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Books are not Nadia Konyk’s thing. Her mother, hoping to entice her, brings them home from the library in Berea, Ohio, but Nadia rarely shows an interest.

Instead, like so many other teenagers, Nadia, 15, is addicted to the Internet. She regularly spends at least six hours a day in front of the computer here in this suburb southwest of Cleveland. Her mother, Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A’s and B’s at school, read books for a change. But at this point, Konyk said, “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”

Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policymakers and reading experts around the world, and within groups such as the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association. For more, read this article in The New York Times online.

 A federal judge has dismissed a closely watched challenge to President Bush’s signature education law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), ruling that the State of Connecticut failed to prove that federal officials had forced it to spend its own money to comply with the law’s requirements. NCLB contains language known as the unfunded mandates provision that says no state or school district can be forced to spend its money on expenses the federal government has not covered.

In 2005, Connecticut accused Education Secretary Margaret Spellings of violating that prohibition in directives governing the testing of students with limited English proficiency or disabilities. In a ruling issued late Monday, April 28, 2008, Judge Mark R. Kravitz of Federal District Court in New Haven wrote that although the state had provided estimates of what it would cost to comply with those testing guidelines, “nowhere did it state that the federal funding was insufficient to cover those costs.” Read the article in The New York Times online.

 The Bush administration will announce new standards for its No Child Left Behind program today (April 22, 2008), a White House spokesman told CNN, which reported it on its Political Ticker. The changes, to be announced by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings in Detroit, will “strengthen and improve” the law, deputy White House press secretary Scott Stanzel said.

Stanzel said the updates are a “follow on” to President Bush’s comments in January, when he said that if Congress did not act this spring to update the law, the president would ask Spellings to strengthen it through administrative actions. “She’s done a lot of traveling around, talking to educators and policymakers about how to improve No Child Left Behind,” explained Stanzel. “She’s … found consensus on several issues.“ Watch for further postings on this topic.

 A bill approved by the state House on April 1, 2008, would have Arizona opt out of the federal No Child Left Behind program, but only if the state itself makes up federal school funding that could be lost. Sent to the Senate on a 46-11 House vote, the bill (HB2392) would require the state to opt out of the school accountability law by mid-2010 if the Legislature increases state education funding to offset the potential loss of federal money. State officials estimate that amount at $600 million.

Rep. Bob Robson, R-Chandler, said during Tuesday’s vote that he agreed with concerns about NCLB but couldn't vote for the bill because it could cause big “financial rigors” for future legislators. The opt-out would begin by July 1, 2010, the start of the state’s 2010-2011 fiscal year. Read more in this Associated Press article online.

 Since its inception, the federal No Child Left Behind education initiative has included the threat of consequences for schools not living up to academic standards. Now, some local districts and individual schools in Indiana are in the midst of dealing with those consequences as they fail to meet the government’s established progress goals year after year. While school officials are not ready to give details, local officials have hinted that changes at some schools are imminent.

The Indiana Department of Education made public Tuesday which districts and schools are making the necessary progress and which schools are not. Changes on the horizon include redesigning the way federal funds are handled and delivered to struggling schools in Fort Wayne Community Schools and staffing reorganization and changes in East Allen County Schools. But those alterations are nothing compared to what the state could do to the districts. After a school district fails to achieve the federal progress goals for four years, the Indiana Department of Education has the right to take over the district. That happens by reducing funding, replacing staff or abolishing the system altogether. Read more in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette online.

 The Arizona House of Representatives is on the verge of opting out of the controversial No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush’s premier educational accomplishment. On a voice vote Wednesday, March 26, 2008, the House approved a bill sponsored by state Representative David Schapira, D-Tempe, that would make Arizona the first state in the nation to leave behind the act and its education mandates. It would take effect on July 1, 2010.

But it would leave the state with a $600 million hole in its schools budget, as it would lose federal education dollars by opting out of the program. That’s a cost that some lawmakers, as well as state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, say isn’t worth it, no matter how big the principle at stake. Read more in The Arizona Republic and The East Valley Tribune.

It looms in the distance, a goal meant to challenge the nation’s schools to reach ever higher. It is 2014, the year the nation’s schoolchildren must all reach proficiency in reading, writing and mathematics under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. But many school officials in Connecticut and around the region are wondering how many more strides they can make in six years toward what some see as an unattainable goal.

Their options to make improvements, they predict, will narrow as 2014 draws closer, particularly since the target of 100% proficiency must also be reached by students who have proven particularly challenging—students from impoverished homes, students with learning disabilities and new immigrants.

Last week, the Bush administration acknowledged that too many schools were failing under the law’s provisions and that some changes would need to be made in some states to help distinguish those schools with major problems from those schools with just a few. Read more in The New York Times online.

 The General Assembly of Virginia is flirting with abandoning a landmark federal law that governs schools in the United States. The decision could make the state the first to set a deadline—summer 2009—for planning a pullout from the No Child Left Behind Act, which ties billions of dollars to federally mandated testing standards in public schools.

State politicians have balked at some of those standards in the past few years. Governor Timothy M. Kaine has signed bills asking the U.S. Department of Education to waive parts of the federal law. Most of those exemptions were granted, but the notable ones that have not been approved frustrate educators and annoy legislators.

This year, some politicians want to up the ante. Read about the proposal in The Virginian Pilot.

 The No Child Left Behind law has led many elementary schools to spend more time on reading and math and less on social studies, science, art and recess, a report released last week finds. The Center on Education Policy’s survey of 349 school systems across the country bolsters anecdotal evidence that the 2002 federal law’s goal of having every child proficient in reading and math by 2014 has forced schools to focus on those subjects, sometimes squeezing out other lessons.

Curriculum narrowing, as the phenomenon is known, has become a key issue in the debate over revamping the law. Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA), chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, has said he plans to introduce a bill this spring to reauthorize the law with changes. Read the article in The Washington Post online.

 When President Bush steps to the podium today in Washington, DC, for his last State of the Union address, he is expected to call on Congress to reauthorize his landmark education law, but Hawai’i’s lawmakers will be a tough sell. During the six years No Child Left Behind has been in effect, the state’s schools have languished in the bottom quarter nationally, despite slight gains. The law ended Oct. 1, but its programs have continued under an automatic one-year extension.

“At its core, the act promised higher standards for educators and schools, achievement testing to measure success and funding to support both the increased standards and the testing,” said Senator Daniel K. Inouye, D-Hawai’i. But, Inouye said, the law’s standards have been applied “inflexibly” to punish schools and educators, testing has been unfair and expensive, and federal funding has been less than required. Read more in The Honolulu Advertiser online.

 The National Education Association (NEA) suggested this week that school districts need not use their own money to pay for obligations under the No Child Left Behind Act, in the wake of a federal appeals court ruling that revived the union’s lawsuit challenging the law as an unfunded federal mandate. The Jan. 7 ruling means that “as a condition of participation in the No Child Left Behind Act, a school district or state cannot be compelled to use its own resources to carry out that mandate,” Robert H. Chanin, the general counsel of the NEA and the architect of the lawsuit, argued in an interview.

But other supporters of the lawsuit were more cautious, and the defendant in the case—U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings—suggested that the decision was far from the last word on the subject. “No Child Left Behind is strong and on the books, and will be abided by by the states and the federal government,” Spellings said after a speech at the National Press Club in Washington. Read more about the brewing controversy in Education Week online.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has dealt a blow to educators, proposing $4.8 billion in cuts to California’s public schools and possibly restarting a fight that he hoped had ended with the state’s largest teachers union. Education advocates vowed to fight the cuts, which Schwarzenegger would accomplish by suspending the holy grail of California’s education system: Proposition 98, the landmark school funding guarantee voters approved in 1988.

“This is going to be one of the most painful, vocal, public, fierce debates about education funding that we have ever seen,” said Brian Lewis, executive director of the California Association of School Business Officials. “We are going to come out of the woodwork opposing any suspension of 98 and any further undermining of this minimal guarantee to kids.”

Having to wield a budget ax over schools is a cruel irony for a governor who just months ago promised he would dedicate 2008 to wide-ranging education reforms in his “Year of Education.” Read more at SFGate.com.

 In a ruling that could have significant ramifications for the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 today to revive a lawsuit that challenges the law's funding.

In November 2005, a district judge had dismissed the lawsuit, which was brought by the Pontiac, Michigan, school district, and districts in two other states, along with the National Education Association. The suit argued that schools should not have to comply with "unfunded mandates" within the law. The majority opinion in today's reversal stated that "NCLB fails to provide clear notice as to who bears the additional costs of compliance" and remanded the case for further proceedings.

For further information, read the full text of the ruling.

California has done an impressive job filling schools with at least nominally qualified teachers. The next challenge—a tougher one—is to retain them by vastly changing the way they are trained, evaluated and rewarded.

In 2000, one in seven teachers (42,400 out of 310,000) in California lacked a teaching credential; by this year, the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning found, that had dropped to one in 20—about 16,000. And the remaining 5% consists mainly of first– and second–year teachers who are working on credentials at night.

Despite that good news, gaps and inequities remain, and the turnover of young teachers remains high. One in five teachers quits the profession nationwide within four years; in low–income schools, it’s two out of five. Read more of what California is doing in terms of professional development in this editorial in The San Jose Mercury News.

The Bloomberg administration in New York City is beginning a drive to remove unsatisfactory teachers, hiring new teams of lawyers and consultants who will help principals build cases against tenured teachers who they believe are not up to the job. It is also urging principals to get rid of sub-par novices before they earn tenure. At the center of the effort is a new Teacher Performance Unit of five lawyers headed by a former prosecutor. A separate team of five consultants, including former principals, will work with principals to improve struggling teachers’ performance. In cases where the teachers fail to get better, the consultants will help amass the documentation necessary to oust them. Read about the undertaking in The New York Times.

Escalating his budget battle with a Democratic Congress, President Bush on Nov. 13 vetoed a spending measure for labor, health, and education programs that would have provided $63.6 billion for the U.S. Department of Education, a 5% increase over 2007 spending and 8% more than Bush had sought. The president’s veto sets up what could be a nasty showdown over 2008 education spending, with the 2008 fiscal year already two weeks old. Bush vetoed the $150.7 billion labor, health, and education spending measure on the same day he signed a 9% increase in the Pentagon’s non-war budget, to $471 billion. The defense measure only funds core department operations. It doesn’t include Bush’s $196 billion request for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, except for a nearly $12 billion infusion for new troop vehicles that are resistant to roadside bombs. Read more at eSchool News online.

 Requests from parents to transfer their children to another school within the Manchester, New Hampshire, school district have skyrocketed. Last year, 18 children changed schools. This year, 94 families representing 100 children have asked administrators to approve moving out of a school designated “in need of improvement” under No Child Left Behind. The law requires districts give parents that option, but it only applies to schools accepting federal Title I funds for free and reduced lunch. Manchester only uses Title I money in elementary schools. Just three schools had to offer parents a transfer option last year. Now there are eight Title I schools in need of improvement. Read how the district is trying to cope in The Union Leader.

 Despite the scandals involving Reading First at the national level, a new report from the Center on Education Policy (CEP) finds that the program is being implemented as intended, and it is widely credited by state and local officials for lifting achievement of students who receive Reading First services.

According to the report, Reading First: Locally Appreciated, Nationally Troubled, more than three-fourths of states and more than two-thirds of districts with Reading First grants reported that the program's assessment and instructional programs were important causes of gains in student achievement. The report calls on Congress to increase current levels of funding for Reading First. It also calls for measures to ensure no future mismanagement of Reading First funds.

For further information about the report, visit the CEP website.

 No South Carolina school districts, including those in York and Chester counties, met Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) standards this year, according to results released today, October 30, 2007. AYP is part of the federal No Child Left Behind Act that requires schools to meet milestones for achievement within various subgroups, including race, those with disabilities and those who receive government-subsidized lunches. Whether or not a school meets AYP is dependent in large part on the percentage of students scoring “proficient” or above on state tests. South Carolina’s standard for proficiency is considered among the toughest in the nation. State Superintendent Jim Rex has criticized AYP for rewarding states that set their standard lower. Read the article in The Herald online.

Last spring, town officials in Milton, Massachusetts, an affluent Boston suburb changed the elementary–school assignments for 38 streets—and sparked outrage. Some white students had been reassigned to Tucker, a mostly black school which has historically had Milton’s lowest test scores. Kevin Keating, a white parent of a reassigned student, is talking to lawyers about going to court to reverse the plan. I “just don’t feel good putting [my son] in an inferior school,” he says. His ammunition: the U.S. Supreme Court’s June ruling that consideration of race in school assignments is unconstitutional. Without the backing of the Supreme Court, Keating says his effort wouldn't have “much of a standing.” Read the article in The Wall Street Journal.

 Under pressure from the right and the left, President Bush said Tuesday, October 9, that he is open to reformulating his signature No Child Left Behind education law but stressed that he remains unwilling to surrender on its core elements of testing and accountability. “As we move forward, we will continue to welcome new ideas,” Bush said in the Rose Garden after meeting with civil rights leaders. “And I appreciate the ideas I heard today. Yet there can be no compromise on the basic principle: Every child must learn to read and do math at, or above, grade level. And there can be no compromise on the need to hold schools accountable to making sure we achieve that goal.” Read the article at washingtonpost.com.

The story seemed like a surefire hit for children. A pair of penguins take care of an egg that isn’t theirs and then raise the baby penguin, after it hatches, as their own. How heartwarming. And who doesn’t love penguins? Plenty of parents, it turns out, when both penguin parents are male. That plot twist earned And Tango Makes Three the distinction of being the most challenged book of 2006, according to the Chicago–based American Library Association, which compiles an annual list of titles that have been targeted by efforts to remove them from public and school libraries. The book and others will be the center of attention at readings and other literary events nationwide as part of Banned Books Week, organized by the library association and other groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union. Read more at The Chicago Tribune.

A former senior Labor policy adviser has attacked the vision for school education unveiled by Australian state and territory governments as “dangerous drivel” and a “retrograde step that will dumb down school curriculum across Australia.” Ken Wiltshire, professor of public policy at the University of Queensland, told The Australian that the Future of Schooling report showed Labor education policy was still driven by the teachers’ unions. According to the report released this week, “the judgment of teachers is paramount,” with external state exams and national tests supplementing the teachers’ assessment. “External assessment should be what drives the whole national school curriculum. School-based assessment is subsidiary,” he said. Read about the controversy.

 In a message posted on The Huffington Post website on September 10, noted author and activist Jonathan Kozol reported that he was entering the 67th day of a partial fast as an act of protest against the “vicious damage being done to inner-city children by the federal education law No Child Left Behind.” Kozol, who was the opening general session speaker at IRA’s Annual Convention in Chicago, said he is subsisting on a largely liquid diet.

For decades a leading proponent for children in poverty, Kozol said he has talked with a number of senators in hopes of changing the testing requirements in NCLB as well as other aspects of the law. He sees his fast as “a tiny price to pay compared to what so many of our children and their teachers have to go through every single day.” To read Kozol’s full report, visit The Huffington Post website and do a search for Jonathan Kozol.

  After white parents in the racially mixed city of Tuscaloosa complained about school overcrowding, school authorities set out to draw up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black—and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools. Black parents have been battling the rezoning for weeks, calling it resegregation. And in a new twist for an integration fight, they are wielding an unusual weapon: the federal No Child Left Behind law, which gives students in schools deemed failing the right to move to better ones. Read more of this article from The New York Times.

  The two national teachers’ unions have mounted a vigorous lobbying campaign to rewrite language linking teacher bonuses to student test scores and other incentive-pay provisions contained in a draft bill for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act. Read more of this article from Education Week.

Performance pay for teachers could create disharmony between colleagues and damage teaching quality, a federal parliamentary committee in Australia says. The Senate standing committee report Quality of School Education, published September 13, highlights problems associated with rewarding individual teachers and said such a scheme should not be used to substitute real increases in base salaries. “The committee considers that concerns raised about the effect of performance pay on secondary school departmental work teams, which operate on the basis of strong collegiality, are matters that need to be treated seriously,” the report says. Read the article at The Sydney Morning Herald website.

 A majority of the nation’s private schools do not use federally funded services they are entitled to receive under the No Child Left Behind Act or the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, a study released this week shows. Just 44% of private schools have a student, teacher, or parent participating in programs financed under the No Child Left Behind law, even though 12 major federal programs covered by that law require public school districts to offer services to private schools, according to the report. Similarly, only 43% of private schools had any students receiving services under the IDEA, according to the study, issued September 11 by the U.S. Department of Education. Read about the study at edweek.org.

 The PBS program NewsHour has begun a three-part series on the impact of the federal No child Left Behind law. In the first part, correspondent for education John Merrow examined how some schools are dealing with, and trying to avoid, requirements of the law. Read the transcript from Merrow’s report on the NewsHour website.

New teachers are being blamed for the decline in reading scores in Connecticut. Elaine Zimmerman, executive director of the state Commission on Children, says new teachers either don’t know or haven’t followed proven techniques for teaching reading. Doris J. Kurtz, New Britain superintendent of schools, decries new teachers’ lack of preparedness in literacy skills as “disgraceful.” A quick glance at third–grade reading scores, however, shows that higher scores come from wealthy towns and lower ones from poor cities. Poverty has long been associated with low scores across academic disciplines. Leaders ignore greater societal ills as they point their fingers at those who lack the protection of tenure. Read more of this opinion piece at courant.com.

Mark Jacobsen is the president and co-founder of Adventure Boys, a company committed to saving boyhood by encouraging fathers and sons to participate in heroic adventures and real life experiences together. The Adventure Boys experience begins with a series of original, pulp-style character-driven paperback books that allow fathers and sons to relate on everything from racecars and fighter planes to Wild West gunfights and science experiments. In this interview from the website ednews.org, Jacobsen talks about the Adventure Boys paperbacks and his website, adventureboys.com, which features activities to enhance writing skills.

What started as a subtle flaw in the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test of 3rd grade reading has widened into a full-scale debate with national implications: Is too much riding on one fallible assessment? Read more of this article from Education Week.

We seem to be doing a bit better educating our most disadvantaged students. But many educators think that is not enough. The numbers displayed in the graphic smorgasbord known as "The Condition of Education 2007," from the U.S. Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics, reveal the struggles of a generation to make schools work for all children. Read the article by Jay Matthews on rating gains in our schools at The Washington Post website.

Illegal registration fees, academic fraud, embezzlement, and many other corrupt practices are seriously undermining education systems around the world according to a UNESCO report released June 6. “Corrupt schools, corrupt universities: What can be done” by UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) refers to the experience of more than 60 countries. Director-General of UNESCO Koïchiro Matsuura said, “Such widespread corruption ... prevents poorer parents from sending their children to school, robs schools and pupils of equipment, lowers teaching standards and thus education standards generally.” For more about the report and a summer worshop on transparency and accountability, visit UNESCO's Education portal.

Prettygate Junior School near Colchester in Essex, England, has been chosen to take part in a government pilot project aimed at ensuring no child falls behind or gets stuck in an educational rut. Prettygate and the other 483 schools in the project will be challenged to make sure that all children move forward and progress at acceptable rates, said head teacher Barry Hawes. Under the pilot, the Department for Education and Skills will pay for outside tutors to come into the school. The school also has looked at how its teachers assess pupils and is making more use of teacher-based assessments to evaluate children's progress. Read more about England's attempt to leave no child behind at BBC News.

At a press conference last Friday at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, a group of this year’s State Teachers of the Year discussed ways No Child Left Behind should be changed to better meet the present needs of the students, parents, teachers, and schools who make up our educational system.

Fifty of the 56 State Teachers of the Year had signed onto a statement offering 10 specific changes to make NCLB more effective.

1. Fully fund all education and assessment programs that are federally mandated.
2. Allow all states to utilize a growth model for measuring individual student achievement over time.
3. Use multiple methods of assessment to evaluate student learning accurately and report the results to the public.
4. Include language that appropriately addresses the unique needs of students with exceptionalities (disabilities as well as gifts and talents) while continuing to set high standards for all students.
5. Provide assessment information to teachers in a timely manner and professional development in effectively utilizing such information, so that it can inform instruction that will improve teaching and learning.
6. Evaluate current sanctions for failing Adequate Yearly Progress and replace them with proven methods of enhancing achievement.
7. Develop and fund programs that promote meaningful parent and family engagement.
8. Modify assessments and set realistic goals for English Language Learners.
9. Ensure every student is taught by a highly effective teacher who receives ongoing professional development.
10. Include programs for school leadership development that addresses the need for administrators to become instructional leaders who conduct regular classroom observations and provide productive feedback to teachers.

Watch for an article featuring interviews with State Teachers of the Year in the June/July issue of Reading Today.

 The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA) requires school districts that receive federal funding for low–income students and that have not met state performance goals for three consecutive years to offer supplemental educational services (SES), such as tutoring. In its report issued April 18, the Government Accountability Office included recommendations that the U.S. Department of Education clarify what and how services are offered, how states are to monitor such services and whether they affect student achievement. The report also discussed the challenges of keeping parents informed and the contracting and coordination of service delivery. To read the full report, click here. To read a summary, click here.

The Kansas City School District had a choice. Stick with its old reading program in 15 of its struggling schools and get an almost-guaranteed $1.6 million federal grant. Or make a pitch for $3 million to expand its new reading program. The district gambled—and lost it all. Read more of this article from The Kansas City Star.

Teens’ literacy rates are dropping to the point that some consider it a crisis. The statistics are disconcerting, say representatives from the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group acting on behalf of at-risk, low-performing secondary school students. Read about those disconcerting statistics in this article from the The Repository of Canton, Ohio.

On March 22, 2007 Senators Jeff Sessions and Patty Murray introduced the Striving Readers Act of 2007 (S. 958) in the United States Senate. This bill will vastly expand the capacity of schools to help older students who struggle with reading by establishing adolescent literacy initiatives aimed at increasing high school graduation and college readiness.

The legislation will expand the current Striving Readers Program, which funds only eight grants. The Striving Readers Act of 2007 will make funding available to every state to implement schoolwide adolescent literacy programs, support statewide initiates, and allow data collection and rigorous evaluation to document program success. In addition, this bill will prepare teachers to incorporate literacy strategies in core academic classes and will assist parents by training them to support their children’s literacy development.

The International Reading Association endorses expanded services for adolescent readers and urges members to contact their Senators to sign on to this legislation. See sample letter at http://latadvisory.blogspot.com.

See the press release announcing IRA’s endorsement.

 U.S. Education Department officials and their contractors appear to have improperly backed certain types of instruction in administering a $1 billion–a–year reading program, congressional investigators found. The Government Accountability Office report supports assertions by the inspector general of the Education Department, who has released several reports in recent months about the Reading First program, a key part of the 2002 No Child Left Behind law. Reading First offers intensive reading help for low-income and struggling schools. Read the article at The Houston Chronicle website. To see the entire report, click here.

For most Delaware teachers and teachers across the country, the only option for career advancement is to become an administrator and leave the classroom. Education leaders want to change that, proposing new career paths to keep talented teachers teaching. A coalition of education, business, and community leaders suggests such a move would help the state develop, support, and retain the best teachers. It is one idea in Vision 2015, a broad plan to transform Delaware’s school system into a world leader in the next eight years. Read the article at delawareonline.com.

 The Manassas City (Virginia) School Board, which oversees a small system with a large concentration of students who have limited English, this week reluctantly abandoned an effort to defy a controversial federal rule for testing those students. Previously, the board had considered resisting the rule through a resolution similar to those adopted recently by school boards in Fairfax and Arlington counties. Read how the threat of losing aid for disadvantaged students prompted the decision in this article from The Washington Post.

  The nation’s governors are uniting for the first time to lobby for changes to the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which was enacted five years ago with little input from this group of state leaders. Under the umbrella of the bipartisan National Governors Association, the governors are moving to take a seat at the bargaining table as Congress and President Bush work on renewing the law. Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire said that while some governors have different opinons on NCLB, nearly all of them agree on several key issues. They all agree, for instance, that more funding is needed, and that some of the accountability provisions need to be made more flexible, especially regarding the testing of English-language learners and special education students. Read more of this article from Education Week.

 The U.S. Education Department has threatened to withhold more than $17 million from Fairfax County schools in Virginia if the system continues to defy a federal mandate to give reading tests to thousands of immigrant children. Other Virginia school systems would also be in jeopardy if they refuse to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The dispute started last summer when federal officials rejected the test Virginia uses to measure the progress of many immigrant children. The exam shows how well students learn to read, write and speak English. But it doesn’t, as the No Child law requires, test students on their understanding of grade–level reading material. Read about the standoff at washingtonpost.com.

 The U.S. Department of Education erred from the outset of the Reading First program in focusing on selected reading programs and a single assessment in training sessions for state officials applying for a share of the $1 billion-a-year program, a report by the department’s inspector general concludes. Read more about the inspector general’s report in this article from Education Week.

High school seniors are performing worse overall on some national tests than they did in the previous decade, even though they are receiving significantly higher grades and taking what seem to be more rigorous courses, according to government data released February 22. The mismatch between stronger transcripts and weak test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the Nation’s Report Card, resonated in the Washington area and elsewhere. Some seized upon the findings as evidence of grade inflation and the dumbing–down of courses. The findings also prompted renewed calls for tough national standards and the expansion of the federal No Child Left Behind law. Read articles at washingtonpost.com and USATODAY.com.

 To many at Wilson Elementary School in California, last summer felt like a cosmic joke. The school made another leap on its standardized test scores, posting better results for the sixth straight year. Low-income students, taken as a subgroup, topped themselves again. Some of the wealthier schools across town posted lower gains. But in August, the federal government put Wilson on the sanctions list because its test scores were below par. The reason? One Wilson student too many failed the state English exam. Read more about how a school district in California is dealing with the No Child Left Behind act in this article from the Daily Pilot of Newport Beach and Costa Mesa.

Children are missing out on the best possible education because teaching techniques have never been tested rigorously, one of Britain’s most senior scientists has said. Education needs to learn to use rigorous experiments to determine which approaches work best, according to Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust, England’s largest independent funder of bio–medical research. Questions such as optimum class size, whether boys and girls were better taught separately, and how best to teach literacy and numeracy, had never been investigated by scientific experiment, he said. Read the article at TimesOnline. IRA has a position statement on evidence-based reading instruction available at IRA’s website.

 The latest audit report from the inspector general's office of the U.S. Department of Education found several faults in the handling of the federal Reading First program by the Georgia Department of Education (GDOE). Among the concerns cited were that the GDOE did not have written policies and procedures and did not adequately manage the LEA grant application process. GDOE also added a requirement for LEA's selection of scientifically based reading research (SBRR) programs that was not approved by the U.S. Education Department. Unlike recent audits of programs in Wisconsin and New York, this one did not recommend that Georgia return any federal money.

To access the full report, visit the following page on the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Inspector General website

 Education researchers affiliated with the University of Oregon are facing growing scrutiny in the coming months over allegations that they financially benefited from their involvement in the Bush administration’s billion-dollar-a-year early reading program. The trouble first surfaced last fall, when the federal Education Department’s Inspector General released an audit outlining widespread mismanagement in the federal Reading First program, which gives states grants to boost literary skills in grades K–3. Read more of this article from The Oregonian.

 The U.S. Department of Education threatened yesterday to take “enforcement action” against Virginia if any school districts defy a federal mandate to give reading tests to thousands of immigrant students. The dispute began last year when federal education officials rejected the reading exams that Virginia has given to many students learning English, because the tests don’t cover the same grade-level material as those given to students fluent in English. Virginia educators fighting the mandate say that students who haven’t mastered the language are likely to fail a traditional test and that it is unfair to administer it. Read more about this dispute in this article from The Washington Post.

 Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said yesterday the next phase of the federal No Child Left Behind law should focus on schools that chronically underperform. Schools that don’t meet federal standards for multiple years should offer parents more options for transferring their child — such as vouchers to attend private schools — and need to have the resources to attract top teachers, she said. Read more about her efforts to rally support for the law’s reauthorization in this article from The Telegraph, from Macon, Georgia.

 Policy experts and scholars gathered in Los Angeles last week cited chapter and verse about the negative consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act’s reliance on state tests to judge schools. But there was less agreement about what a better alternative might look like, and even less optimism that one would come to pass. The consensus at the conference, hosted by the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing, or CRESST, seemed to be that tweaks, rather than big revisions, in test-based accountability are most likely in the near term. Read more of this article from Education Week.

 U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings spent the day in Chicago Thursday, lobbying students, teachers, school officials and business leaders to support proposed changes to the five-year-old No Child Left Behind law. The law, which requires schools to test students in math and reading and holds schools accountable for the results, comes up for reauthorization this year. Spellings spent most of her time pushing the more controversial parts of the blueprint: giving vouchers for students to attend private schools, allowing districts to bypass state-imposed charter school caps, letting districts circumvent teacher contracts to transfer teachers to the worst schools. Read the article in The Chicago Tribune online.

 The Bush administration called on Wednesday for an array of changes to the president’s signature education law. The proposals would give local school officials new powers to override both teachers’ contracts and state limits on charter schools in the case of persistently failing schools. Read more about these new proposals in this article from The New York Times.

 The White House unveiled details of the president’s proposals for overhauling the No Child Left Behind law, which is up for renewal this year. The administration’s proposal calls for giving vouchers to students in schools that persistently fail to meet progress goals set by the federal law. Read more of this article from The Boston Globe. Read the White House fact sheet on the 2007 State of the Union policy initiatives, which includes the president’s education proposals.

About 200 public school teachers across the Washington, DC region won certification in 2006 from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, based in Arlington County, Virginia. Although some wonder how much the program raises student achievement, there is a growing movement toward national certification. The number of board-certified teachers has tripled in the past five years to more than 55,000 nationwide. The federal No Child Left Behind law requires states to have “highly qualified” teachers for all core academic classes; teachers increasingly are turning to national board certification to prove their mettle. There are also financial incentives attached. Read the article at washingtonpost.com.

A report released today by the inspector general’s office of the U.S. Department of Education says Georgia education officials mismanaged several aspects of the federal Reading First program, a failing that resulted in confusion over policies and procedures, the hiring of underqualified grant reviewers, inconsistencies in how local grant proposals were reviewed, and the unfair treatment of some vendors. Read more of this article from Education Week.

 In an interview with The Washington Post five days before the fifth anniversary of the No Child Left Behind law, U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings rejected calls for a major rewrite of the law. Spellings said that she welcomed proposals to "perfect and tweak" NCLB as Congress prepares for what could become a divisive debate on renewal of the landmark education initiative. Read the article in The Washington Post.

 Illinois and Montana are the only two states to have failed thus far to compile and release standardized student test results for 2006 as required under the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law. Illinois education officials blame a variety of causes including human error and the testing company, while Montana officials say their late reporting was in fact planned. The upshot is that students in both states won’t know officially whether they are eligible for free tutoring or to transfer to another school if they attend a failing school, as mandated under the reform law. Read the complete article at the Time.com website.

 As Congress prepares to consider reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, the goal to close the test-score gaps between African American and Hispanic students and their white counterparts remains far off, according to an article by Sam Dillon in the November 20 issue of The New York Times. Dillon notes that several recent studies are reporting little progress in narrowing achievement gaps. For more information, read the full article.

“Almost from the inception of Reading First, critics raised red flags about the potential of the initiative to blur the lines between commerce and policy.”

In an essay posted at the Title I Online website, authors Andrew Brownstein and Travis Hicks provide a summary of events leading to last September’s report by the Office of the Inspector General that prompted charges of corruption and conflict of interest against the Department of Education and the professionals it appointed to implement the program.

 As Congress contemplates revising the centerpiece of U.S. national education policy, the International Reading Association has released a statement that supports several specific components of No Child Left Behind but calls for “significant reform” in a number of areas:

• Support for high quality teachers
• Well-defined criteria for excellent reading instruction
• Assessments designed to inform instruction
• More accurate descriptions of adequate yearly progress
• Funding allocations to students most in need

Download a copy of the statement or find more information about NCLB on the IRA website.

Most people agree that public schools in the United States need to make changes in order to meet the needs of all students and the challenges of the 21st century. The question is how to accomplish this. A new report by Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Ruy Teixeira, What the Public Really Wants on Education, attempts to answer this question by sifting through a variety of data, including recent poll results. For further information, read the full report.

 
A National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) study of the experiences and perceptions of more than 2,000 literacy educators conducted in April 2006 shows that among these teachers charged with implementing the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), 76% believe that NCLB has had at least a somewhat negative influence on teaching and learning in English/reading classrooms, according to an article published in the September 6 issue of The Council Chronicle Online. For further details, visit the NCTE website.

Ministers have failed to reach their key education goal of getting 85 per cent of 11-year-olds to master the three Rs before they leave primary school, this year’s test results will show. Learn more in The Independent.

  Delegates at the 2006 National Education Association (NEA) annual conference in Orlando have approved a comprehensive plan for lobbying to support meaningful reform of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Calling the law "fundamentally flawed," NEA President Reg Weaver said, "No one is more qualified to bring real improvement to public education than the 2.8 million members of NEA."

For further details, visit the NEA website.

  How can a school be "outstanding" and "in need of improvement" at the same time? Under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), hundreds of American public schools fall into this category. Defenders of NCLB say this happens because these schools fail certain groups of students. Opponents say the law punishes diversity and does not take into account improvements the schools are making.

A PBS report from John Merrow, produced by Tira Grey, takes us inside a New York City elementary school in the Bronx--one that is highly regarded and successful yet is obligated by law to inform the public that it is a "failing" school. To view the report or read a transcript, click here.

  One of the primary goals of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act is to improve outcomes for all students, especially those with the greatest needs. Yet, as Jennifer Booher-Jennings writes in an article in Phi Delta Kappan, the implementation of NCLB, with its punitive consequences for schools that fail to meet their adequate yearly progress (AYP) goals, causes many schools to ration resources to the "bubble kids"--those most likely to pass the test after a little extra help--and to divert assistance away from the "hopeless cases."

For further information, read the full article.

Are schools of education providing adequate information about the National Reading Panel's "big five" essential components of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension? A new report says no.

  As the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act approaches, critics are calling for changes. In an article in the Spring 2006 issue of Rethinking Schools, Stan Karp offers his perspective on whether we need "Band-Aids to 'fix' NCLB or a bulldozer to bury it." For more information, read the full article.

Almost half of the students who ultimately drop out of Philadelphia high schools can be identified as early as the sixth grade, according to research by the Philadelphia Education Fund in conjunction with Johns Hopkins University. The research found that a student displaying any one of four risk factors — attendance below 80 percent, poor behavior, a failing math grade, and a failing English grade — has, at best, only a 10 percent chance of graduating from high school on time, and only a 20 percent chance of graduating one year late.

“As early as the sixth grade, you can identify kids at risk and who won’t graduate unless something is done,” said Robert Balfanz of Johns Hopkins, the coauthor of the study along with Liza Herzog of the Philadelphia Education Fund. “They’re just starting to fall off track, and there’s time to pull them back in.”

For more on the study, see “A City At Risk: New Research Identifies Sixth-Grade ‘Risk Factors’ That Can Predict Future High School Dropouts in Philadelphia” at the Alliance for Excellent Education website.

 Only 17% of students across the United States who are eligible for free tutoring under the No Child Left Behind Act are taking advantage of it, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said this week, reports Public Agenda Online Alert. Furthermore, less than 1% of all students who are eligible for school choice actually transferred to another school.

While most Americans have heard of the No Child Left Behind Act, nearly 7 in 10 say they don't know enough to form an opinion, according to Public Agenda, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that measures public opinion on a variety of topics, including education. Even so, a majority of Americans say the law will improve education.

Public Agenda's latest Reality Check survey also indicates that most parents are confident their children will be well prepared for college or work when the time comes. In fact, substantial majorities of parents believe the schools their children attend are better than the ones they attended. For further information, visit the Public Agenda website.

 Former Post education reporter Karin Chenoweth looks at schools that are getting great results under very difficult conditions. These are schools where many of the children are poor but where just about all of them either meet or exceed state standards. These schools have little trouble making AYP. They may have a handle on doing it “better.” Find her article in The Washington Post.

"Differentiated learning," which addresses the varied needs of individual learners in individualized ways, is in use in one New York state district that serves as an example of many others.

According to the BBC, the national curriculum in England is to be revised so children are taught to read primarily using the method known as synthetic phonics.

 In an effort to help policymakers better understand the effects of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, the Center on Education Policy (CEP) has developed a series of four one-page policy briefs highlighting major findings from its 2005 annual report: From the Capital to the Classroom: Year 3 of the No Child Left Behind Act.

The first brief, released on June 29, examines why urban schools are being identified for improvement at a disproportionate rate than suburban or rural schools. The remaining briefs, which are now available on CEP’s website, address the following topics: Middle Schools Are Increasingly Targeted for Improvement, Is NCLB Narrowing the Curriculum?, and What School Districts Are Doing to Improve Teacher Quality in High-Need Schools.

For further information, visit the following CEP webpage.

 Concerns about how the No Child Left Behind Act has been implemented have sparked serious revolts in Utah, Texas, and Connecticut, according to a comprehensive, nuanced, and balanced Christian Science Monitor article.

Britain’s most able pupils lead the world in reading skills. But the nation’s least able readers are in the relegation zone: below their equivalents in Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, the Czech republic, Russia, and Hong Kong. So what is going wrong with the UK’s least able readers? And how can their needs be addressed without compromising the education of their more highly skilled classmates?

Education correspondent Mike Baker adds his voice to the debate over synthetic phonics and reading reform in a BBC News article.

Three years after a federal law required states to collect a host of education data, much of that information and more will now be available in one place — giving the public a newfound resource and giving educators headaches over how schools can be compared.

 The Public Education Network (PEN) has called on federal officials to vigorously enforce key provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) to avoid undermining public support for the law’s objectives. In an open letter to the Bush Administration and congressional leaders, the organization cites a serious flaw in the law’s accountability framework, which holds schools and students accountable but has no consequences for states that miss the mark. Find details through PEN’s Web portal, Open to the Public.

Researchers Camille L. Z. Blachowicz, Connie Obrochta, and Ellen Fogelberg examine a Chicago school district’s literacy coaching model that boosts teacher effectiveness. Schools interested in developing their own successful literacy coaching models can benefit from six coaching process strategies that effectively support improved teaching and learning. Their report appears in the March 2005 issue of Educational Leadership.

On March 8, International Women’s Day, the Global Campaign for Education released a new report slamming world leaders for their failure to achieve the first and most critical of all the Education for All and Millennium Development Goals — getting equal numbers of girls and boys into school by 2005. New research shows that an extra 1 million child deaths will occur this year alone because of failure to close the education gap facing girls.

Find out about the new report, Girls Can’t Wait: Why Girls’ Education Matters, at the Global Campaign for Education website.

A year ago, education consultant Tim DeRoche told everyone who would listen that the standards and accountability movement was a necessary evil. Now he’s not so sure about the “evil” part. In his essay in the March issue of Teacher Magazine, DeRoche argues that standards and testing can be a positive force in teaching and “spark an extraordinary revolution in the teaching profession.”

 As states ramp up to meet the 100 percent proficiency rates required by law by the year 2014, educators will have to deal with an ever-increasing number of ways they can fall short of AYP. In her article in Scholastic Administrator, Pamela Wheaton Schorr outlines six possible strategies for helping districts meet AYP.