California has fallen short in its bid to win a controversial federal Race to the Top school-reform grant.
The winners, just confirmed by federal officials, are Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia.
Had they prevailed, participating California school systems stood to receive as much as $700 million. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second-largest school system, was in line for about $120 million; Long Beach Unified would have received at least $18 million.
The Obama administration created the competitive grant program to spur its vision of reform nationwide. A total of $3.4 billion was available.
In California, school districts had pledged to pursue reforms that included linking teacher evaluations to the standardized test scores of their students. The grant application committed them to using this test-score analysis for at least 30% of a teacher's evaluation.
A new evaluation system, however, would need to be negotiated with local teacher unions, and that was by no means automatic. In fact, California representatives were queried about that issue during a 90-minute presentation this month before federal evaluators in Washington, D.C.
As a result, California lost some points with evaluators, but officials stressed that no single virtue or shortcoming would by itself determine the fate of an application.
Read the rest of this post on LA Times.com
Photo: LAUSD Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, right, leads U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan on a tour of Samuel Gompers Middle School in 2009. Duncan urged Gov. Schwarzenegger to apply again for the federal grant. Credit: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times
Increasing Academic Success through Engagement
The 2009 Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE), based on a survey of more than 400,000 students from 663 institutions, illuminates the potential of online connections to increase student engagement. Community college students are a diverse population and this diversity complicates a college's ability to support their academic needs through physical resources alone. According to the report 60% of community college students are enrolled part-time, 21% of full-time students work more than 30 hours a week, 29% take evening classes and 28% have taken at least one online class. Additionally, community college students arrive on campus with a dramatic range of academic preparation, academic goals -- ranging from transferring to a 4-year university, returning from the workforce to update skills, personal enrichment, and many are first-generation college students, stepping foot for the first time on a college campus.
The CCSSE survey notes a correlation between engagement and degree attainment -- the less engaged a student is, the greater the risk of dropping out -- and the least engaged students are those who attend part-time and students age 24 and younger, representing a significant population of community college students and the early adopters of social networking. Outside of college, 95% of students age 18-24 use social networking sites for personal use, signaling a tremendous opportunity for institutions to foster relevant relationships with students that keep them connected to coursework, college services, and events when they are away from campus (Smith, Salaway, Borreson Caruso. ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and IT, 2009). In fact, student engagement levels increase when social networking is used for "academically purposeful activities." (CCCSE survey)
Submitted to GETIDEAS.ORG by Michelle Pacansky-Brock
Educational Consultant, Teaching Without Walls on Tue, 2010-08-10 09:31
San Jose, CA
http://mpbreflections.blogspot.com
President Barack Obama visited the University of Texas at Austin Monday to deliver a common-sense message: Higher education is important, and this country needs more of it. "America has to have the highest share of graduates compared to every other nation," Obama said. "But Texas, I want you to know we have been slipping."
Obama called education "the economic issue of our time." He said the unemployment rate is nearly twice as high for people who've never gone to college compared with those who have.
For more on this story visit: Dallas News.com hhacker@dallasnews.com
FOR YEARS, THE SECRETS TO GREAT TEACHING HAVE SEEMED MORE LIKE ALCHEMY THAN SCIENCE, A MIX OF MOTIVATIONAL MUMBO JUMBO AND MISTY-EYED TALES OF INSPIRATION AND DEDICATION. BUT FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, ONE ORGANIZATION HAS BEEN TRACKING HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF KIDS, AND LOOKING AT WHY SOME TEACHERS CAN MOVE THEM THREE GRADE LEVELS AHEAD IN A YEAR AND OTHERS CAN’T. NOW, AS THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION OFFERS STATES MORE THAN $4 BILLION TO IDENTIFY AND CULTIVATE EFFECTIVE TEACHERS, TEACH FOR AMERICA IS READY TO RELEASE ITS DATA.
By Amanda Ripley
Image: Veronika Lukasova
ON AUGUST 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math.
One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor’s math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked. The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a ZIP code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so. At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools—not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it’s worth noting, not a very hard one).
After a year in Mr. Taylor’s class, the first little boy’s scores went up—way up. He had started below grade level and finished above. On average, his classmates’ scores rose about 13 points—which is almost 10 points more than fifth-graders with similar incoming test scores achieved in other low-income D.C. schools that year. On that first day of school, only 40 percent of Mr. Taylor’s students were doing math at grade level. By the end of the year, 90 percent were at or above grade level. As for the other boy? Well, he ended the year the same way he’d started it—below grade level. In fact, only a quarter of the fifth-graders at Plummer finished the year at grade level in math—despite having started off at about the same level as Mr. Taylor’s class down the road.
This tale of two boys, and of the millions of kids just like them, embodies the most stunning finding to come out of education research in the past decade: more than any other variable in education—more than schools or curriculum—teachers matter. Put concretely, if Mr. Taylor’s student continued to learn at the same level for a few more years, his test scores would be no different from those of his more affluent peers in Northwest D.C. And if these two boys were to keep their respective teachers for three years, their lives would likely diverge forever. By high school, the compounded effects of the strong teacher—or the weak one—would become too great.
You can find the entire article on-line at: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-makes-a-great-teacher/7841/
