Archive for December 30, 2007 - January 05, 2008

For decades, the nation’ teachers could count on at least one constant—the longer they served, the more they’d earn. But now, that’s changing, thanks to relentless pressure to improve student achievement. In a growing number of schools, teachers’ future earnings now depend on how well they teach.

Denver has become a pioneer when it comes to performance pay. In 2005, the voters of Denver were asked to approve a $25 million funding boost in teacher pay. They said yes, but they wanted something in return, according to Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper. “Teachers are underpaid, I don’t think anyone argues that. But given the sentiment of the public, if they want to have taxpayers vote more taxes, they’re going to have to give some dramatic change in the way they go about teaching,” Hickenlooper said. Read more at National Public Radio ’s website.

In a growing number of classrooms around the country, 4 is the new 5 and preschool the new kindergarten. Hoping for a payoff of better schools and sharper students, states are aggressively expanding publicly funded programs to the youngest students—4 or even 3 years old. And turning away from play-oriented day care, states are setting new academic standards, including class sizes and teacher credentials, to provide higher quality education before the first day of kindergarten.

Led by states such as Florida, Maryland and North Carolina, enrollment in public pre-K by 4- and even 3-year-olds jumped 40% from 2001 to 2006. Excluding federal Head Start programs for poor children, the pre-K landscape now spans 38 states, including Delaware, and includes nearly 1 million children, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. Read more about the expansion of early child care services in The News Journal online.

Reading First, funded at $1 billion per year, is among the most promising federal efforts to help the poor. Title I, funded at $12 billion per year, is not nearly so effective. That President Bush has just signed into law a 2008 budget that gives the latter an 8.6% increase in funding and the former a 64% decrease confirms the wisdom of Lincoln, who observed, “In republican democracies, public sentiment is everything. With it nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.”

Notwithstanding Reading First’s success increasing early literacy rates among the poor, public sentiment for the program remains weaker than that of its enemies, who have proved more influential in Congress and more determined than Reading First’s stewards in the administration. Continue reading this opinion piece by Shepard Barbash in The National Review online.

Minneapolis ranks as the most literate city in the United States, according to a survey compiled by John Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University. Since 2003, Miller's survey has ranked the 69 largest American cities (population 250,000 and above) on six key indicators of literacy: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources.

Other cities in the top 10 are Seattle, St. Paul, Denver, Washington, St. Louis, San Francisco, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and Boston. For further information, visit the America's Most Literate Cities webpage.

It was the Philippine Department of Education that first raised the alarm in 2006 that the quality of education in the country had sunk to its lowest level, Education Secretary Jesli Lapus said. “The problem is systemic. The entire system is [seriously affected],” he said, reacting to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s admission that the state of education continued to worsen during a consultative meeting in Baguio City earlier this week.

“The issues confronting us are the [result] of decades of under-investment, understatement ... English has had to take a back seat. The reading skills also suffered with many Grade 6 students unable to read,” he said.

Consider this: Of the elementary school teachers tested for English proficiency in the school year 2006-2007 by the education department, only 60% passed. The secondary education teachers fared worse—only 20% passed, 70% were below the desired proficiency and 10% failed the test. Read more in The Philippine Daily Inquirer online.

Knuffle Bunny is among the finalists for a Cybils award, but Harry Potter is not. The New York Times bestseller Knuffle Bunny Too by Mo Willems earned a spot on the short list for Fiction Picture Books at The Children's and Young Adult Bloggers' Literary Awards (Cybils), but the boy wizard did not make the cut in the Fantasy and Science Fiction category. Judges have also announced finalists for Poetry and Middle Grade Fiction. Finalists for Graphic Novels, Young Adult Fiction, Non-Fiction Picture Books, and Non-Fiction for Middle-Grade/Young Adult Readers will be announced January 7.

Cybils began last year with kidlit bloggers hoping to steer a middle course between the lofty Newbery Medal and the populist Quill Awards. The contest drew more than 570 nominations this year, and 90 judges are participating. Winners will be announced on February 14. For further information, visit the Cybils webpage.

Jon Scieszka, author of The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales and the Time Warp Trio series, will get the imprimatur of the Library of Congress today, January 3, 2008, as the first National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.

“We think it’s very important to have an evangelist for reading,” said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. The library’s Center for the Book has teamed up with the Children’s Book Council, a publishing industry trade association, to create the national ambassador program.

The appointment comes at a time when declines in Americans’ reading proficiency and time spent reading have been widely noted—most recently in “To Read or Not to Read,” a report issued by the National Endowment for the Arts. For many reasons, including economic competitiveness, it is “a matter of crucial national importance” that young people read, Billington said. Read more in The Washington Post.

Bill Gates is spending $30 million on the Unted States’ presidential campaign for a cause, not a candidate. The world’s richest man plans to make education the No. 1 domestic priority with voters. The 52-year-old Microsoft Corp. chairman has poured $3.4 billion into school improvements and scholarships since 2000 through his Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, according to the foundation’s records. Now the charity says it is providing half the money for Strong American Schools, a bipartisan group with a $60 million effort called “Ed in '08.”

The Washington-based organization, led by former Democratic Governor Roy Romer of Colorado, wants the next president to rally support for learning standards, increased pay and training for teachers, and longer class days and school years. It says those ideas would improve access to high-quality education, boost economic vitality and reduce the number of U.S. high school dropouts from 1.2 million a year. Read the Bloomberg news article.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative has generated its share of skepticism since its announcement three years ago, according to an article in eSchool News. But children in the Andean village of Arahuay, Peru, can't get enough of their "XO" laptops.

Peru made the single biggest order of XO machines to date--more than 272,000--in an attempt to turn around a primary education system that the World Economic Forum recently ranked last among 131 countries surveyed. Fifty primary school children in Arahuay received machines from the OLPC project six months ago. To learn more, read the full article.

Teachers and principals at schools the state of Louisiana has taken over could earn big bonuses if they bring the schools up to certain standards. The Recovery School District, which is running more than 30 public schools in New Orleans, could dole out bonuses of up to $3,000 to teachers and up to $5,000 to principals under the pay-for-performance plan largely based on test scores, officials said last week. The RSD took over many poorly performing public schools in New Orleans. It has turned some over to charter organizations and is running 34 itself. For more about the performance-based bonuses, read the article in Education Week.

Across the United States, educators, parents, and government officials are placing more emphasis on early childhood education to help preempt academic achievement problems later, according to an article by Karen Roebuck in the December 30, 2007, issue of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. "If you build a love of learning at an early age, that love of learning will sustain them throughout school," said Don Owens, a spokeperson for the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

Owens cited various studies indicating that children in high-quality early learning programs have higher rates of high school graduation and college attendance, lower dropout rates, earn higher incomes, and bear children four to five years later than their peers. For futher information, read the full article.

For help with a variety of common problems, more people turn to the Internet than consult experts or family members to provide information and resources, according to Information Searches That Solve Problems, a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

A second key finding from the survey is that members of the tech-loving Generation Y (age 18-30) are the leading users of libraries for help solving problems and in more general patronage. Libraries drew visits by more than half of Americans (53%) in the past year for all kinds of purposes.

For further information, visit the following page on the Pew Internet & American Life Project website.