered species at the elementary level.)

At the same time, disparities persist in access to arts instruction for high-poverty schools, though in a number of specific categories, those schools have seen some improvements over time. For example, a greater share of high-poverty schools now employ visual arts specialists than a decade ago.

I've certainly heard many times the assertion that the arts have been getting squeezed out of the curriculum in recent years, amid the dual pressures of the federal No Child Left Behind Act and recession-driven declines in education spending.

But the nationally representative results made public today tell a different story.

The vast majority of public elementary schools (94 percent) offered music instruction in 2009-10, the exact same figure as a decade earlier, according to the report from the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. Visual arts dropped just slightly, from 87 percent to 83 percent in 2009-10.

For secondary schools, music instruction was offered in 91 percent of public schools in 2008-09, up from 90 percent a decade earlier. For visual arts, there was a slight decline from 93 percent to 89 percent.

"Generally, what we really found is there is no consistent trend of decline in arts education in public schools," said Jared Coopersmith, a project officer at the NCES. "However, we did find various instances of change."

Most notable was the bad news for dance and drama at the elementary level, which have all but disappeared. Dance instruction dropped from 20 percent of schools in 1999-2000 to 3 percent in 2009-10. Drama/theater dropped from 20 percent to 4 percent. (In 2010, I wrote about efforts to integrate dance across the curriculum. Among my examples was a Maryland school that incorporated dance into a lesson on photosynthesis.)

At the secondary level, however, the figures were far more stable, with only slight declines, from 14 percent to 12 percent in dance, from 1999-2000 to 2008-09, and from 48 percent to 45 percent in drama/theater.

The President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities issued a statement today expressing some relief about the big picture, even while drawing attention to some troubling data within the report. This advisory panel issued a report last year that called for "reinvesting" in arts education, saying that "due to budget constraints and emphasis on the subjects of high-stakes testing, arts instruction in schools is on a downward trend." The report suggested that this trend was "especially true" for students in schools serving higher concentrations of children living in poverty.

"It is gratifying that, even in times of narrowing curriculum and economic hardships over the last decade, schools still see a strong value in access to arts education and continue to prioritize making it available to their students," the White House advisory panel said today.

At the same time, the committee highlighted "disturbing" data on the "persistence of the gap" in access to arts instruction between high- and low-poverty schools.

In looking at the federal report, I did see some differences, though they did not paint a picture of consistent disparities. Here are some examples of access differences when comparing schools with 0 to 25 percent of students eligible for a free or reduced-price lunch (which I'll call low poverty) and those with 76 percent or more of such students (which I'll call high poverty).

Music instruction at elementary level:

• Available at least once a week
Low Poverty: 95 percent
High Poverty: 93 percent

• Offered throughout the entire school year
Low Poverty: 96 percent
High Poverty: 89 percent

• Dedicated rooms with special equipment were primary space for instruction:
Low poverty: 82 percent
High poverty: 65 percent

• Arts specialists were available
Low Poverty: 98 percent
High Povety: 85 percent

Visual arts instruction at elementary level:

• Available at least once a week
Low poverty: 90 percent
High poverty: 84 percent

• Offered throughout the entire school year
Low poverty: 92 percent
High poverty: 83 percent

• Dedicated rooms with special equipment were primary space for instruction:
Low poverty: 76 percent
High poverty: 59 percent

• Arts specialists employed:
Low poverty: 89 percent
High poverty: 81 percent

That said, in many categories, the gap in access is closing between high- and low-poverty schools, the data suggest. For instance, over the past decade, the availability of weekly music instruction climbed from 82 percent to 93 percent in high-poverty schools, while the figure for low-poverty schools stayed the same, at 95 percent. And dedicated music rooms were available in 65 percent, up from 43 percent in 1999-2000. In fact, the availability of such dedicated rooms for visual arts instruction nearly doubled for high-poverty schools over the past decade, from 33 percent to 59 percent.

[UPDATE: (April 3, 2:13 p.m.) A significant—and disturbing—change I missed in my initial blog post concerns access to music and visual-arts instruction at the secondary level for high-poverty schools. It dropped from 100 percent to 81 percent in music, and from 93 percent to 80 percent in the visual arts, when comparing data for 1999-2000 with the 2008-09 school year. Oddly enough, the opposite was true at the elementary level. Access to music instruction among high-poverty schools grew from 85 percent to 89 percent, when comparing 1999-2000 with 2009-10. For visual arts, it grew from 74 percent to 80 percent.]

There's a ton of data to mine in this new federal report, and I've only scratched the surface here. So you should definitely take a closer look if the subject of arts access in schools is of interest.

I'll close by highlighting a sobering comment from the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities about how the percentages revealed in the federal report don't tell the whole story.

"It's important to note that, according to this study, tens and tens of thousands of children in our country have little or no access to arts education in their school," the panel said. "No recorders, no drawing self-portraits, no band or school plays. Disproportionately, this number consists of our neediest students."

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