Archive for April 20, 2008 - April 26, 2008

Eleven limousines pulled up to the front door of Ryan’s Steakhouse in Simpsonville, South Carolina, as a crowd cheered and media waited with cameras and notebooks for the honored guests. Out jumped the day’s celebrities, students from nine Laurens County elementary schools who participated in the Limos for Learning program. They walked a red carpet through the doors into the restaurant to eat a free lunch and experience entertainment from a magician and Michael Cogdill, WYFF-4 broadcaster and children’s book author.

More than 200 students hopped out of the limos Wednesday, April 23, 2008, as the crowd cheered them on. The third- and fourth-graders had qualified for the trip through a reading rewards program started by a Laurens businesswoman five years ago. Since then, it has blossomed into a statewide incentive program, and this year alone, more than 15,000 students have taken a limo ride to a free lunch to celebrate reading goals that they’ve met.

Betsy Ross, president of Limos for Learning, started the program because as a pharmacist, she saw many patients who couldn’t read their own health-care materials. Early intervention was the key, she said. Read more about the program in The Greenville News online.

If it seems no U.S. politician ever makes a speech today without insisting that education is his or her top priority, a quick glance back exactly 20 years may explain why that is. On April 26, 1983, a blue-ribbon commission appointed by the Reagan administration released A Nation at Risk —a report chock-full of strong language and disturbing findings on the state of education in the United States.

“Our Nation is at risk,” the report stated. “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” Test scores were falling, schools were asking less and less of their students, and U.S. schools increasingly were failing to stack up against their overseas counterparts, the report asserted.

A state of emergency was declared. The federal government couldn’t afford to leave education to state and local governments. In 1989, then-President George Bush convened a governors’ conference on education, directly inspired by the report, and 13 years later his son signed the No Child Left Behind legislation into law. Because of A Nation at Risk, the federal government has an unprecedented and probably irreversible role in education. Read more in The Christian Science Monitor online.

Let us limp down memory lane to mark this week’s melancholy 25th anniversary of a national commission’s report, A Nation at Risk, that galvanized Americans to vow to do better. Today the nation still ignores what had been learned years before 1983.

In 1964, SAT scores among college-bound students peaked. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) codified confidence in the correlation between financial inputs and cognitive outputs in education. But in 1966, the Coleman report, the result of the largest social science project in history, reached a conclusion so “seismic”— Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s description—that the government almost refused to publish it.

Released quietly on the Fourth of July weekend, the report concluded that the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools’ effectiveness. The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class—fractured families—would have to be faced. But it wasn’t. Instead, shopworn panaceas—larger teacher salaries, smaller class sizes—were pursued as colleges were reduced to offering remediation to freshmen. Read more of George Will’s opinion piece in The Washington Post online.

Laura Bush said she expects to continue her efforts touting education and literacy through her husband’s presidential library and public policy center being built at Southern Methodist University, her alma mater. In an interview with The Dallas Morning News Wednesday, April 23, 2008, Bush said plans are still in flux, but she’s looking forward to having the George W. Bush Presidential Library complex showcase and promote activities she pursued as first lady.

“I hope that out of both the library and the Bush institute that will be there, I’ll be able to continue working on the issues that are important to me. And part of that is education and literacy, including worldwide and especially the education of girls and women in Afghanistan,” she said. Read more in The Dallas Morning News online.

The new government of Pakistan plans to introduce a uniform education system in the country by integrating all prevailing systems into a standard system. In February, 16 political parties signed a joint declaration on “Education For All” (EFA), which called for more than a 10% budget allocation for the education sector. EFA is an international movement and Pakistan is signatory to the EFA Declaration and has promised to achieve EFA targets by 2015.

The EFA targets included early childhood and care, primary education for all, life skills, a 50% increase in the adult literacy rate, elimination of gender disparity in education, and improving the quality of education. Pakistan also plans to set up one girls school in each union council and to promote a culture of reading. Read more about the initiative in The (Pakistan) Daily Times.

A new free family literacy resource will be available in Spanish in time to celebrate El Día de los Niños, the holiday April 30 that recognizes children as the center of the Latino family. The celebration also is known as El Día de los Libros (The Day of the Books). To mark the event, the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) is unveiling the Spanish version of Cultivating Readers (Cultivando el hábito de la lectura), which provides activities for parents to support their child’s literacy, language and reading skills.

The 16-page magazine includes activities and strategies to increase the reading readiness and school success specifically for three age groups—infants and toddlers, preschoolers, and students from kindergarten through grade three.
For more on the magazine, visit NCFL’s website.

Even before Nancy Mazza retired eight years ago from teaching art to Appleton, Wisconsin, children, a job she dearly enjoyed, she had discovered an even deeper passion—bookmaking. “I was mostly interested in book forms—scrolls, origami, concertinas, pamphlet stitching, sewn bindings, glued bindings—and I had so much fun making books I tried to think how I could share this with kids,”Mazza recalled.

Hundreds of books later, her pastime has evolved into a rewarding outreach helping struggling readers and writers makes what she calls a “literacy connection.” For her creativity and innovative approach, the Hortonville woman is the 2008 Celebrating Our Volunteers recipient of the Daniel P. Spalding Volunteer Educator Award.

Becky Schuler, a reading specialist at Kaukauna’s Quinney Elementary School and president of Mid-East Reading Council of the International Reading Association who happens to be Mazza’s daughter, was quick to embrace Mazza’s way of motivating reluctant readers and introduced her to her pupils. Schuler nominated Mazza not only for her bookmaking in Quinney classrooms, but also the free workshops she conducts showing local teachers how to use visuals to boost reading comprehension, and showing parents how to support literacy at home. Read more in The Post-Crescent online

Twenty-five years ago this week, Americans awoke to a forceful little report that, depending on your point of view, either ruined public education or saved it.

On April 26, 1983, in a White House ceremony, Ronald Reagan took possession of “A Nation at Risk.” The product of nearly two years’ work by a blue-ribbon commission, it found poor academic performance at nearly every level and warned that the education system was “being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity.” It kick-started decades of tough talk about public schools and reforms that culminated in 2002's No Child Left Behind, the Bush administration law that pushes schools to improve students’ basic skills or face ever-tougher sanctions.

Twenty-five years later, the sole teacher on the 1983 panel says the tough talk was just what the doctor ordered. Read more in USA Today online.

 The Bush administration proposed major changes Tuesday, April 22, 2008, in enforcement of the No Child Left Behind law, including some regulations meant to tighten oversight of public schools, as efforts to revamp the landmark education act have stalled in Congress.

In the most significant shift, all states would be required by 2013 to use the same formula to calculate the high school graduation rate, an effort to shine a light on the nation’s dropout problem and force schools to take steps to ensure that more students earn diplomas.

The proposed rules also would require officials at low-performing schools to better inform parents about a key requirement of the law—that certain children be given access to government-funded tutoring or the chance to transfer to a school with better test scores. Read more in The Washington Post 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.

Progress measures have become a central component of the Response to Intervention (RTI) approach. Contemporary assessment has shifted focus from describing differences between students to measuring their progress toward important educational outcomes.

Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) procedures are used to monitor basic skills growth, to identify students at risk of learning difficulty, to evaluate efforts to prevent and remediate low achievement, and to aid in making instructional decisions to accelerate learning.

Stanley Deno, Ph.D., best known for his research leading to the development of CBM progress monitoring procedures and their use in the RTI model, will answer your questions on CBM at the first RTI Action Network Talk on April 23 at 1-2 p.m. EDT. Join this RTI Talk online.

Some kids in Fulton County, Georgia, are earning a paycheck just for doing their homework. A pilot project sponsored by a local foundation is offering a group of low-income students $8 an hour to go to after-school study sessions twice a week. Jackie Cushman, engineer of the Learn and Earn program, said she hopes the money will get the kids into the classroom, but that, once there, they’ll start to enjoy learning.

Cushman is the founder of the Atlanta-based nonprofit Learning Makes a Difference. She’s also the daughter of former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who suggested paying low-income students to improve their grades in a 2005 speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The students who participate in the Learn and Earn program say it’s helping them, but some educators are troubled by it. Read and hear more at National Public Radio’s website.

Have you ever wanted to ask author Beverly Cleary a question about her much-loved books, the vivid characters she created, or her life as a writer? Reading Rockets, a national multimedia project offering information and resources on how young kids learn to read, interviewed Mrs. Cleary using questions from children and adults. Mrs. Cleary talks about her favorite teddy bear, where the character Ralph came from, the pleasures of reading and writing, and much more. Listen to the interview on the Reading Rockets website.

When her son Dylan was just 6 years old, Kristen Wahlmeier noticed that he had to be bribed to read: A surfing trip here or a pair of new shoes there before he'd pick up a book. Worried as she watched him struggle, a gnawing fear crept into her stomach: Her only son, with big blue eyes and the jones for Star Wars, might be headed for a special education classroom.

Instead, teachers at his suburban Portland, Oregon, school intervened immediately, putting him into extra reading and vocabulary tutoring every day before school. It paid off. Now, officials in districts across the country are rapidly adopting similar early intervention programs, hoping that steering a child away from expensive special education classes later will pay off for them, too, in cost savings.

Not everyone is so pleased about the early help, known as “response to intervention” or RTI. Some parents worry that children with learning disabilities will have to wait too long to get the intensive help they need. Academics and administrators fear the trend is taking off too quickly, without enough research to back up its surge. Read more in this Associated Press story online.

IBRinfo.org is a new web site that provides independent, reliable information about Income-Based Repayment and Public Service Loan Forgiveness, two new federal programs to help make student loan repayment fair and manageable. The site explains the programs and will be updated as new information becomes available. Users can register to get updates on important developments as the U.S. Department of Education finalizes regulations and creates the systems for managing the new programs.

Income-Based Repayment (IBR) is a new payment option for federal student loans that will help borrowers keep their payments affordable with payment caps (less than 10% of income for most eligible borrowers) based on income and family size. IBR also will forgive remaining debt, if any, after up to 25 years of qualifying payments. Public Service Loan Forgiveness will forgive remaining debt after 10 years of eligible employment and qualifying loan payments for people working in key public service professions such as teaching, government, social work, law enforcement, and non-profit 501(c)(3) organizations. Visit the IBR website for more information.

The inability of many Texas students to write and speak good English is like a dreadful disease requiring aggressive treatment, say some education advocates who want to use different teaching approaches. Social conservatives on the State Board of Education, influenced in part by a retired teacher, are backing a new curriculum that increases the focus on basics, including grammar.

They’ve met fierce resistance from teachers and educators who warn this emphasis will prepare students for the 1950s, not the 21st century, and embarrass Texas in the process. They fear the state’s proposed new standards for reading and English language arts contradict established research and will only make things worse. Read about the controversy in The Houston Chronicle online.

  A combination of poverty and a high number of special needs students often leads to schools that fail to meet guidelines of the federal No Child Left Behind law, Indiana and regional officials say. If a Title 1 school misses AYP for two consecutive years, corrective action can include replacing school staff and implementing new curriculum. Special education remains the most commonly missed target among schools that fall short of making AYP in a single area.

Lake Station Superintendent Dan DeHaven said it is very difficult for special education students to pass the tests, placing schools with larger populations of special needs students at a disadvantage. Of the 1,489 students in Lake Station, DeHaven said 15% are in special education. Read more in The Times online.