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June 27, 2008

Summer vacation?

June is here, and in the immortal words of Alice Cooper, "school's out for summer." But what does that mean for teachers, administrators and school board members? If you're thinking long walks on the beach, road trips to Disney World, and lazy afternoons by the pool, think again! According to this article that came to BoardBuzz through the Gazette (Maryland), teachers' work doesn't always end when the school year does.

According to the most recent survey from the National Education Association on how teachers spend personal time, about 35 percent of teachers surveyed nationwide in 2003 said they were participating in courses and activities sponsored by their school systems in the summertime.

‘‘Many of them take professional development courses because that’s easier to do in the summer,” said Daniel Kaufman, a spokesman for the Maryland State Teachers Association, a group associated with the National Education Association. ‘‘It needs to be said that most teachers during the school year work much more than just the usual daily schedule. ... They’re usually in the 60-hour per week range.”

And it's not just teachers either. According to our friends over at the Leading Source blog, school board members don't hang it up when summer comes either. Naomi Dillon, of ASBJ, reports that,

One school board I covered as a beat reporter always went on board retreats in July. And during a multi-year capital improvement project, district officials used the summer as a time to do renovations and additions to existing buildings.

Freed from the day-to-day distractions that occur during the school year, district officials can focus on the big picture, on things that may not be critical but matter nonetheless.

So . . . that leads BoardBuzz to ask the eternal question, how are you going to spend your summer vacation?

Posted at 10:49 AM | Link to this story | Comments (0)

Reality vs. Rhetoric: Are high achieving students being left behind?

If you had read last week's Gadfly, the Fordham's Institutes weekly bulletin, you would have been left with the impression that high achieving students have been neglected since the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Although that is clearly what our friends at Fordham wanted you to think, you would be wrong.

Fordham based their rhetoric on a report they released last week called High Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB. The report aimed to determine whether high achieving students were making as many academic gains as low achieving students based on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores. The report also included a survey of 900 teachers around the country to gain insight into their views on how schools focus on high achieving students.

Although BoardBuzz found the report quite informative and well prepared, the rhetoric from Fordham just did not match the findings. Contrary to the thinking that high achieving students have been left behind, the report actually found that high achieving students (those scoring in the top 10 percent on NAEP) have been making similar gains on NAEP over the past 20 years. BoardBuzz hardly thinks that's being left behind. On the other hand, low achieving students (those scoring in the bottom 10 percent) have been making 4 times as many gains on NAEP since NCLB was enacted compare to before.

Fordham sees the steady increases of high achievers as proof that NCLB is leaving our high achievers behind, rather than recognizing that schools are doing an amazing job of improving the achievement of their most challenging students while also increasing the achievement of their best and brightest. Isn't this what we want schools to do? If you had listened to Fordham you would think the achievement of high achieving students remained flat or even declined but this simply is not the case. Would we all like to see greater gains from all our students? Of course. There is always room for improvement, but that does not mean that high performers have been neglected.

What was most striking to BoardBuzz, which no one else seems to be talking about, are the huge gains low achieving students have made in recent years. Reason being, BoardBuzz has heard a lot that schools have been forced to focus on only those students right below or above proficiency, so called bubble kids, at the expense of their low and high performing students to raise their proficiency rates since high achievers would reach proficiency anyway and low achievers weren't likely to. Fortunately the report shows that this appears to be untrue. Although NCLB implicitly encourages schools to do so, they are not just focusing on these bubble kids at the expense of other students. As a matter of fact, both high and low achieving students are making solid academic gains and teachers report focusing on their low achieving students.

Does BoardBuzz agree with the report that future accountability systems should provide incentives to schools to focus on high achieving students? We certainly do. Schools deserve a pat on the back for their efforts and improvements they are making with their low achieving students. It is certainly time for accountability systems, both state and national, to use more carrots than sticks and to recognize the gains students below and above proficiency are making. This is just one of many reasons Congress needs to act now to change NCLB.

For a summary of High Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB go to the Center for Public Education. While there also check out Measuring Student Growth: A guide for informed decision making to learn more about how to measure student growth.

Posted at 10:02 AM | Advocacy & Legislation | Link to this story | Comments (2)

Swimming, archery, and cheese fries

When the school year ends, summer camp season begins. As students head into a summer of fun and games, parents have other thoughts on their minds. Can camps be trusted to provide a nutritious meal? Will students staying at home eat healthy? BoardBuzz is also curious.

It looks like The New York Times was thinking about it too. As the Times reported, summertime nutrition has become a big challenge for parents, who rely on the structured school days' eating and exercise schedules to keep kids healthy.

With schools usually limiting eating to lunchtime and snack time, children at home have more access to food and no organized physical activity. Children at camps have the benefit of exercise, but camp food isn't what many parents hope for:

“Camp food is terrible,” said Susan B. Roberts, director of the energy metabolism laboratory at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. “The problem is that they are doing what is easiest — the lowest common denominator for what kids like, and on top of that usually it has to be not something that goes bad and is no work to prepare.”

Even out of the classroom, children's health and wellness is important to BoardBuzz. Some of these camp favorites, like cheese fries, can pack more than 800 calories in just one serving! As summer starts up, BoardBuzz is reminding parents and families to encourage physcial activity and help kids make healthy choices when snacking. For more information about keeping students healthy, check out NSBA's School Health Web site.

Posted at 1:50 AM | Health & Wellness | Link to this story | Comments (0)

June 26, 2008

Did you see what I think I saw?

It's been a while since BoardBuzz has had a really good news of the weird story . . . but today we've got a doozy! According to this article that came to us via AP, it seems that schools in Barnegat, N.J. were locked down yesterday because of a ninja on the loose. And, yes, BoardBuzz knows that school safety is no laughing matter.

But this story is definitely worth a chuckle.

Turns out the ninja was actually a camp counselor dressed in black karate garb and carrying a plastic sword.

Police tell the Asbury Park Press the man was late to a costume-themed day at a nearby middle school.

For more on the story, including a picture of the ninja in question, click here. According to the ninja, (also known as Christopher Begley),

"They told us to create a persona that reflected our personality for orientation," said Begley, who has a black belt.

"It was a nice day out, so I decided to walk. I realized I was late so I started to run. I didn't even think anybody saw me," he said.

As for the sword, it was a footlong piece of gray plastic in a black holster that he bought from a dollar store.

So in the end, no harm came to anyone, and BoardBuzz got our giggle for the day.

Posted at 2:13 PM | Miscellany | Link to this story | Comments (0)

Who hates NCLB and what voters think of education

Chances are, if you are white and an independent, you're more likely to hate NCLB. That’s a finding from a new national poll. As Campaign K-12 pointed out, it’s no wonder Democratic presidential candidates were attacking the law. It’s probably no surprise that independents tend to think NCLB is hurting public schools because the law has become so politically controversial. Forty percent of independents surveyed said NCLB is hurting public schools, compared with 32 percent of Democrats and 28 percent of Republicans, according to the poll conducted by Lake Research Partners and sponsored by the Public Education Network (see the PowerPoint here).

Among racial groups, 34 percent of whites said NCLB is hurting public schools, compared with 21 percent of blacks and 23 percent of Latinos. Overall, about one third (31 percent) of Americans said the law has hurt and another one third said it has helped. Thirty-eight percent said it has made no difference or that they don’t know.

The poll also asked people to rank the most important issues in their decision in the next president. Even with soaring gas prices and the economic downturn hurting voters’ pocketbooks, they still care about education, ranking it third, above health care, taxes, homeland security and budget deficit. Gas price and economy ranked first and second, respectively.

Schools plus

That's the idea behind the new Broader Bolder Approach to Education, a statement which calls to improve schools through reducing the impact that economic and social disadvantages can produce.

Our friends at the Learning First Alliance's, Public School Insights have done it again! They've had a chance to interview the co-chairs of this campaign to hear more about their approach in enhancing student achievement through improving early childhood education, health services, social development, and the time students spend outside of the classroom.

BoardBuzz was glad to hear what the three task-force leaders, Pedro Noguera, Tom Payzant, and Helen Ladd had to say. Check out highlights of their interviews at Public School Insights here, here, and here.

Posted at 9:54 AM | Announcements | Link to this story | Comments (0)

June 24, 2008

NCLB's effect on student achievement remains unknown

State test scores in reading and math are up and achievement gaps have narrowed since 2002, but these findings cannot be directly attributed to NCLB, according to a new report by the Center on Education Policy. Jack Jennings, president and CEO of CEP, cited two reasons why a causal relationship between the law and test results cannot be drawn: First researchers cannot isolate the effect of NCLB because of many state and local district efforts that were in play. Second, there was no control group which was not affected by NCLB.

The report also looked at NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores over the same years and found that NAEP scores generally moved in the same direction as state test scores, with one exception in grade 8 reading, where fewer states showed gains on NAEP than on state tests. The authors of the report were not able to explain the reason for the exception, reiterating that NAEP standards do not match state standards and that the curriculums between the two are different. NSBA does not believe comparison of state test data and NAEP data yield many meaningful conclusions. For more, click here.

Posted at 5:28 PM | No Child Left Behind | Link to this story | Comments (0)

Victory on Capitol Hill

We'll say upfront that this posting is past due, but school boards won a crucial victory in Congress last week when the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the supplemental appropriations bill that included a moratorium on Medicaid reimbursement important to school districts. The inclusion of the moratorium, needed because of an Adminstration rule to end the reimbursements, was one of a limited number of domestic priorities that survived in the final bill, which now heads to the Senate.

Also last week, a House panel approved increases, though not nearly to the level needed, for Title I and special education. The full House Appropriations Committee and a Senate subcommittee will continue work on education funding this week. Get all the details on that issue and others in the NSBA Advocacy highlights.

And if you can't wait to read those weekly Hill updates here on BoardBuzz, visit the Advocacy website every Monday morning.

Posted at 1:52 PM | Advocacy & Legislation | Link to this story | Comments (0)

Districts feel pain at the pump

Gas prices continue to climb, and, as always, we wonder how these rising prices will affect school districts. ABC Newsreports that as gas exceeds $4 a gallon, it looks like many schools are expecting big changes in their communities this coming fall.

Fueling school buses is a main concern for districts, where a bus can average 6.1 miles per gallon. The school board in Montgomery County, Maryland, shares in the struggle:

"When we budgeted for the 2009 school year the price of fuel was $2.75," Chris Cram, the public information officer for the Montgomery Country School Board, told ABCNEWS.com. "Now it's much, much higher."

"We'll begin the school year with a fuel budget deficit of $5.362 million," said Cram, who added that the suburban D.C. county has the 13th largest bus fleet in the nation, transporting 96,000 students daily. "It's a huge problem."

As fuel prices remain high, districts are faced with tough decisions as they decide which students will receive a free ride to school and which students will need to walk or find an alternate form of transportation. Daily bus routes are not the only thing affected either; other states' athletic teams have cut back on game schedules and virtual fieldtrips are taking the place of classroom outings.

The Washington Post reported here, the Montgomery County school board's recent approval to change its transportation policy, where officials now have the emergency powers to extend walking distances if high diesel prices leave the districts in financial distress. BoardBuzz is waiting to see how other school boards across the country will respond. Does your school district have tips or suggestions? Let BoardBuzz know.

Posted at 11:27 AM | Miscellany | Link to this story | Comments (0)

Two more Supreme Court decisions that matter to schools

Last week, BoardBuzz got word of another couple of Supreme Court rulings in which NSBA had submitted friend-of-the-court briefs. Both of these decisions were age discrimination cases.

In Meacham v. Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, the court said that in a case in which employees claim their employer's decision had an unfair impact on older workers, the employer has the burden of proof when it argues that its decision actually was based on permissible "reasonable factors other than age." For its part, NSBA, with pro bono assistance from Hogan & Hartson school lawyers, had warned the justices about further encumbering public school employment decisions with legal complications at a critical time of great change in public education—change that is forcing school boards to make tough decisions that sometimes may happen to have more impact on older employees, but not for any nefarious reason. The court acknowledged employer concerns were legit, but basically said they should be directed to Congress: "We have to read it the way Congress wrote it." More details on the ruling, background on the case, and NSBA's brief are here.

The same day, in Kentucky Retirement System v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the court rejected the idea that a retirement system automatically "discriminates because of age" just because it bases pension eligibility in part on age and treats employees differently based in part on their pension status. NSBA's take on this one, with a pro bono hand from school lawyers from Minnesota's Johnson & Condon, was that if the court were to come out the other way, it would threaten thousands of school district retirement plans, which were not based on the kind of arbitrary stereotypes the federal age discrimination law is intended to address. The court found that Kentucky's system is not based on such stereotypes, has a non-age-related reason for the disparity challenged here, and in other cases actually treats older employees better than younger ones. The details and background on this one are here.

Interesting presidential election year sidenote: For those on both sides of the partisan world who like to boil down the important issue of Supreme Court appointments into convenient soundbites to rile up their respective bases, these cases aren't especially helpful. As Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times points out, employers have come up short quite a bit this term, despite the "right-wing" court. And look at how the votes came out in the KRS case: on one side, Breyer, Roberts, Stevens, Souter, and Thomas—on the other, Kennedy, Scalia, Ginsburg, and Alito. Try making that one about "liberal" vs. "conservative" judges!

Posted at 11:05 AM | School Law | Link to this story | Comments (0)

Skateboarding is newest assignment

A recent USA Today article informed us that some schools are getting creative with their physical education curriculum. BoardBuzz may not know all the skateboarding tricks, but we love to hear about how students are getting active.

Skateboarding has become physical education's newest undertaking. Thanks to Skate Pass, a company that designed a skateboarding program for schools, students from across the country are grabbing helmets and jumping on skateboards.

This untraditional exercise activity is meant to motivate students to enjoy gym class and acknowledges that athletics do not come easily to all. Oak Elementary School in Oregon is one school to adopt the program and is happy to offer something to students who may not play team sports.

"When people first hear 'elementary PE,' the first thing that comes to mind is dodgeball. Then all the other stuff they didn't like," says Jake Gerig, Oak Elementary's PE teacher.
We're trying to focus on lifetime activities that are non-competitive and individualized so students can learn at their own pace," Gerig says.

The Skate Pass curriculum requires students to use safety equipment including helmets, wrist guards, and knee and elbow pads. Teachers are provided with instructional DVDs to lead them through the curriculum, where students first learn safety and then skateboarding etiquette.

BoardBuzz is pleased that educators are looking for ways for all students to develop healthy excercises habits. For more information, check out those links.

Posted at 10:07 AM | Health & Wellness | Link to this story | Comments (0)

June 23, 2008

Don't believe everything you read on the Internet...

...unless you are reading BoardBuzz. Then you're good to go.

Expect to start hearing more stories like this right here in the good ole US of A. Our friends across the pond are pointing to the Internet, and specifically Wikipedia, as contributing to falling test scores, suggesting that more and more students are relying too heavily on the Internet for school research without realizing the information may be a little less than, well, accurate.

The Scottish Parent Teacher Council (SPTC) said pupils are turning to websites and internet resources that contain inaccurate or deliberately misleading information before passing it off as their own work.
The group singled out online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which allows entries to be logged or updated by anyone and is not verified by researchers, as the main source of information.

Has your district witnessed similar problems? And what steps are you taking to address them or prevent them?

Posted at 3:37 PM | Miscellany | Students | Link to this story | Comments (1)