NCLB as an open-ended work in progress

Posted by Slim

One of the best articles on the ever changing debate and concerns for reauthorization of NCLB is covered in detail by this LA Times article. Who knows what NCLB II will look like? There is a lot to fix and many potential directions it could take.

A juggling act on No Child Left Behind

Democrats, Republicans and teachers see flaws in Calif.'s Rep. Miller's proposal to renew the 2001 education law. He's not giving up.

By Nicole Gaouette

Los Angeles Times

October 30, 2007

WASHINGTON -- Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) has never been one to back away from a brawl -- he once warned an adversary that if he wanted to fight, it was going to take a while, so he'd better bring lunch. But as Miller pushes to renew the landmark education law known as No Child Left Behind, he faces so many fights that the fate of the bill is increasingly in doubt.

As chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, Miller is sparring with Republicans who see his proposed changes as an unacceptable watering down of the law's core standards.

Teachers object to his proposal to link pay to performance.

Even his fellow Democrats -- particularly freshmen who campaigned against it and members of the Congressional Black Caucus -- are giving him a hard time, largely for not doing enough to soften the law's most rigid requirements.

Some critics of the law say the emphasis on math and English testing has squeezed teaching time for history, science and other subjects. Others say that the law is too strict and punishes schools that are doing a fairly good job.

"People have a very strong sense that the No Child Left Behind Act is not fair, that it is not flexible and that it is not funded," Miller said in a recent speech. "And they are not wrong. The question is what we are going to do next."

The 2001 law, President Bush's hallmark domestic achievement, is supposed to be renewed every five years, although it remains in effect even if lawmakers fail to do that.

Democrats pledged to rewrite it this year, but time is short and political tensions are high. Congress plans to adjourn for the year in a few weeks. And some Democrats are loath to give Bush a victory on No Child Left Behind when he refused to compromise on the Iraq war.

The administration has also made clear it wants just minimal changes.

No Child Left Behind was designed to end what the president called the "soft bigotry of low expectations" by forcing schools to track data on low-income and minority students and holding the schools accountable if those pupils did not do well. Schools also have to show that all students are making adequate yearly progress in math and English, or face tough sanctions.

Miller drafted 1,036 pages of proposed changes with the committee's lead Republican, Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon of Santa Clarita. But as Miller has tweaked that proposal to appeal to Democrats and teachers, he has lost Republicans.

The balance he seeks is between those who think the law's standards are too rigid and those who want them as tightly defined as possible.

A 33-year veteran of the House, Miller is known for his pragmatism, his ability to make a deal and his close ties to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), all of which may help him find an answer in the few weeks he has left.

"We're certainly not in full agreement," Miller said, mentioning talks with committee Republicans. "Not between my caucus and their caucus, not between Mr. McKeon and myself. Whether we can reach an agreement remains to be seen. We're pushing as hard as we can."

McKeon said he was hopeful that he and Miller could reach a compromise, but he expressed concern "that some provisions in the draft would weaken accountability, allowing schools to mask a lack of achievement in the fundamentals of reading and math and obscure the information provided to schools and communities."

For Miller, who has made children a focus of his career and has long advocated greater teacher accountability, working on the first No Child Left Behind bill was a natural cause. A staunch liberal, he was an odd partner for Bush, but they worked closely enough for the president to dub the burly former football player "Big George."

In the five years since Miller and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) helped write and pass No Child Left Behind, they complain, the administration has never fully funded the law in a way that would help schools meet their additional burdens. Republicans counter that few laws are fully funded.

The law has frustrated some parents and teachers who dislike its effect in local schools.

Rep. Albert R. Wynn (D-Md.), a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, has told Miller that his draft continues to overemphasize standardized tests.

The cost, Wynn says, includes "extraordinary pressure placed on students and the loss of important instruction in music, art and other elements of a well-rounded education."

Some critics say that too many schools are sanctioned under the law. Schools that fail to meet goals for three years must offer students free tutoring or the chance to switch schools. After five years of failure, the law mandates, a school must be restructured with a new staff or new leadership or be converted to a charter school.

Miller's draft bill would broaden measurements of students and schools -- for instance, letting states measure how much students improve over a year and not just whether they meet the bar set by No Child Left Behind.

Miller also wants to expand the standards by which schools are judged beyond math and English scores -- a shift McKeon strongly opposes. Under Miller's proposal, up to 15% of an elementary school's evaluation could be based on assessments of history, science, and civics and government classes. For high schools, rates for graduation, dropouts, attendance and college enrollment could be considered too.

Some of the strictest sanctions would be relaxed under Miller's bill. For example, it would loosen a rule that puts an otherwise successful school on probation if a small group within it -- such as learning-disabled children -- fails to meet the standards.

The draft would also change the way English-language learners are evaluated, allowing them to be tested in their native language for up to five years instead of the current three years, and permitting a two-year extension for some. Republicans say this would mean a child who spoke no English could enter the public school system in fifth grade and graduate from high school without ever being evaluated in English.

Teachers unions have objected to Miller's proposal to allow high-needs school districts to give $10,000 bonuses to outstanding teachers and up to $12,500 for teachers of math, science, special education and other subjects that are short of instructors. Criteria for the awards would be developed with input from the unions.

Critics of the unions say teachers are trying to avoid accountability. The unions say Miller's plan -- which McKeon backs -- is not workable.

"You can be a better teacher than I am, but based on conditions that you have to work in, it makes it much more difficult for you to do the same job," said National Education Assn. President Reginald Weaver. "Plus, paying teachers based on student performance hasn't really made a difference in how students achieve."

In the Senate, Democrats and Republicans are in talks about the bill, and Kennedy hopes to begin formal discussions in the education committee in the next few weeks.

Miller, meanwhile, continues to search for a compromise that can win enough support to pass the House.

"We would be wrong to waver when it comes to the existing goals and standards of the No Child Left Behind law," he said. "We would also be wrong if we failed to respond to the serious concerns with the law raised by people who sincerely care about America's educational future."

Dialogue in education

Posted by Slim

I find the dialogue and discussion on Education Week between educators Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch to be informative and erudite. They tackle the complexities of education well and are worth reading.

Bridging Differences

Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch have found themselves at odds on policy over the years, but they share a passion for improving schools. Bridging Differences will offer their insights on what matters most in education.

October 30, 2007

This Is Not Good Education

Dear Deb,

There are times when I feel that we are on the same wavelength, and times when I know we are not. Right now, my frustration is multiplied because in the course of your last mini-essay, I found myself alternately agreeing and disagreeing with your assertions.

I said that many people who have spoken out about the recent round of NAEP scores seem not to have read the report in which the scores were embedded. I expressed the wish that the commentators would take the trouble to read the report before characterizing what they read in the newspapers, which is third-hand at best. This observation sent you into musing about how the original sources themselves are “an interpretation of data,” and how we all rely on the writers that we trust—or happen to agree with.

But that was not my point. The NAEP data are an original source for those who wish to discuss the latest round of national tests. They are not an “interpretation of data.” They are the data. I assume that you mean to say that you are unimpressed by NAEP, that you do not like the content of the NAEP frameworks or the methodology of the NAEP assessments. That is fair enough. But that is a different discussion from the one I raised.

Policymakers in Washington and the state capitols are influenced by the every-other-year reports from NAEP about state and national progress. It is your right to dismiss NAEP out of hand, but the people making important decisions about education policy are on a different trajectory. They look at the numbers and they see a reality that you dismiss as trivial and unimportant. Maybe you are right and they are wrong.

My point is that if public policy is going to be affected by NAEP—and I believe it is (and should be)—then at least the people who write about the NAEP scores should read the data and not rely on second-hand or third-hand accounts. Like the tests or hate them, they are the best measure we have right now. As the recent report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (“The Proficiency Illusion”) showed, the state tests vary widely and randomly in terms of their expectations and standards.

As I said in my last post, the progress on NAEP in most areas has been slight or insignificant from 2003-2007. I take this to mean that NCLB has had trivial effects on student achievement in reading and math, the subjects tested every other year. Now that the president and the U.S. Department of Education have made it their business to show that federal legislation can and will raise test scores, every release of NAEP data is accompanied by a press statement from the U.S. Secretary of Education that magnifies slight gains as huge achievements.

This is troublesome. It is troublesome because the federal government’s role as the honest, impartial collector and distributor of information gets corrupted when it acts as a cheerleader. And it is troublesome because it is unrealistic to expect test scores to make major leaps in a few years. When they do, one should suspect chicanery of some kind.

NAEP shines a light on state testing practices, as the Fordham report shows. Many states are reporting unrealistic leaps in achievement and high levels of proficiency to satisfy the absurd demand of NCLB for a trajectory that will bring every child to "proficiency" by the year 2014. NAEP shows how unlikely it is that any state will meet that goal and how inflated most of the states' claims of achievement are.

You make a transition from national testing to the dangers of a national curriculum. We have discussed this often. Like you, I would like to see schools where children have time to build, to create, to explore, to experiment, to play. I would like to see kids in the primary grades building castles and fortresses and stores with blocks. But unlike you, I don’t think this kind of playful learning is at odds with a national curriculum.

What is really frightening today—due in large measure to NCLB—is that we have a national testing mania without any curriculum at all. So now our schools are obsessed with preparing to take tests, getting good scores on tests, and then starting the test prep all over again. Out the window goes any thoughtful or playful engagement with history, literature, or the arts, as well as time for physical education (in many New York City schools, children are lucky to have one period a week for physical education). This is outrageous. This is not good education.

So here is where we find our differences and we find our agreements. Unlike you, I am not frightened by a national curriculum and national testing; I believe we already have both, supplied by commercial publishers of textbooks and tests. And what we have is low-level and antithetical to good education. Where we agree is that we have a vision of what good education is and should be. Even if we don’t agree on every detail, we do agree that what we have now is far from good education.

Diane

October 25, 2007

What Frightens Me About a National Curriculum

Dear Diane,

Your frustration about folks avoiding original sources is reasonable. Especially when it's actually easily available. But, of course, the "original source" itself is an interpretation of data. In short, we fall back on easier, less time-consuming ways. ("We" being me. See the back-and-forth comments about—presumably—the same data between Erin Johnson and myself.)

In fields that I don't feel deeply connected to, I mostly look for the experts I "trust". There's no way to be an expert in all the subjects I need to have an opinion about! So I go along with the consensus in some cases (like climate) and rely on "my" experts (generally via the magazines I read) on foreign policy and economics—e.g. Richard Rothstein, or Paul Krugman. So why should I expect folks to do otherwise about schooling?

But it's why it is so easy to get myths out there into the public sphere as though they were facts. In our field, there's the myth about the good old days. It rests in part on how often opinion leaders of all political stripes refer casually to the "decline" of public education; ditto for the assumption that most other nations are doing better at something called "schooling" or "education" without our having stopped to define what either means. We fall back on test scores whose contents and assumptions few question, whose methodology even education reporters know little if anything about, not to mention the narrowness of the measures—or the way scores are set. We use a language that assumes that being well-educated is a zero-sum game, in which the progress of others has to injure us.

We trust these assumptions because to think otherwise would require going against the grain and becoming an expert oneself. Rothstein's piece in American Prospect is not the first masterly complicating of the economic/schooling myths, but precisely by complicating it he loses part of his audience. For example, he reminds us that we "forget" that there's a 20-30-year gap between when the tests are administered and when that age group has an impact on the economy. In the information age, resources are also not evenly distributed. While, for example, FairTest—the only national organization that is in the business of being skeptical about test data, has a budget of less than half a million, the three or four leading testing agencies each spend many millions on promoting the idea that tests are the one true measure. (Disclosure: I'm on the board of FairTest.)

It leads me to wish we had a very different way of spending those 13-20 schooling years—preparing people to assess the events that surround them, independently sorting out pros and cons. I'm for the "liberal arts"—but not at the expense of "making sense" of the world around us, those "habits of mind" we build our curriculum around at schools associated with the Coalition of Essential Schools. The traditional liberal arts might even support such habits, if we designed them with this in mind. It would, for example, take a very different definition of advanced mathematics. The public's much-criticized lack of interest in advanced math may, in fact, betray their good sense, not their bad. Calculus-driven math may be foolish-driven math, that mis-prepares us, leaving us disarmed before the realities of our world. Perhaps a "statistics-driven" math would be equally tough and "advanced" but more suitable for a democratic citizenry?

In short, what frightens me about a national curriculum is not merely that I think it's more exciting to teach based on the particular interests and events that swirl around the young but because I think I can even "cover" more stuff of importance if I begin with what grabs our interest—from dinosaurs, mummies, castles, to modern Iraq or climate claims. I can better engage kids with the world they live in—including its history—if I make that the central aim of my work. Diane, it seems unlikely we can get a national consensus around the kind of experimentation that many of us think needs to take place. Nor should we! But suppose I'm right, that more "coverage" of the traditional fare won't make us either scientifically more sophisticated or mathematically more at home in this world? I'm not interested in banning traditionalism, but I'm also not interested in prohibiting us from the kind of exploration that needs to take place. Nor do I want to leave it all to private schools to experiment with the age-old conundrums. I think there are responsible ways to engage in this work, not just in private but also in public schools.

Our scientific future depends, I believe, on our remaining a nation that appreciates "play"—the non-utilitarian (or at least not immediately so) mindset that we're born with. We are systematically cutting ourselves off from the roots of human intellectual inventiveness. We need to find the equivalent of a generation-old practice of taking cars and radios apart to see how they work and building fortresses out of whatever is on hand. Computer-programmed games can't replace the old chemistry sets. Finding the modern equivalents requires us to experiment, not to return to the 1896 Ivy League consensus, great as it was. Some of us were lucky to have had both, but too many kids today have neither. They thus develop an acquiescent mindset or else a merely rebellious one, but an insufficiently curious and self-disciplined one.

As I meet with teachers and principals and parents I hear a lot of anguish and fear. Of course my sample is biased, but…. Read Dan Brown's book, "The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle" for a moving account of why we may be entering an era of temp teachers.

Deb

Don’t shoot the messenger

Posted by Slim

It does seem unfair to have principals delivering district decisions, especially when this particular district has a large communications department.

October 30, 2007

LOOKING IN ON: EDUCATION

Message to schools: Don't make principals give the bad news

By Emily Richmond

Las Vegas Sun
Sometimes it's hard not to blame the messenger. Particularly when the message is that a school schedule is being changed and the messenger is the school principal.

Erin Cranor, the mother of four Clark County School District students, has a novel suggestion that could do much to preserve a principal's relationship with the campus community: Find another messenger.

Cranor's remarks came last week at a meeting of the Superintendent's Year-Round Study Group.

The decision as to whether a school moves to a year-round schedule rests with the district's central office. So why, Cranor asked, are principals the ones forced to spread the word, especially since parents rarely celebrate the news?

When the announcement comes from the principal, it leaves some parents wondering if the switch isn't being done to boost school administrators' salaries, Cranor said. Principals at year-round schools are paid about 12 percent more than their colleagues at nine-month schools.

The principal's relationship with staff, students and parents sets the tone for everything that follows, said Cranor, a member of the district committee that makes recommendations on school boundaries.

The news should come from the region al office so the "principal is protected," Cranor said.

It would also help if parents and teachers were warned as early as possible. Cranor told the Sun on Thursday that at Tomiyasu Elementary School, where her two youngest children are students, families are already being warned that too many students could trigger a scheduling switch for the 2008-09 academic year.

"Families deal better when they know it's coming," Cranor said. "Don't try to sneak it up on them."

• • •
Can't make it to School Board meetings? Audio recordings, conveniently arranged into snippets for each agenda item, are now available online on the district's Web site. Although the online format isn't the easiest to access or particularly user-friendly for first-timers, it is an improvement over having to request your own copy of an audio or video recording.

To listen to the audio recordings of meetings since Sept. 20, go to the School District 's Web site (ccsd.net) and follow the links to the board meetings. Then click on "reference materials" for the meeting you wish to hear. After that, choose the agenda item from the left-hand column and click on the audio file icon.

Users of iTunes know the software automatically assigns a genre when audio files are downloaded - George Strait is country, Eric Clapton is rock, etc. One has to wonder if some Apple employee actually listened to a School Board meeting or if assigning the files to the "blues" category is just a lucky quirk. But few veterans of the Thursday night marathons would quibble with the choice.

• • •

Scam artists are attempting to capitalize on the ol' team spirit in neighborhoods surrounding Shadow Ridge High School.

For the record, the school's football team doesn't need new safety pads. And even if it did, players wouldn't go door to door asking for money to pay for the equipment, as some people are reportedly doing.

"It's ridiculous," said Bill Garis, athletic director for the Clark County School District. "Players have all the protective gear they need."

Garis catches wind of such scams three or four times a year, involving schools throughout the Las Vegas Valley. He occasionally gets calls from local businesses wondering whether a school is really selling ad space in a deluxe souvenir calendar with the season's line up . ( Usually it's not.)

District regulations discourage door-to-door soliciting by elementary school students. Most of the district's campus fundraisers ask students to sell items such as cookie dough or wrapping paper to their own families and immediate circle of friends. However, more enterprising youngsters are known to stake out entrances to grocery stores and knock on the doors of strangers' homes.

If you're unsure whether a fundraiser is on the up and up, Garis recommends contacting the school.

"We encourage everyone to ask, 'Is this legit ?' " Garis said. "That's the only way to shut these things down."

Engaging students with little known historical facts

Posted by Slim

Often students think that history is cut and dry, all the facts are known, and it is simply memorizing the facts. New information is always being discovered in history. Engaging students with the many mysteries of past events and little know facts are good ways to generate greater interest and deeper understanding.

The article below on why they called it the Manhattan Project is a high interest U.S. history hook.

New York Times

October 30, 2007

Why They Called It the Manhattan Project

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

By nature, code names and cover stories are meant to give no indication of the secrets concealed. “Magic” was the name for intelligence gleaned from Japanese ciphers in World War II, and “Overlord” stood for the Allied plan to invade Europe.

Many people assume that the same holds true for the Manhattan Project, in which thousands of experts gathered in the mountains of New Mexico to make the world’s first atom bomb.
Robert S. Norris, a historian of the atomic age, wants to shatter that myth.

In “The Manhattan Project” (Black Dog & Leventhal), published last month, Dr. Norris writes about the Manhattan Project’s Manhattan locations. He says the borough had at least 10 sites, all but one still standing. They include warehouses that held uranium, laboratories that split the atom, and the project’s first headquarters — a skyscraper hidden in plain sight right across from City Hall.

“It was supersecret,” Dr. Norris said in an interview. “At least 5,000 people were coming and going to work, knowing only enough to get the job done.”

Manhattan was central, according to Dr. Norris, because it had everything: lots of military units, piers for the import of precious ores, top physicists who had fled Europe and ranks of workers eager to aid the war effort. It even had spies who managed to steal some of the project’s top secrets.

“The story is so rich,” Dr. Norris enthused. “There’s layer upon layer of good stuff, interesting characters.”

Still, more than six decades after the project’s start, the Manhattan side of the atom bomb story seems to be a well-preserved secret.

Dr. Norris recently visited Manhattan at the request of The New York Times for a daylong tour of the Manhattan Project’s roots. Only one site he visited displayed a public sign noting its role in the epochal events. And most people who encountered his entourage, which included a photographer and videographer, knew little or nothing of the atomic labors in Manhattan.

“That’s amazing,” Alexandra Ghitelman said after learning that the buildings she had just passed on inline skates once held tons of uranium destined for atomic weapons. “That’s unbelievable.”

While shock tended to be the main reaction, some people hinted at feelings of pride. More than one person said they knew someone who had worked on the secret project, which formally got under way in August 1942 and three years later culminated in the atomic bombing of Japan. In all, it employed more than 130,000 people.

Dr. Norris is also the author of “Racing for the Bomb” (Steerforth, 2002), a biography of Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the project’s military leader. As his protagonist had done during the war, Dr. Norris works in Washington. At the Natural Resources Defense Council, he studies and writes about the nation’s atomic facilities.

Dr. Norris began his day of exploration by taking the train to New York from Washington, coming into Pennsylvania Station just as General Groves had done dozens of times during the war to visit project sites.

“Groves didn’t want the job,” Dr. Norris remarked outside the station. “But his foot hit the accelerator and he didn’t let up for 1,000 days.”

For tour assistance, Dr. Norris brought along his own books as well as printouts from “The Traveler’s Guide to Nuclear Weapons,” a CD by James M. Maroncelli and Timothy L. Karpin that features little-known history of the nation’s atom endeavors.

We headed north to the childhood home of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the eccentric genius whom General Groves hired to run the project’s scientific side as well as its sprawling New Mexico laboratory. Last year, a biography of Oppenheimer, “American Prometheus” (Knopf, 2005), won the Pulitzer Prize.

“One of the most famous scientists of the 20th century,” Dr. Norris noted, got his start “walking these streets” and attending the nearby Ethical Culture School.

Oppenheimer and his parents lived at 155 Riverside Drive, an elegant apartment building at West 88th Street. The superintendent, Joe Gugulski, said the family lived on the 11th floor, overlooking the Hudson River.

“One of my tenants read the book,” Mr. Gugulski told us. “So I looked it up.” To his knowledge, Mr. Gugulski added, no other atomic tourists had visited the building.

The Oppenheimers decorated their apartment with original artwork by Picasso, Rembrandt, Renoir, Van Gogh and Cézanne, according to “American Prometheus.” His mother encouraged young Robert to paint.

By the late 1930s and early 1940s, blocks away at Columbia University, scientists were laboring to split the atom and release its titanic energies. We made our way across campus — with difficulty because of protests over the visit of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, which is widely suspected of harboring its own bomb program.

Dr. Norris noted that the Manhattan Project led to “many of our problems today.”

The Pupin Physics Laboratories housed the early atom experiments, Dr. Norris said. But the tall building, topped by observatory domes, has no plaque in its foyer describing its nuclear ties.

Passing students and pedestrians answered “no” and “kind of” when asked if they knew of the atom breakthroughs at Pupin Hall. Dr. Norris said the Manhattan Project, at its peak, employed 700 people at Columbia. At one point, the football team was recruited to move tons of uranium. That work, he said, eventually led to the world’s first nuclear reactor.

After lunch, we headed to West 20th Street just off the West Side Highway. The block, on the fringe of Chelsea, bristled with new galleries, and Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses. On its north side, three tall buildings once made up the Baker and Williams Warehouses, which held tons of uranium.

Two women taking a cigarette break said they had no idea of their building’s atomic past. “It’s horrible,” said one.

Dr. Norris’s “Traveler’s Guide” fact sheet said the federal government in the late 1980s and early 1990s cleaned the buildings of residual uranium. Workers removed more than a dozen drums of radioactive waste, according to the Department of Energy in Washington. “Radiological surveys show that the site now meets applicable requirements for unrestricted use,” a federal document said in 1995.

We moved to Manhattan’s southern tip and worked our way up Broadway along the route known as the Canyon of Heroes, the scene of many ticker-tape parades amid the skyscrapers.
At 25 Broadway, we visited a minor but important site — the Cunard Building. Edgar Sengier, a Belgian with an office here, had his company mine about 1,200 tons of high-grade uranium ore and store it on Staten Island in the shadow of the Bayonne Bridge. Though a civilian, he knew of the atomic possibilities and feared the invading Germans might confiscate his mines.

Dr. Norris said General Groves, on his first day in charge, sent an assistant to buy all that uranium for a dollar a pound — or $2.5 million. “The Manhattan Project was off to a flying start,” he said, adding that the Belgian entrepreneur in time supplied two-thirds of all the project’s uranium.

We walked past St. Paul’s Chapel and proceeded to the soaring grandeur of the Woolworth Building, once the world’s tallest, at 233 Broadway.

A major site, it housed a front company that devised one of the project’s main ways of concentrating uranium’s rare isotope — a secret of bomb making. On the 11th, 12th and 14th floors, the company drew on the nation’s scientific best and brightest, including teams from Columbia.

Dr. Norris said the front company’s 3,700 employees included Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy. “He was a substantial physicist in his own right,” Dr. Norris said. “He contributed to the American atom bomb, the Soviet atom bomb and the British atom bomb.”

So how did the Manhattan Project get its name, and why was Manhattan chosen as its first headquarters?

Dr. Norris said the answer lay at our next stop, 270 Broadway. There, at Chambers Street, on the southwest corner, we found a nondescript building overlooking City Hall Park.

It was here, Dr. Norris said, that the Army Corps of Engineers had its North Atlantic Division, which built ports and airfields. When the Corps got the responsibility of making the atom bomb, it put the headquarters in the same building, on the 18th floor.

“That way he didn’t need to reinvent the wheel,” Dr. Norris said of General Groves. “He used what he had at his fingertips — the entire Corps of Engineers infrastructure.”

Dr. Norris added that the Corps at that time included “extraordinary people, the best and brightest of West Point.”

In time, the office at 270 Broadway ran not only atom research and materials acquisition but also the building of whole nuclear cities in Tennessee, New Mexico and Washington State.
The first proposed name for the project, Dr. Norris said, was the Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials. But General Groves feared that would draw undo attention.
Instead, General Groves called for the bureaucratically dull approach of adopting the standard Corps procedure for naming new regional organizations. That method simply noted the unit’s geographical area, as in the Pittsburgh Engineer District.

So the top-secret endeavor to build the atom bomb got the most boring of cover names: the Manhattan Engineer District, in time shortened to the Manhattan Project. Unlike other Corps districts, however, it had no territorial limits. “He was nuts about not attracting attention,” Dr. Norris said.

Manhattan’s role shrank as secretive outposts for the endeavor sprouted across the country and quickly grew into major enterprises. By the late summer of 1943, little more than a year after its establishment, the headquarters of the Manhattan Project moved to Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Despite this dispersal, Dr. Norris said, scientists and businesses in Manhattan, including The New York Times, continued to aid the atomic project.

In April 1945, General Groves traveled to the newspaper’s offices on West 43rd Street. He asked that a science writer, William L. Laurence, be allowed to go on leave to report on a major wartime story involving science.

As early as 1940, before wartime secrecy, Mr. Laurence had reported on the atomic breakthroughs at Pupin Hall.

Now, Dr. Norris said, Mr. Laurence went to work for the Manhattan Project and became the only reporter to witness the Trinity test in the New Mexican desert in July 1945, and, shortly thereafter, the nuclear bombing of Japan.

The atomic age, Mr. Laurence wrote in the first article of a series, began in the New Mexico desert before dawn in a burst of flame that illuminated “earth and sky for a brief span that seemed eternal.”

In Manhattan, the one location that has memorialized its atomic connection had nothing to do with making or witnessing the bomb, but rather with managing to survive its fury.

The spot is on Riverside Drive between 105th and 106th Streets. There, in a residential neighborhood, in front of the New York Buddhist Church, is a tall statue of a Japanese Buddhist monk, Shinran Shonin, who lived in the 12th and 13th centuries. In peasant hat and sandals, holding a wooden staff, the saint peers down on the sidewalk.

The statue survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, standing a little more than a mile from ground zero. It was brought to New York in 1955. The plaque calls the statue “a testimonial to the atomic bomb devastation and a symbol of lasting hope for world peace.”

The statue stands a few blocks from Columbia University, where much of the bomb program began.

“I wonder how many New Yorkers know about it,” Dr. Norris said of the statue, “and know the history.”

Technology also decreases student writing skills

Posted by Slim

I feel Cindi’s pain. While the use of laptops in Maine, see yesterday’s post, has been attributed to improving student writing, technology is a double edged sword. Sloppy English used by students in e-mails, IM’s, and over reliance on Spell check are undermining their writing development. It is a situation where student writing and research are improved by using computers to edit and reorganize information while at the same time eroding knowledge of English usage and grammar rules.

Technology WITH traditional English instruction and solid content will empower students. Technology INSTEAD of traditional English instruction and content will leave them debilitated. What say you?

Published: October 18, 2007

Teacher Magazine

Grammar Interrupted

By Cindi Rigsbee

I worry about the English language. Thanks to new advances in technology, the impact of pop culture, and the increasing focus on tested areas of our curriculum, the Queen’s English is in more trouble than ever before. Until someone develops a high-stakes test on the use of the past participle, will anyone really be interested in how well our students are writing and speaking?

First, let's talk about technology. Spellcheck has clearly made the world lazy. Students think they don’t need to learn the rules of spelling and grammar because one click will do it for them.

These same students (and my own children) are addicted to Instant Messaging. My son, who in high school struggled with attention issues in the classroom, could sit at his computer desk at night and carry on 16 simultaneous conversations. Those conversations did not include correctly spelled words or any attempt at punctuation; in fact, IM-speak is actually meant to be incorrect, just so long as it’s fast! For an example, check out this excerpt from a MySpace page that belongs to a student at my school:

"wut it do i ain't talked 2 u n a minute ever since da last day of skool fo christmas break wut been ^ 2 me nuttin jus sittin @ home ain't gone nuttin 2 do........well i wuz jus stoppin by 2 sho ur page sum luvin get baq @ me when u can"

Enough said on that subject.

Pop culture plays a part in the slow, painful torture of correct English in another way, too. Songs on the radio reinforce incorrect usage of grammar (and have for years). Take this oldie from the 80's:

"I feel the magic between you and I" (from Eric Carmen's "Hungry Eyes" on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack).

I ask you, would the songwriter say, "Give it to I, baby!"?

In "Brick House," The Commodores sang, “Ain’t nothing wrong with dat.” This usage of non-standard English for emphasis is actually less offensive. Eric Carmen's use of “I” as an object of the preposition is an ill-fated attempt to sound formal, which adds pretentiousness to the list of crimes committed here.

And don’t get me started on Pink Floyd’s “We Don’t Need No Education.” Ugh. Who says?

Nostalgia for Diagramming

In addition, there has been an enormous shift in our schools in the way they teach—or don’t teach—grammar. We feel those tests looming, hanging in the air over us, gray clouds of reality waiting to descend in mid-May. My students have heard the morning announcements: “There are 165 days left until the end-of-grade test.” (Would the students tell on me if I attacked the intercom speaker with my yardstick?) Focusing on tested areas of the curriculum has often resulted in teachers being forced to give up instruction they love, including the fine points of English grammar.

I remember teaching diagramming. Sentence diagrams were the granddaddy of graphic organizers. I took pride in drawing those precise lines and knowing exactly where to place the indirect object. They were like perfect puzzles, and those of us who mastered them felt like we had just figured out how to do calculus to the third derivative (I don’t even know what I just said).

Not only did I teach diagramming, I taught parts of speech and had students do random, isolated sentences. I did realize that those exercises never seemed to transfer to a student's casual writing and speaking. Just because students could identify pronouns in a sentence didn’t mean they stopped saying, “Me and her need to go to the bathroom.” But we had to start somewhere! Nowadays, however, there is little room in the curriculum for such time-intensive instruction.

The Art of the Mini-Lesson

So what do we do? Sit back and watch our language continue to deteriorate? I, for one, refuse to go down without a fight. Here’s how I’ve changed my teaching:

First of all, I teach short mini-lessons on grammar. Nancie Atwell (In the Middle), Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell (Guiding Readers and Writers), and Lucy Calkins (The Art of Teaching Writing) have touted the mini-lesson for years. It's a short lesson focused on a specific principle or procedure. And for me, it works wonders for those irritating grammatical problems.

So, I'll play a bit of "Hungry Eyes," then say, “Class, why is it improper to say, ‘between you and I?’ How do we usually use the pronoun ‘I’?” I have the students provide a couple of sentences for the overhead, and we have a grand musically enhanced discussion!

On another day, I might ask the students to explain the different ways we speak to one another. I hope they’ll tell me that we speak more informally with our friends—the mode Ruby Payne (in A Framework for Understanding Poverty) calls “casual register.” I explain that we write that way, too, on our MySpace pages and in our text messages. However, formal writing calls for adhering to the conventions—“Remember that discussion we had about pronouns?”

And last, I hit ‘em where they live. I pull out examples of those MySpace pages and ask students to write them over in standard English. I tell them, “This is not art. No symbols – I want words!” Most of the time, they rise to the expectations that are placed on them.

Oh, and one more thing: I challenge them to represent themselves as being intelligent writers and speakers. With luck, one of them will grow up to write the songs. And I won't have to struggle to keep my car on the road when I listen to the radio.

Cindi Rigsbee is a National Board-certified middle grades teacher in Durham, N.C., and a former North Carolina regional teacher of the year. She was a finalist for the Terry Sanford Award for Creativity and Innovation in Teaching.

Classroom Voices

Posted by Slim

The Los Angeles Times has an interesting educators’ blog, The Homeroom, allowing teachers to raise and discuss the issues they face in the classroom. As an example, I’m posting the strand about the plagiarism problem a young teacher published and a few of the comments from other teachers. The anonymous comment telling her to “get over it” is puzzling and demonstrates not all comments are thoughtful, but many provided perspective and good advice. I agree and practice giving a “0”, major goose egg, for plagiarized papers.

The Homeroom

Plagiarism

Lauren McCabe writes:

As I sat at the airport last weekend, grading my students’ summer reading essays and waiting to take off, I was angry. Not because of the tardiness of my flight, but because I was looking at 15 plagiarized essays from my seniors, seniors who knew better. They had all summer to read a book and write this five-paragraph essay on any topic they wanted. After I read over two essays and saw the exact same words, sentences and paragraphs, it wasn't hard to figure out that these papers had been copied.

After talking with some of my colleagues over the weekend, I learned that plagiarism wasn’t a new concept at my school, Environmental Charter High School, and that most of the students on my list had turned in plagiarized work in the past. I began to wonder why students plagiarize. Could it really be that they were just too lazy to write their own papers? And the essay they turned in and tried to pass as their own was of very low quality. Didn’t they have respect for themselves and their abilities?

While I was venting my frustration to an administrator at my school, he offered a bit of insight into the community I teach in and he grew up in. He explained that the major battle these students are fighting every day does not necessarily come from an external source, but from within. The inferiority complex is a constant war within our students. They “dumbed down” their essays to a level so far below their actual writing abilities because they thought it would be more believable to me that way. They ran away from this challenge because they didn’t believe they could achieve on their own.

This is not to say “poor babies” or to give excuses for blatant plagiarism, but I think it is important to understand the mindsets with which our students walk into the classroom every day and ways by which we can expand those views. Pure laziness is only one possibility of many for explaining why students plagiarize, as is the inferiority complex. But until we consider all of the possibilities and stop labeling students, we will never solve the issue. Malleable intelligence, the concept of intelligence not being fixed, will be the first topic of discussion that I start off with in my next class.

Comments

Lauren, I understand why you may want to analyze why your students plagiarize, but resist the temptation to do this and just give them a 0. Put as much effort into the grading as they put into the paper.

This is simply immaturity, laziness and seeing if they could get away with it....
Here is what I do...I don't make a big deal about it. I just put a 0 on their papers and write, " Same as Julie's paper; 0 same as David's paper" I don't moralize, I don't lecture, I don't call their parents. It takes me 10 seconds to write it on the paper. I usually never have a plagiarism issue again.

I'm sure you gave your students the option to contact you should they run into difficulty and provided an email or phone number, so there really are no excuses for the plagiarism.

Again, in high school ,students must pass a class to move on to the next grade level , not like in middle school, which is another reason they are turning in poor quality work.

One practical thing you can do and you may already be doing this for students who have trouble structuring an essay is to write out five to seven sample topic sentences for each essay: The background sentence, thesis sentence and 3 to 5 supporting topic sentences and a concluding sentences and have them "build" the essay. This way they have a template to begin using. Santa Monica High School has a website with a paper called the "Sweet Sixteens of Good Writing" It is a helpful handout with sixteen boxes that offer tips on good writing.

Another hint, don't leave the topic wide open but give them five or six options. They still have choice but also have something concrete about which to write. Did you connect the essay to the book they were reading? This way they have to read the book to write about it in the essay.

Great job giving a summer assigment as you are way ahead of the game in knowing a little about each student and their work ethic. It also gives you information that allows you to adjust and correct what you want in your upcoming reading and essay assignments which puts you way ahead of the game. Keep it up!

Posted by: evelyn

EVERYONE DOES IT!! GET OVER IT ALREADY!!

Posted by: Anonymous

15 seniors plagiarized an essay? The same one?

This is not your fault. It is a break down in the system. This is learned behavior that has most likely happened in the past without consequence.

In any serious academic institution, plagiarism is a serious offense. I hear you saying that the administrator, in sentiment, excused the behavior. Why didn't the administrator offer to come to your class and deal with this problem so you can focus your mind and energy on curricular and instructional issues?

I don't want to be too cynical, but I can guess at the answer. First, the system emphasizes attendance and seat time. Any serious discipline must have the possibility of suspension as its ultimate consequence. Administrators hate suspensions because it takes away from attendance and makes the school's discipline statistics look bad.

I like the advice of evelyn. Don't moralize on the issue, but absolutely don't accept plagiarism. The students will figure it out for themselves. You can focus on being the best English teacher you can be, and model professionalism to the students. Too many teachers stray the academic path in an attempt to be life coaches.

Posted by: David

It isn't just underprivileged high school students. Plagiarism is a plague at all levels, including very ritzy universities populated by kids from upper-middle class homes. So, don't buy the excuses, get yourself a subscription to turnitin.com, and remember that by being tough now, you can save a plagiarist a lot of pain in the future if they manage to get into college. Unless there are serious consequences now, they will keep on doing it, each time they're caught telling the teacher that they didn't know.

The pattern of plagiarism that I've heard about is that in this internet age, the kids often have really bad process for their writing. So, you'll see a lone plagiarized sentence in a single paragraph, or you'll find that the student's work is a strange hybrid of original and plagiarized work, even when hunting down the material to plagiarize and weaving it into a coherent text must actually have been more work. They need extremely explicit instruction in how to write and how to include citations. You might want to explain to them that using citations impresses the teacher, because it demonstrates that you've done a lot of research.

Posted by: Amy P

Addressing ELL in the shadow of NCLB

Posted by Slim

Many school districts in Nevada are struggling with large numbers of ELL students. Questions have been raised regarding the effectiveness of Reading First and the need to refine it as the main federal tool to deal with ELL students.

Published Online: October 22, 2007

Education Week

Reading Aid Seen to Lag in ELL Focus

By Mary Ann Zehr

Educators and experts across the country who work with English-language learners are moving toward a consensus that the federal Reading First program needs to be refined to become more effective for children acquiring English.

Administrators in several big-city districts with large numbers of such students are stepping up their training of teachers on how best to teach second-language learners to read under the No Child Left Behind Act’s flagship reading program, which serves grades K-3.

Last school year, the 410,000-student Chicago public school system established a new position at the district level for a bilingual specialist to coach teachers at the city’s 17 Reading First schools with large numbers of ELLs on how to tailor reading instruction to such students.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, where 38 percent of the 708,000 students are ELLs, started an institute for Reading First teachers this school year on reading strategies for ELLs.
And since last school year the 1.1 million-student New York City school system has been providing workshops and coaching to Reading First teachers and administrators on the same topic.

The U.S. Department of Education’s 11-member Reading First Advisory Committee has enough concerns about whether ELLs are getting what they need under the $1 billion-a-year program that it set up a subcommittee to look into the issue last week, according to Kris D. Gutiérrez, a committee member and a professor of social-research methodology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“My opinion is we have a long ways to go to meet the needs of English-language learners under the current policies and practices of Reading First,” Ms. Gutiérrez said. Among the program’s problems, she said, are that students’ reading skills are tested before they learn English, the literacy curriculum is too narrow, and teachers are not prepared to work with ELLs.

Education Department officials, asked last week if Reading First is working for ELLs, said “state-reported annual performance data show that many Reading First sites are showing improvements in reading fluency and comprehension for their English-language-learner students,” according to an e-mail message from Elaine Quesinberry, a spokeswoman for the department.

New Language

Concern about how to refine reading instruction for English-language learners also has spread to Capitol Hill.

A draft bill to reauthorize the NCLB law, put forth by the House Education and Labor Committee, calls for Reading First programs to be “linguistically appropriate”—a term not included in the current federal education law.

Rep. Rubén Hinojosa, a Texas Democrat and a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, was one of the lawmakers who helped get the phrase into the draft, according to Elizabeth Esfahani, his press secretary. The phrase is mentioned 11 times in the draft.

A number of reading experts and educators said that even though “linguistically appropriate” is a vague phrase, its addition to the law would likely be beneficial for English-learners.

“The advantage of the new [legislative] language is it’s going to nudge states and districts, as they submit their plans, to stress more how teacher training and coaching will lead to teaching English-language development better,” said Russell Gersten, the executive director of the Instructional Research Group, an educational research institute in Long Beach, Calif.
Mr. Gersten headed a panel for the Education Department to write a“practice guide” for education of English-language learners, released in July, and has been a consultant for Houghton Mifflin Company’s reading textbooks.

Margarita Calderón, a professor and research scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, agrees with others who say Reading First has not worked well for ELLs. The additional language “would be an improvement,” she said, “because schools will have to be accountable and show they are doing this in a linguistically appropriate way.”

But, aside from agreeing on the need for more teacher training, educators’ views of how Reading First needs to be improved sometimes contradict each other, particularly on whether students’ native languages should be used to teach reading.

Mr. Gersten said teachers should teach English structures, such as “compare and contrast” or “cause and effect,” and help students practice them. It’s also helpful for teachers to preview reading lessons with students to ensure that they know what a story is about, he said. Pictures or Web sites can be useful for previewing, Mr. Gersten noted.

But he said it would be a mistake for the words “linguistically appropriate” to steer schools to use students’ native languages for reading instruction. He hasn’t found studies concluding that bilingual education is more effective than English-only methods to be persuasive.

On the other hand, Miriam Calderón, who is not related to Margarita Calderón and is a policy analyst at the Washington-based National Council of La Raza, said her group lobbied members of Congress to add linguistically appropriate to Reading First particularly for that purpose.

And Johns Hopkins’ Margarita Calderón believes that including the term “linguistically appropriate” in the law could encourage the teaching of reading to ELLs through their native languages at the same time they are learning English.

Varying State Policies

While reading experts favored the proposed changes in Reading First for ELLs, state education officials in several states with large populations of English-learners were indifferent. Officials in Arizona, California, and New Jersey all said they already are implementing Reading First in a linguistically appropriate way.

Their approaches, all approved by the Education Department, differ widely, however. State plans vary in how they implement the Reading First program for English-language learners.

Arizona

• Requires instruction and materials to be in English.

• No approved list of materials school districts must choose from.

California

• Requires school districts to select materials from an approved list that includes textbooks in Spanish and English. No separate textbooks designed for English-language learners.

• No separate block of time for English-language development.

New Jersey

• Requires that schools provide reading instruction in Spanish if they have a critical mass of Spanish speakers who are ELLs.

• Requires school districts to select materials from an approved list that includes textbooks in Spanish and English and has separate English-language development textbooks tailored for ELLs.

• In addition to the regular 90-minute reading block, schools must teach English-language development to ELLs for a minimum of 30 minutes each day.

SOURCES: State education departments in Arizona, California, and New Jersey

New Jersey, for instance, requires that Reading First schools provide instruction to ELLs in Spanish, while Arizona requires that all Reading First instruction be in English. California permits schools to use Spanish instruction for Reading First in bilingual classrooms that meet state restrictions for using that educational method.

New Jersey also requires schools to select Reading First materials from an approved list that includes core materials in Spanish or English and has separate materials for teaching English-language development to ELLs.

But California has not adopted separate materials for ELLs, and the state board of education’s refusal to enable such an adoption is controversial. In the state’s next adoption process, however, textbook publishers will have to meet specified criteria to address the needs of ELLs. For example, they will need to provide ideas for teachers to preview reading lessons for ELLs.
Shelly Spiegel-Coleman, the executive director of Californians Tomorrow, a coalition of 17 groups that advocate in behalf of ELLs, said the increasing gap in reading achievement in California between native speakers of English and ELLs demonstrates that the nearly 6-year-old Reading First program isn’t working.

As evidence, she said the achievement gap in reading between native speakers of English and ELLs in Los Angeles schools, the state’s school system with the most ELLs, has stayed the same or widened from last year to this year at every grade level tested. Ms. Spiegel-Coleman, who just retired as director of the multilingual-academic-support unit of the Los Angeles County Office of Education, criticized the Open Court Reading materials used for the program, and also said the instruction gave students little chance to practice English. The core language arts series is published by SRA/McGraw-Hill.

Julie Slayton, the executive director of strategic planning and accountability for the Los Angeles school district, said the Open Court materials are high-quality, but noted that the quality of instruction “varies widely.”

David L. Brewer III, the superintendent for LAUSD, said in an e-mail message that, like any other materials, Open Court “gets results when skillful teachers use it properly.” He said the Open Court program “will need to be modified somewhat to better accommodate ELL students, especially teacher professional development,” which he expects to happen in the next textbook-adoption cycle.

The addition of the phrase “linguistically appropriate” to the federal education law, Ms. Spiegel-Coleman believes, would force California officials and school districts to do more for ELLs.
“California has a reading initiative, and Reading First is just more of the same—more assessments, coaches, more intensity, more monitoring.” She added, “You can’t do the same old thing. If you have kids who don’t speak English in Reading First who aren’t doing well, you have to do something else.”

Technology increasing student writing skills

Posted by Slim

Maine has a creative program to improve student writing with laptops. A follow up study seems to support the program as being effective.

Published Online: October 24, 2007

Maine’s Laptops Found to Aid Writing Scores

By The Associated Press

Maine’s program to give every 7th and 8th grade student a laptop computer is leading to better writing. 4real!

Despite creating a language all their own using e-mail and text messages, students are still learning standard English, and their writing scores improved on the state’s standardized writing test in 2005 compared with 2000, before laptop computers were distributed, according to a new study.

Students’ writing skills were higher whether they took the online or pen-and-paper version of the state test. Yet students who said they use laptops in more phases of the writing process scored significantly higher than students who use them in fewer phases or not at all, the study found.

“If you concentrate on whether laptops are helping kids achieve 21st-century skills, this demonstrates that it’s happening in writing,” said David L. Silvernail, the director of the Maine Education Policy Research Institute at the University of Southern Maine in Gorham.

The study by Mr. Silvernail and Aaron K. Gritter is the first in a series that aims to evaluate the impact on student achievement and learning of Maine’s first-in-the-nation laptop program. Next year, the researchers plan to release a study on the laptops’ impact in math instruction.

The laptop program, which seeks to eliminate the “digital divide” between poor and wealthy students, kicked off with distribution of more than 30,000 computers to 7th and 8th graders in public schools in 2002 and 2003. Their teachers also received laptops, as well as training in how to use them in instruction.

The study focused on 8th graders’ scores on the Maine Educational Assessment to see if the standardized-test results backed up perceptions among students and teachers that laptops have led to better writing skills.

State Commissioner of Education Sue Gendron said it represents the first concrete evidence backing up what most educators already feel: The laptop program, known as the Maine Learning Technology Initiative, is working.

“It’s about enhancing learning opportunities, and the evidence and the data we’ve received in this report substantiates that this is the right approach,” she said.

Honing Language Skills

Maine Education Assessment scores show that 49 percent of 8th graders were proficient in writing in 2005, compared with 29 percent in 2000.

The gain wasn’t just a function of taking the writing portion of the test using a computer and keyboard. Students who used pen and paper and students who used a computer keyboard showed similar improvement on the test, Mr. Silvernail said.

For the same period, math scores were unchanged, and science scores grew by 2 points, while reading scores actually dropped by 3 points, Mr. Silvernail said. Writing showed the biggest improvement—7 points, from 530 to 537, he said.

Mr. Silvernail said it is unrealistic to expect big increases on standardized tests tied to laptops, but writing is the exception.

Laptops make it easier for students to edit their copy and make changes, he said. And it was important, he said, that those skills translated when the test was taken with pen and paper.
Students who, in a survey that accompanied the 2005 test, reported using their laptops in all phases of the writing process were twice as likely to have met proficiency than students who said they did not use their laptops in writing, the study found.

Virginia Rebar, the principal of Piscataquis Community Middle School, was not surprised by the results, because language skills are being developed every time the computers are used, in social studies and other subjects beyond language arts.

“It’s just a lot easier to edit, to self-critique. Our teachers engage students in a lot of peer-editing. Not only are they helping themselves, but they’re helping each other as they get to their final projects,” she said.

Are the NSEA and CCEA acting in desperation?

Posted by Slim

This Las Vegas Sun article raises the question of whether the initiative against gaming really reflects the NSEA’s legislative failures and lack of representing teachers’ interests. Can the NSEA pull off distracting the voters and teachers at the same time while taking on Nevada’s most powerful industry? It will be a neat trick worthy of any Las Vegas magician show if they can do it.

October 11, 2007

Silver lining as well as green in tax push

Teachers union gets wiggle room against rival

By Michael J. Mishak

Las Vegas Sun

The Nevada State Education Association's push to boost taxes on gaming offers the union an advantage on another front. The tax plan provides leverage as the association tries to fend off a rival union.

The education association is locked in a struggle with Teamsters Local 14, which is campaigning to represent Clark County teachers. To win, the Teamsters must persuade more than half of those teachers to oust the education association as their representative.

But the association has painted the Teamsters into something of a corner by asking voters to boost the gaming tax so the state could grant teachers a raise.

The Teamsters local and two of its sister locals have workers spread throughout the gaming industry. The union is likely to oppose the higher taxes, which would leave it working to defeat a statewide ballot initiative whose purpose is to help teachers.

The Teamsters said Wednesday they will continue their organizing campaign and predicted the education association would fail to raise gaming taxes.

The association needs to secure nearly 60,000 signatures to place an initiative on the statewide ballot in 2008. If it's approved, voters would need to pass it again in 2010. The association seeks to bump the tax on gaming revenue from 6.75 percent to 9.75 percent.

The association's proposal is the latest in a series of hurdles facing the Teamsters local. From the outset, the union faced the challenge of organizing a largely apathetic and transient membership. Fifty percent of Clark County's teachers typically leave within five years. Also working against the Teamsters is the absence of a record of ever representing public educators.

The Teamsters originally expected their organizing drive would last through most of 2008. But the education association and Teamsters recently agreed to shrink the timeline. The campaign is now expected to conclude by the end of next month.

To be sure, the teachers union has weaknesses, and the Teamsters clearly see an opening. Members are frustrated by years of small raises and saw their union as largely ineffectual in this year's legislative session.

Education lobbyists made the mistake of going around Assembly Democrats to cut a deal with Senate Republicans on education funding. The move irritated the teachers' natural allies and could mean less clout with Assembly Democrats in future Legislatures - not a comforting thought.

The Teamsters say the education association's leadership is now lashing out at the most powerful interest in Nevada - the gaming industry - to deflect attention from its failures.

Ron Taylor, a district teacher who launched a grass-roots effort to decertify the education association and now works for Teamsters Local 14, said the tax proposal was a direct response to the Teamsters organizing effort, which he said is picking up steam.

"It's obvious this action was done because of us," Taylor said. "The NSEA is trying to protect their cash cow - the Clark County Education Association. They have no shot, but this is a way to tell teachers, 'We're fighting for you.' It's transparent."

The state education association represents more than 18,000 teachers across Nevada, including about 13,000 in Clark County.

The Teamsters say they have collected more than 2,000 signed authorization cards. The union needs 7,500 cards by the end of November to make the case for an election, which, if sanctioned by the state labor board, could take place next spring, said Gary Mauger, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 14.

As for the teachers union tax plan, Mauger said he would consult with the Teamsters executive board and the Nevada AFL-CIO before rendering judgment. Still, he added, "Going and putting the burden on the hand that feeds you sometimes doesn't make for a good way to go."

Richard Hurd, a labor expert at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, said the gaming tax proposal could galvanize the teachers union, slowing - if not killing - the Teamsters' momentum.

"It could be that what the education association is doing now is attempting to demonstrate that they have the potential to deliver," Hurd said.

Terry Hickman , the education association's executive director, said the union's plan was purely a response to a state that chronically underfunds education. Nevada ranks 49th in the nation in education spending.

"It's not enough to complain," Hickman said. "If you are not solution-based, get out of the way. Any association that opposes funding for our kids, I wonder what their values are."
And yet, the teachers union is going it alone.

Danny Thompson, executive secretary-treasurer of the Nevada AFL-CIO, said the 200,000-strong labor federation would vote on the teachers' tax plan, but he said support was unlikely. The AFL-CIO supports the Teamsters organizing effort.

"We support broadening the tax base away from one industry," Thompson said. "If you raise the gaming tax without raising others' taxes, you increase your dependency even more."

We are with the union and are not here to help

Posted by Slim

Chip Mosher shares a detailed anecdote about how the CCEA fails to represent a dues paying teacher. The union’s answer is “let them eat cake” or in this case literally “bend over.”

Sad to say

by Chip Mosher

Las Vegas City Life

October 11, 2007

THE TEACHER WAS ON THE PHONE asking a simple question. What happened to his arbitration hearing regarding the issue of a rogue administrator severely punishing him for doing the right thing? On the other end of the line, a Clark County Education Association (teachers' faux union) representative, Steven Horner, confessed confusion as to why, after nearly four years, the arbitration hadn't been held, since the average turnaround time to conduct such an independent hearing was 12 to 18 months. He said he'd find the problem and promised to call the teacher back with his case's status.

The teacher never heard back from Horner. Following multiple failed attempts to contact him again by phone and e-mail, the teacher finally gave up in a despair common to teachers who've had to rely on their faux union for such amateurish support in labor disputes.

Months later, the teacher ran into the evasive Horner at a picnic and, because they'd never met, introduced himself. The conversation went something like this:

"Yes, I know who you are," said Horner.

"Why didn't you call me back, as you promised to, about my arbitration that simply vanished into thin air?" asked the teacher.

"Because my boss told me not to contact you. I was just following orders," he answered.

"Like the Nazis?" the teacher said.

"Hey. Even you teachers have to bend over for your jobs on occasion, too," explained Horner.

"Only because teachers have been stuck with the Clark County Education Association to represent them against the school district," the teacher replied.

With that, Horner turned and walked away. How do I know this? Because I was the teacher.

That was last spring. This past week Horner's name popped up again at a local school. Recently, much to the amazement of many veteran teachers, their faux union is surprisingly showing up on campuses, trying to improve its decade-long image as an absentee, ineffective union. Sadly, though, this is not to fix its chronic incompetence, but rather the union is suddenly erecting a false front of concern for teachers -- in order to counter Teamsters Local Union 14, which also is vying for the right to represent the valley's teachers.

As part of the faux union's propaganda push, Horner was scheduled to appear at a school where, for teachers, he was a no-show. Exhausted teachers waited for him long after the school day ended. They had questions. Serious questions. Yet he didn't arrive. In his defense, Horner has said he came to the school's cafeteria, but didn't know exactly where to go for the meeting. After going to the main office, he apparently didn't possess the mental acuity to phone or page his female contact at the school, about where the meeting was. It was in her room, where the tired teachers were waiting, seemingly for Godot. Or, for a union to finally represent their interests.

And Horner's explanation?

"I did arrive at 2:05 and tried to check in no one [sic] was at the front desk however [sic] the AP [assistant principal's] secretary gave me directions, [sic] I will gladly reschedule at your convenience" [sic], Horner wrote to an unhappy teacher.

Note the shaky grammar.

Last year another teacher, being brutally terminated by the district, had been represented by Horner. Although she'd had many years of excellent evaluations in the L.A. Unified School District, this was her probationary year teaching in Clark County. Here, according to her, she'd been railroaded by a mean-spirited, vindictive principal -- a common occurrence in the district. Her contention was supported by several colleagues.

"I have called numerous times and I have not received any response to my inquiries regarding my termination. I am requesting a phone call from my union representative," she e-mailed Horner.

Days later, Horner e-mailed back: "As i told at our last meeting once the letter of non-renewal is issued then I turn over the documents to the lawyers. They will handle the the issues"

Again, note the grammar. This, from a man who represents teachers against district lawyers in disciplinary hearings.

The unlucky teacher, now gone from the district, responded to Horner: "That's the point. There have been no additional meetings, nor have you responded to my phone calls since the notice of my non-renewal."

Unfortunately, the elusive Steven Horner typifies the representation too many teachers get from their faux union, the Clark County Education Association. Sad to say.

Chip Mosher is a simple classroom teacher and faux union member.

We have access to your files?

Posted by Slim

Chip Mosher recounts CCEA president’s chilling statement and backpedaling on Las Vegas television.

The rest is silence

by Chip Mosher

Las Vegas City Life

October 4, 2007

DEAR READER, I wanted to avoid the banality of school district issues this week by writing about the passing of French mime Marcel Marceau, and dead Buddhist monks on the streets of Myanmar. By writing about the death of such beautiful silence and, again, about the death of such beautiful silence. But not to be. C'est la vie.

Instead, I made the mistake of viewing local journalist Jon Ralston's gripping TV show Face To Face, which this past week featured leaders of two unions vying to represent teachers' interests in Las Vegas. Mary Ella Holloway, president of the Clark County Education Association -- teachers' current faux union -- verbally squared off against teacher Ron Taylor, a spokesperson for Teamsters Local Union 14.

The program started out predictably enough, each participant rhetorically jabbing and parrying politely, with both scoring minor points. Until halfway through the all-too-short 15-minute debate -- when Holloway, attempting to forensically sucker-punch Taylor, blurted out a doozy.

"We have access to his files," said Holloway, sounding and looking like J. Edgar Hoover in drag, while trying to discredit Taylor, a former member of her union.

Preceding and provoking this incendiary comment, the pit-bull-like host Ralston quoted, from an old news report, the executive director of the teachers' faux union, John Jasonek, who'd disparagingly said that Taylor had worked at five different local schools. But Taylor, a sought-after computer expert, responded -- honestly, it seemed -- that it was really six schools, in 15 years, where he was recruited by principals for his expertise.

On a video news clip, the faux union's Executive Director Jasonek, to trash Taylor, said: "Instead of being some righteous effort to make change from within, his [Taylor's] goal was to land a job with the Teamsters."

It's an odd statement from the top man at the teachers' faux union. Why? Because, according to inside sources, Jasonek led an effort last year to successfully oust Ron Taylor from this union, due to Taylor's efforts to create change inside the union -- the one which provides the bread and butter of Jasonek's documented personal financial affluence.

Following this insightful news clip, the debate took a turn toward the heart of the matter facing local teachers. This was the dialogue:

Ralston: You're just trying to hurt his (Taylor's) credibility, aren't you?

Holloway: We have access to his files -- but we can't talk about it.

Taylor: You have access to my files? You have access to my personnel files?

Holloway: No, no, no. The ones that are-- I-- I-- when CCEA--

Ralston: You see why he's so upset, if you have access to his personnel files? And it's said the school district is in bed with you--

Holloway: Please. Please. Please, Jon. It's not the personnel files. It's the files we have at CCEA when we do business with our-- with our people.

Ralston: That would have nothing to do with whether he's recruited by the principal of one of these schools or not.

Holloway: I think it would tell why he's changed schools so many times.

Whoops. After admitting she had access to Taylor's files and that she "can't talk about it," Holloway actually spoke about Taylor's files. "I think it would tell why he's changed schools so many times," she unethically said to Ralston. Thus, in her floundering, she ignored her own words and, even worse, Taylor's right to privacy.

On top of that, Holloway's weak implication that there was something nefarious about Taylor because of his "files" does little more than make a veteran teacher laugh. To many of those who have been around the school district a while, it is believed that many devious principals have often tried to keep good teachers in their schools by poisoning those teachers' personnel folders with outright lies. It's a pattern of Clark County School District ruthlessness against which the faux union's leadership, Holloway and Jasonek specifically, has consistently failed to protect teachers. Together, Holloway and Jasonek have bungled guarding the salaries and rights of Las Vegas teachers for most of a decade.

And during that time, 5,000 new teachers have disappeared from the district every five years. With the quietude of mimes. Or the silence of dead monks. Each with his own horror story to tell about those in charge, who, apparently, have had access to their files. C'est la vie.

Chip Mosher is a simple classroom teacher and faux union member.

The other transition: elementary to middle school tips

Posted by Slim

As the previous post asks what goes wrong in the middle school to high school transition, this post offers sage tips for teachers in handling the elementary to middle school transition.

Published: October 3, 2007

Teaching Secrets: Organizing Middle Schoolers

By Laurie Wasserman

Teacher Magazine

What characteristic is most common among brand-new middle school students? It's not a physical trait (they come in an amazing assortment of shapes and sizes) or an emotional state (adolescents are famous for their mood swings). What they most have in common is this: They are disorganized. And why wouldn't they be? In most cases, new 6th graders have spent their first five years of school with a single teacher for the majority of the day. They entered elementary school each morning, hung up their coats, and stowed away their lunch boxes. Their homework, pencils, lunch money, and personal gear were stuffed in a nearby book bag or in their desk. Their textbooks were neatly stacked in a single, familiar classroom. Now, suddenly, they're middle schoolers, and the world's turned upside down.

They are given a combination lock, a hallway locker, a homeroom, and a schedule that often has four or more subject-area teachers whom they will see on any given day. There's more work to do – and more teachers who expect them to do it. This is where the child with significant organizational challenges becomes both overwhelmed and frustrated.

As educators, what can we do to support these students who often come to our classrooms without their necessary materials and homework assignments? Here are some tips from my special education classroom that can help any student bring order to chaos.

Agenda Books – If a school can provide each child with an agenda or assignment book, this is a terrific, consistent strategy. There are companies that sell them for $5 or less. Teachers can begin their classes by asking students to take out their agenda notebooks, and then write the next homework assignment on the board as students jot it down. In my own classroom, I stroll around the room checking to make sure each of my students has copied the assignment down correctly and written it in the right place (middle schoolers will often write it in the wrong day – or month!). If funds aren't available to purchase agenda books, I’ve run off assignment checklists on the copy machine and distributed them each Monday in stapled sets of five. It’s not as ideal, but still quite feasible.

Schoolnotes.com – This is a free Internet tool that allows educators to post our assignments online. All a parent or student needs to do is go to the site (from home or a public library) and type in their zip code. Any teacher who uses the service will be listed in alphabetical order, under the name of the school, and by grade or subject. Teachers can also provide their school email address, in case a parent or student needs homework clarification at night or wants to send a document when there's no printer available. Many parents who have Internet access at their jobs welcome the opportunity to check their child’s next-day assignments before they leave work. Imagine the look on their child’s face the first time mom or dad asks them if they brought home their study guides for tomorrow’s science test!

Preparation Grade – As a strategy to promote organization, I count preparation as part of my students' overall subject grade. I allow them to go to their lockers, if they forget a book or a pencil. But each trip to the locker costs them 1 point from their preparation grade. It sounds harsh (and most of my students have ADD/ADHD), but I find if they know my policy ahead of time, and I’m consistent with it, they learn by trial and error. I also loan them pencils, but ask for a sneaker as collateral. Their missing sneaker helps them to remember to return the pencil as they leave the room.

The Absent-Student Crate – I print assignments out and place them in a 3-ring binder titled "Schoolnotes," which resides in the Absent-Student Crate. This gives the kids a running record of what assignments they have missed while they were out. I also keep a 3-ring binder for each subject I teach, with the various handouts I have distributed, so the students have an archive to reference. I keep track of who's absent by asking the student who is passing out papers to write the names of any absentee on the handout and place it in an accordion folder also kept in the crate. When the absent child returns, I remind him or her to check the crate for any handouts or incomplete assignments. Basically, I'm modeling good organization for my kids.

The I.O.U. Board – I have an I.O.U area on my board with the assignments students owe me (with their names listed below each assignment). If a child is absent during a test, or owes me a project, he or she can immediately see their debt. In my special ed classes, I also use this for students who owe work to their mainstream teachers.

The TEAM Homework Area – I keep a running list of all homework assigned by the teachers on my 6th grade teams. The students can refer to this board if they've forgotten to copy any assignments down in other classes. I also utilize this board for my regular-education homeroom students.

Pocket folders, a cheap way to help kids – An inexpensive way for students to keep track of various written assignments they need to complete is to take a 2-pocket folder, available at any office supply store, and label the left side with “To Do” and the right side with “Completed.” They are ONLY allowed to put works-in-progress in this pocket folder. Once the assignments have been completed, the work can be transferred to the appropriate binders or notebooks that the teacher may require.

A final thought: Kids will be kids. It’s hard sometimes to realize that students don’t deliberately misplace papers, forget pencils, or lose track of assignments. They just don't have our experience or habits of mind. It’s our job to teach them the tools and strategies for getting organized and feeling successful.

Laurie Wasserman is a 6th grade special educator in Medford, Massachusetts. A National Board Certified Teacher, she works with students who have learning disabilities, both in self-contained and mainstream classrooms.

Break in the education pipeline: middle school to high school

Posted by Slim

Many of us have seen first-hand the majority of students dropping out are in the 9th and 10th grades in Nevada. The study below confirms this nationally. What is it in your opinion that accounts for a large number students being unable to transition from the middle school into high school? Is it because students do not at first understand the credit system and it being too late when they do, being passed along in earlier grades, lack of Career and Technical Education, the nature of middle school preparation, or other factors in play? We would like to know what you think.

Ninth Grade is Key in Graduation Pipeline

Education Week

By Sterling C. Lloyd

In 2007, an estimated 1.2 million students failed to earn high school diplomas with their graduating class. Given that high school graduates, on average, enjoy higher earnings and require fewer government services than non-graduates, the costs of dropping out are high for both individuals and the nation as a whole. As a result, effective interventions that help keep students in school are likely to pay significant dividends. This is especially true if they successfully target those most at risk of dropping out. This Stat of the Week examines the high school pipeline in order to find the point at which the most students are lost.

The 2007 edition of Education Week's annual Diplomas Count report analyzes the high school graduation process as a series of grade-to-grade promotions using the Cumulative Promotion Index. The CPI allows researchers to pinpoint where, in the high school pipeline, students are lost. The results show that the 9th grade is the leading source of student loss. In fact, more than one-third of non-graduates, in the class of 2003-04, failed to make the transition from 9th to 10th grade. This finding suggests that programs to increase graduation rates may need to help 9th graders get off to a good start in high school.

Where are students lost?

Nationally, more than one-third of the students lost from the high school pipeline failed to move from 9th to 10th grade.

Understanding the causes underlying freshman-year loss could be crucial for improving the prospects of youth at-risk of dropping out. To that end, a July 2007 report from the Consortium on Chicago School Research identified four predictors of whether Chicago public high school students would graduate within four years. The researchers found that 9th graders were more likely to graduate on time if they: (1) remained on-track (by accumulating at least ten semester credits and earning no more than one semester "F" in a core academic course), (2) earned higher GPAs, (3) failed fewer semester course, and (4) had fewer absences.

The report notes that, "for many students, freshman year is like a bottleneck" where sub par academic performance puts them so far behind that they are unable to catch up. This finding about the 9th grade underscores the importance of reform strategies designed to assist students early in high school. The Chicago researchers suggest that interventions such as summer school and tutoring programs would be more effective by targeting students who fail one to four courses in the freshman year.

Landmark study reveals proficiency illusion

Posted by Slim

The Thomas Fordham Foundation has released today its study showing states have very different levels in determining what is proficient in math and reading. These states even have different levels of difficulty within a subject by not properly aligning and calibrating difficulty levels from grade to grade. Nevada’s scores for 2006 are:

Reading 3 5 8
Raw Reported 51% 39% 51%
Calibrated 51% 46% 44%

Mathematics 3 5 8
Raw Reported 51% 45% 51%
Calibrated 51% 41% 39%

Properly calibrating these scores based on the Fordham study reveals Nevada’s hidden decline in reading and mathematics from the 3rd to 8th grade.

The Proficiency Illusion


by John Cronin, Michael Dahlin, Deborah Adkins, G. Gage Kingsbury
10/04/2007


"The Proficiency Illusion" reveals that the tests that states use to measure academic progress under the No Child Left Behind Act are creating a false impression of success, especially in reading and especially in the early grades.

The report, a collaboration of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Northwest Evaluation Association, contains several major findings:

States are aiming particularly low when it comes to their expectations for younger children, setting

elementary students up to fail as they progress through their academic careers. The central flaw in NCLB is that it allows each state to set its own definition of what constitutes "proficiency."

By mandating that all students reach "proficiency" by 2014, it tempts states to define proficiency downward.

Although there has not been a "race to the bottom," with the majority of states dramatically lowering standards under pressure from NCLB, the report did find a "walk to the middle," as some states with high standards saw their expectations drop toward the middle of the pack.
In most states, math tests are consistently more difficult to pass than reading tests.

Eighth-grade tests are sharply harder to pass in most states than those in earlier grades (even after taking into account obvious differences in subject-matter complexity and children's academic development).

As a result, students may be performing worse in reading, and worse in elementary school, than is readily apparent by looking at passing rates on state tests.

Click here to read the full report.

AAE perspective on CCEA unrest

Posted by Slim

Published in the Green Valley News September 20/21

The teachers of Clark County are currently facing a tough choice. Unfortunately, the choice they are being offered is between two unions, neither of which is designed to address the needs and interests of today¹s educators.

As more and more teachers in Clark County have expressed discontent with their representative unit, the Clark County Education Association, the Teamsters have decided to throw their hat in the ring. The Teamsters are saying that the status quo, the CCEA, is not meeting the interests of the teachers they represent. The CCEA says the Teamsters are unprofessional and are not capable of representing teachers effectively.

The fact of the matter is neither the CCEA nor the Teamsters are looking out for the best interests of teachers. Teachers are professionals who deserve a professional organization that will engender the type of respect and recognition that unions do not bring to the table. No matter what name a union goes by, whether it is the NEA, AFT or the Teamsters, the union model is the same. The Teamsters are no better a solution to the concerns of the teachers of Clark County than the CCEA.

The militant labor union mentality is inherently wrong for teachers. Industrial-style unionism neither advances the respect and compensation that educators deserve, nor does it improve the quality of education for kids.

Teachers have been tasked with the education of our nation¹s children, and must be the best and the brightest. The union model rewards teachers who act in a way that belies the nature of their profession. They are indeed professionals and should act and be treated as such. If teachers strive to be taken seriously as a profession, they need to align themselves with groups whose priorities do not center on political agendas that have little to do with the classroom.

The problem is that the unions currently in charge have a tight grip on information that is provided to teachers, and because of this lack of free flow of information, most teachers are unaware they have choices regarding who represents them. Most teachers believe that their only choice is to join the union or nothing at all. The move by the Teamsters to represent teachers in Clark County is good in a way because it is informing teachers that their choice is not the union or nothing.

However, if the Teamsters are successful and unseat the CCEA, the current problems will still exist. Teachers will continue to come in second place to union interests, and they will still not get the recognition they deserve as professionals.

It¹s understandable that Clark County¹s educators are wondering if there are better options than a union. The answer is yes. In fact, there is a groundswell among America¹s teachers, who are leaving traditional teacher labor unions, to join non-union professional associations. Nearly 300,000 teachers nationwide have opted to join non-union educators associations such as the Association of American Educators, which has members in all 50 states. Members can get most of the benefits that the unions provide but at a fraction of the cost.

It¹s a common sense option. Attorneys have the American Bar Association. Physicians have the American Medical Association. Why shouldn¹t educators belong to an organization that respects them as the academic professionals that they are?

Clark County teachers have a unique opportunity to do what¹s best for their profession and for the kids they teach. There have indeed been problems with the CCEA¹s representation and teachers should want change. However, the Teamsters¹ outdated labor model is no more appropriate for today¹s teachers than is the NEA. Teachers deserve a professional choice.

Gary Beckner is executive director of the Association of American Educators. www.aaeteachers.org