Web Watch

With budgets slashed and staff layoffs coming by the thousands, schools are getting desperate to raise revenue. That desperation is leading to some creative schemes. Last year, a Maryland school district played advertisements on school bus radios until parents protested. In November, a teacher in San Diego raised controversy by selling ad space on his math tests. And now, Prince William’s County, Va., public schools are raising revenue by selling ad space on the Web sites of 17 of their schools, according to The Washington Post.

Since the school district started selling ads in October 2008, it has raised more than $50,000. Money has come from county education sponsors, including a car dealership, power companies, BB&T Bank, and Lockhead Martin.

"We're just looking for any way in these economic times to maximize people's donations," said Sharon Henry, executive director of the Prince William County Public Schools Education Foundation, who started the project. "It opens up a whole new opportunity for them to support schools by giving back."

Henry would like to raise at least $25,000 more from the advertising by the end of the school year and expand the ads to all 87 of their school Web sites.

The advertisements have been met with mixed reactions from parents and educators.

"To me, it kind of cheapens the education mission, and it takes a captive audience and shoves advertising down their throats," said Manassas Park Superintendent Thomas DeBolt.

Posted by Josh Cohen at 4:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In several schools around the country, letter grades are being replaced by standards-based report cards, according to The New York Times. The new report cards which use numbers 1 through 4 offer a window into how students are fairing in very specific terms. A “1” indicates that a student is "not meeting academic standards," whereas a “4” reflects “meeting standards with distinction.” Students receiving these report cards see their skills assessed in dozens of categories from “decoding strategies” to “number sense and operations.”

While some educators find the system helpful for its drill-down approach to grading, parents are having a harder time with it. The executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, Gerald Tirozzi, who supports the standards-based approach, explained “I think the present grading system—A, B, C, D, F—is ingrained in us. It’s the language which college admissions officers understand; it’s the language which parents understand.”

In the San Mateo-Foster city district, outside San Francisco, parents successfully delayed the expansion of the numbering system from elementary to middle schools. One parent expressed concern that high-performing students were not working as hard for number grades as they would for letter grades. "They all stopped trying," said Ellen Ulrich, a mother of two.

Janice Ingram Bell, a parent in Pelham, New York, finds the new grading system a “bargain basement version of a report card” for its inability to distinguish sufficiently between student ability levels. Thomas R. Guskey, a professor and author of the forthcoming book, Developing Standards-Based Report Cards, disagrees, “The dilemma with [the letter grading] system is that you really don’t know whether anybody has learned anything.”

Posted by Elizabeth Rich at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

For multiracial students and their parents, the “check-one-box” directions on school registration forms have historically posed a problem. Under a new federal mandate, public schools will increase the accuracy of their data-gathering by allowing students to identify with more than one race, reports the Washington Post.

The Education Department’s new rules will go into effect for all students in 2010, though the change is now mandated for newly enrolled students nationwide.

But not everyone is thrilled about changes to the labeling and counting process. Members of the NAACP, among other groups, are concerned about how the new data will be used. "This will make our whole education system look different, and nobody will know whether we are going forward or backward," said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California in Los Angeles. Melissa Herman, a sociologist at Dartmouth College, worries that the aggregate numbers reported to the government, which will identify some students under the category of “two or more races,” will mask valuable data. "If we don't know that some multiracial, Hispanic, and black students are doing worse, we can conveniently ignore that they are doing worse."

However, the policy shift comes as a relief for many families. Shelley Bryant, the mother of a 2nd grader at Lake Anne Elementary School in Fairfax, Virginia, where 14 percent of students identify as more than one ethnicity, said, "I want my kids to know they are biracial. We say . . .'we took a mixture of Mommy and Daddy and made you.'" Mary Ann Dawedeit, a white mother from Maryland, is glad she no longer has to choose one race when filling out forms for her three sons, whose father is black. “You have to honor both parents' backgrounds. It's hard to check one box."

Posted by Liana Heitin at 5:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

High on D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s controversial to-do list is attracting a “new breed” of young teachers, with or without education degrees, who have more of an interest in education reform than in union-steered contractual arrangements, reports NPR’s Claudio Sanchez.

Meredith Leonard, a 22-year-old first-year English teacher at Shaw-Garnet-Patterson Middle School in Washington, fits the bill. She’s supportive of changes such as merit pay and relinquishing tenure, and is adamant that teachers should hold high expectations for all learners, regardless of their home lives. "Maybe it's because I'm a first-year teacher, maybe I'm not jaded yet, but that's always been my opinion on it," she says. "There is a difference — you can't pretend there isn't — between new teachers and teachers who've been in the system a long time." According to the most recent benchmark testing, says Sanchez, all of Leonard’s students are reading with 100% proficiency.

But some observers caution Rhee’s stress on youth and change may alienate more experienced teachers, who have a greater stake in their jobs. "[Older teachers] knew they were never going to be richly compensated, but they knew they were going to have steady employment and that one of the perks is you get to the school you want to be at and teach the classes you want to be in," notes Frederick Hess, an education researcher at the American Enterprise Institute.

Posted by Liana Heitin at 4:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A high school teacher in rural Oklahoma was fired after assigning her students a play about the murder of a gay college student, reports USA Today.

With her principal’s permission, Debra Taylor showed her class The Laramie Project, a 2002 HBO version of the play about Matthew Shepard, and allowed students to film their own scenes for a class project. A few weeks into production, the principal ordered the project’s termination. In response to her students’ protest of the decision, Taylor held a ceremonial "funeral" for the class film, during which students wrote notes about their feelings and released them inside helium balloons. Ed Turlington, superintendent of the Grandfield Independent School District, cancelled her class the next day.

Taylor complained to a school board member and Turlington put her on paid leave with recommendation for firing. On Friday, the school board accepted her resignation.

The exact reason for Taylor’s dismissal is unclear from reports.

Gay rights advocates are citing the case as a clear instance of homophobia. Grandfield senior Matt Ebner, one of Taylor’s former students, agrees. "They don't want something like this addressed in our community," he says. Taylor, however, maintains she was let go for her complaint to the board member.

John Moyer, the district’s attorney, also says the dismissal was not a result of the play’s subject. "If someone is saying that adverse employment action is being taken against Ms. Taylor because of homosexuality, they're wrong."

Posted by Liana Heitin at 3:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

California school districts will send out as many as 26,000 pink slips today, reports the San Francisco Chronicle, prompting Pink-Slip Friday rallies and teacher protests across the state.

Each year, districts disperse slips by the March 15 deadline to inform staff members that they may be laid off, only to recall many of the notices once the state budget has been finalized. In 2003, 17,000 of the 20,000 pink slips were rescinded. With at least $8.4 billion in education budget cuts looming, anxieties are heightened this year. "We've never been cut by this much before," said David Sanchez, president of the California Teachers Association, which is asking people to start rallying across the state at the close of school today.

Steve Betando, an assistant superintendent in Fremont, said, "I think we'll be able to hire some back, but not as many as in years past. Nowhere close." His district is also encouraging all employees to wear pink and participate in the protests.

Some teachers are finding creative ways to support the cause, including high school drama teacher Matt Ballin, who plans to sing a song and wear a pink feather hat today. "I haven't gotten a pink slip," said Ballin, "but I know plenty of people who have, including my sister-in-law. The impact is incalculable."

Posted by Liana Heitin at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Three teachers were among at least 15 people killed by a 17-year-old gunman who blazed through two schools in Germany today, according to CNN reports. According to an eyewitness, one teacher who was shot had acted with particular heroism, sacrificing herself by stepping in front of a student to protect her. Teachers also apparently took on a role in the awful job of giving the devastating news to arriving parents whose children had been injured or killed.

Police have not yet identified a motive for the shootings. "No one seems to have an explanation for why this happened," according to a CNN reporter on the scene. "Police officers have heard that this young man didn't cause much of a buzz, wasn't someone who was negative or known for violence. They have no idea why he did all this."

Update, March 13: The London Telegraph reports that all of the teachers killed in essence sacrificed themselves in the line of duty: "The Police said the death toll would have been even worse had it not been for the extraordinary sacrifice of the three teachers, who stood in Kretschmer’s way to protect their students." Truly heroic.

Posted by Anthony Rebora, teachermagazine.org at 5:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nearly $40 billion in federal stimulus money is expected to be available to schools in the next month or so. U.S. education officials are hoping the aid will help prevent staff layoffs and further program cuts, according to The Washington Post. “This is really a chance to avert an educational catastrophe and to save a generation of kids," said U.S. Secretary Arne Duncan. Some states are already beginning to amend their education budgets for next year, in order to restore positions and erase cuts.

The money could certainly be of use in the Pontiac, Mich., school district, which recently announced a plan to lay off all of its nearly 500 teachers, effective June 30. The proposal follows a district decision to shutter almost half its schools as a result of declining enrollments and a $10 million deficit, according to The Detroit News. The laid-off teachers would be eligible to be recalled to work in the downsized district next year, based on seniority and qualifications. “We were told they needed to start with a clean slate because it’s easier to place people,” said Doris Colemen, a middle school educator who had attended a recent district information session.

Posted by Anthony Rebora, teachermagazine.org at 3:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Many schools in major urban districts like New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Dallas are employing incentive programs that reward students—often with money—for good performance. These programs have long-garnered skepticism from some psychologists who say they are ineffectual in the long run. But, some business professionals and economists support the programs, citing a need to try anything and everything to improve education. A renewed focus on education reform has prompted increased research on whether or not the programs work, according to the New York Times.

Economists studied several cash programs to compare the academic performance of students who are paid versus those who are not. The results are mixed. Kirabo Jackson, an assistant professor of economics at Cornell who studied Dallas’ A.P. test reward program, found that students who earned rewards scored higher on the SAT and enrolled in college at a higher rate than students who were not rewarded. A separate study of New York’s program A.P. reward program showed that “test scores were flat but that more students were taking the tests.”

Psychologists have explored incentivizing learning since the 1970s. One of the first studies, published in 1971 by University of Rochester psychologist Edward L. Deci, found that, “once the incentives stopped coming, students showed less interest in the task at hand than those who received no reward.”

Newer psychological studies are examining how to differentiate types of incentives and how children perceive them. Some studies report that students resist the awards and incentives because they, “can sense that someone is trying to control their behavior.”

“One of the central questions is to consider how children think about this,” said Mark R. Lepper, a Stanford psychologist. “Are they saying, ‘Oh, I see, they are just bribing me’?”

Posted by Josh Cohen at 2:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A Texas teacher has been suspended after a student secretly used a cellphone to record his classroom temper tantrum, reports the El Paso Times. The paper obtained the recording, in which, over the course of several minutes, the educator loses control, “screaming, cussing, and scolding students.”

He tells his students that they are “constantly whining, constantly (expletive) about your (expletive) (expletive) situation. If you don’t like it, get the (expletive) out.” According to the paper, his anger intensifies as he admonishes his class for not working hard enough: “(Expletive) kids grow up, have some common sense. How many times do we have to do this, huh?... [T]his can be so fun, yet you can’t understand that we have to work first. You haven’t done jack all week. I can show you. Your work, man, is pathetic.”

A student left the classroom to report the incident to campus security, who reported the incident to the administration.

One parent said that his daughter told him two months ago that the teacher had used profanity. That incident was reported in an e-mail to the administration, but there was no follow-up. This same parent said that his daughter got “real nervous [this time]. They had to take her to the nurse’s office because she started hyperventilating a little bit, and I know that when something like that happens, there is cause for alarm.”

Update, March 4:
The El Paso Times published the audio of the teacher here.

Update, March 5
According to the El Paso Times, the teacher resigned on March 4, but will be paid through the end of the month. The investigation continues, but the teacher can apply for another job in the district.

Posted by Elizabeth Rich at 2:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)