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Every week The Schott Foundation for Public Education highlights a select list of articles of interest to you. Simply click the article headlines below to expand the article.


This Issue:
Number of Students Leaving School Early Continues to Increase

‘No Child’ Law Is Not Closing a Racial Gap

Sales tax hike to bring additional aid to Western Massachusetts communities

Springfield begins children's reading initiative based on parents as teachers

Controversial elementary school reorganization plan approved in Ludlow

Scholars Probe Diverse Effects of Exit Exams

Grantee Highlight 1

Grantee Highlight 2

Grantee Highlight 3

Number of Students Leaving School Early Continues to Increase

By JENNIFER MEDINA
Published: April 29, 2009

Almost six years after a lawsuit forced the city to pledge to keep better track of students who leave public schools without graduating, the number leaving high schools has continued to climb, according to a report to be released Thursday by the public advocate’s office.

The report raises questions about why more than 20 percent of students from the class of 2007 were discharged — the term for students who leave the school system without graduating — but 17.5 percent from the class of 2000 were. Much of the increase has come from students who are discharged in the ninth grade, which has gone up to 7.5 percent for the class of 2007, but was 3.8 percent in 2000.

Though students can be classified as discharged for a number of benign reasons, including a transfer to a private school or a move out of the city, the Education Department has been sued several times for pushing out students who are struggling and are unlikely to graduate, a practice that can help raise the school’s test-score averages and graduation rates.

In 2003, Chancellor Joel I. Klein called the effect of the practice a “tragedy,” and when the lawsuit was settled in the fall of that year, the department began requiring all schools to interview students before they can transfer to other programs.

The report was written by Jennifer L. Jennings, a doctoral student at Columbia University, and Leonie Haimson, a frequent critic of Chancellor Klein and the executive director of Class Size Matters, an advocacy group that urges more checks on mayoral control of the schools. The report is being released at a time when the State Legislature is to consider extending the 2002 mayoral control law.

Betsy Gotbaum, the public advocate, said the findings supported her call, issued in the fall of last year, for an independent research board to monitor the Education Department.

“I don’t think anything has gotten any better,” Ms. Gotbaum said Wednesday. “The numbers explaining where these students go is certainly at best questionable and at least a bit wrong. We really don’t understand what all these numbers mean.”

Ms. Gotbaum said she asked on Wednesday that the state comptroller’s office audit the city’s graduation and discharge numbers.

David Cantor, a spokesman for the City Education Department, said that while the increases were noteworthy, they reflected the fact that the student population often moves in and out of the city.

He said the city’s graduation rate, which is affected by the number of students who drop out but not those discharged, has improved steadily over the last six years. For the class of 2008, the projected discharge rate is 19.2 percent, Mr. Cantor said.

Mr. Cantor said the city’s graduation rates and discharges were audited annually by Ernst & Young.

One of the most alarming trends, according to the report, is the number of ninth-grade students who are discharged.

“This finding is of serious concern, as the goal of the public school system is to provide all students with the support needed to persist and successfully graduate from high school,” the report states, adding, “Schools may be responding to accountability incentives to discharge students earlier in their high school careers.”

Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, a senior adviser to the chancellor who oversees research, said department officials had noticed the increase in ninth-grade discharges and were trying to determine its cause.

According to data provided by the Education Department, roughly 74 percent of the more than 18,000 students discharged from the class of 2007 went to a school outside New York City. But according to the report, there is no evidence in census data to suggest that so many teenagers have left New York in recent years.

The department has also reported that the number of high school students transferring to parochial schools has increased over time; there were 2,084 such transfers for the class of 2007, but 821 for the class of 2004, for example. But the report also uses data from the state’s Education Department showing that the enrollment in parochial schools appears largely flat.

The report also finds that far more black and Hispanic students are discharged than white and Asian students, and far more boys than girls.

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‘No Child’ Law Is Not Closing a Racial Gap

By SAM DILLON
Published: April 28, 2009

The achievement gap between white and minority students has not narrowed in recent years, despite the focus of the No Child Left Behind law on improving the scores of blacks and Hispanics, according to results of a federal test considered to be the nation’s best measure of long-term trends in math and reading proficiency.

Between 2004 and last year, scores for young minority students increased, but so did those of white students, leaving the achievement gap stubbornly wide, despite President George W. Bush’s frequent assertions that the No Child law was having a dramatic effect.

Although Black and Hispanic elementary, middle and high school students all scored much higher on the federal test than they did three decades ago, most of those gains were not made in recent years, but during the desegregation efforts of the 1970s and 1980s. That was well before the 2001 passage of the No Child law, the official description of which is “An Act to Close the Achievement Gap.”

“There’s not much indication that N.C.L.B. is causing the kind of change we were all hoping for,” said G. Gage Kingsbury, a testing expert who is a director at the Northwest Evaluation Association in Portland. “Trends after the law took effect mimic trends we were seeing before. But in terms of watershed change, that doesn’t seem to be happening.”

The results no doubt will stoke debate about how to rewrite the No Child law when the Obama administration brings it up for reauthorization later this year. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said he would like to strengthen national academic standards, tighten requirements that high-quality teachers be distributed equally across schools in affluent and poor neighborhoods, and make other adjustments. “We still have a lot more work to do,” Mr. Duncan said of the latest scores. But the long-term assessment results could invigorate those who challenge the law’s accountability model itself.

Despite gains that both whites and minorities did make, the overall scores of the United States’ 17-year-old students, averaged across all groups, were the same as those of teenagers who took the test in the early 1970s. This was largely due to a shift in demographics; there are now far more lower-scoring minorities in relation to whites. In 1971, the proportion of white 17-year-olds who took the reading test was 87 percent, while minorities were 12 percent. Last year, whites had declined to 59 percent while minorities had increased to 40 percent.

The scores of 9- and 13-year-old students, however, were up modestly in reading, and were considerably higher in math, since 2004, the last time the test was administered. And they were quite a bit higher than those of students of the same age a generation back. Still, the progress of younger students tapered off as they got older.

Some experts said the results proved that the No Child law had failed to make serious headway in lifting academic achievement. “We’re lifting the basic skills of young kids,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “but this policy is not lifting 21st-century skills for the new economy.”

But Margaret Spellings, Mr. Duncan’s predecessor under President Bush, called the results a vindication of the No Child law.

“It’s not an accident that we’re seeing the most improvement where N.C.L.B. has focused most vigorously,” Ms. Spellings said. “The law focuses on math and reading in grades three through eight — it’s not about high schools. So these results are affirming of our accountability-type approach.”

Whether anyone knows how to extend the results achieved with younger students through the turbulent high school years remains an open question.

The math and reading test, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Long-Term Trends, was given to a nationally representative sample of 26,000 students last year. It was the 12th time since 1971 that the Department of Education administered a comparable test to students ages 9, 13 and 17. The scores, released on Tuesday in Washington, allow for comparisons of student achievement every few years back to the Vietnam and Watergate years.

The results point to the long-term crisis in many of the nation’s high schools, and could lead to proposals for more federal attention to them in the rewrite of the No Child law, which requires states to administer annual tests in grades three to eight, but only once in high school.

The 2008 score gap between black and white 17-year-olds, 29 points in reading and 26 points in math, could be envisioned as the rough equivalent of between two and three school years’ worth of learning, said Peggy Carr, an associate commissioner for assessment at the Department of Education.

Freeman A. Hrabowski III, the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has written about raising successful black children, said the persistence of the achievement gap should lead policymakers to seek new ways to increase low-performing students’ learning time.

“Where we see the gap narrowing, that’s because there’s been an emphasis on supplemental education, on after-school programs that encourage students to read more and do more math problems,” Dr. Hrabowski said. “Where there are programs that encourage that additional work, students of color do the work and their performance improves and the gap narrows.”

But he said that educators and parents pushing children to higher achievement often find themselves swimming against a tide of popular culture.

“Even middle-class students are unfortunately influenced by the culture that says it’s simply not cool for students to be smart,” he said. “And that is a factor here in these math and reading scores.”

Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents more than 60 metropolitan school systems, said that much of the progress among the nation’s minority students has been the result of hard work by urban educators, not only since the No Child law took effect but for decades before.

“N.C.L.B. did not invent the concept of the achievement gap — much of the desegregation work in the ’70s and ’80s was in fact about giving poor, Hispanic and African-American kids access to better resources and curriculum,” Mr. Casserly said. “You do see from these results that in that period, the gains were steeper. It wasn’t being called an achievement gap, but that was what that was about.”

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Sales tax hike to bring additional aid to Western Massachusetts communities

by Dan Ring of The Republican Newsroom
Tuesday April 28, 2009

BOSTON - A day after hiking the sales tax, the state House of Representatives dipped into the proceeds from the planned increase and approved an additional $205 million in state aid for cities and towns.

The House voted 158-0 on Tuesday to approve the extra $205 million in unrestricted local aid. That restores about half the $424 million cut made by House budget leaders.

"We can go back to every city and town, every school district and say that we have stood by them," Rep. Stephen Kulik, D-Worthington, told House members before the vote.

Under the House vote, cities and towns will receive $1.094 billion in unrestricted state assistance, down about 17 percent from this year's original state budget. Cities and towns were facing a cut of 32 percent before the money was added.

Kulik said the additional $205 million in local aid represents dividends from the disputed decision to increase the sales tax. Kulik said the vote to increase the sales tax was a vote to boost local aid.

The decision to increase the sales tax to 6.25 percent also apparently means that legislators won't approve any increase in the gas tax, said Rep. Joseph F. Wagner, D-Chicopee. Wagner, co-chairman of the Committee on Transportation, said no increase in the gas tax is expected since about $275 million from the sales tax is expected to be used on transportation.

Wagner said most of the revenues from the sales tax will be raised in the eastern part of the state but benefits from the sales tax will be spread across the state.

On the other hand, revenues from a gas tax increase would have been raised in Western Massachusetts and then spent on the MBTA in Boston and the Big Dig highway project in Boston, Wagner said.

Reps. Angelo J. Puppolo and Sean F. Curran, both Springfield Democrats, said they had no reservations about voting to increase local aid, even though both voted in opposition to the increase in the sales tax.

"My main goal is to bring back as much local aid as I can to my district," Puppolo said, adding that he would also support budget cuts and efficiencies.

Gov. Deval L. Patrick on Tuesday said he will not sign both an increase in the sales tax and the gas tax. Patrick proposed a 19 cent increase in the gas tax, but that appears to be dead.

Patrick said he is not philosophically opposed to a sales tax increase, even though he is still threatening to veto the measure.

"I don't want to have a sales tax and a gas tax," Patrick said. "I want to be clear about that. That's too much to ask right now."

During an interview with reporters, Patrick reiterated that he would veto the increase in the sales tax unless legislators have approved strong bills to overhaul pension, ethics and transportation. Patrick set a deadline of around July 1 for legislators to complete work on bills, or he said he would veto the sales tax increase.

"It's about my absolute belief that we owe the public results on this change agenda," Patrick said.

The House late on Monday night voted 108-51 to increase the sales tax from 5 percent to 6.25 percent.

The vote was part of a debate on the state budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1.

Senate approval is also needed to send the increase to Patrick.

In the wake of the House vote to raise the sales tax, opponents on Tuesday pledged to continue the fight against the proposal.

"It's just another tax on business," said Debra A. Boronski, president of the Massachusetts Chamber of Business and Industry, which has an office in East Longmeadow. "This is going to destroy jobs."

Supporters pointed to an analysis by the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. Of the 45 states with a broad-based sales tax, Massachusetts ranks last in revenues collected from the sales tax per $1,000 of income, the foundation said.

Even with the planned increase, Massachusetts would rank about No. 42 out of the 45 states, the foundation said.

The House vote to increase unrestricted local aid provides a financial boost to cities and towns.

Kulik said it will prevent some layoffs and cuts in services.

Springfield would receive $39 million in unrestricted aid, which includes assistance from the state Lottery. That would be still be a 17 percent cut from this year's original budget.

Chicopee would net $11.8 million in unrestricted aid; Greenfield, $3.2 million, Palmer, $2 million; Northampton, $4.5 million, Westfield, $6.4 million; and Holyoke, $10.4 million.

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Springfield begins children's reading initiative based on parents as teachers

By JEANETTE DeFORGE of The Republican Newsroom
Wednesday April 29, 2009

SPRINGFIELD - Reading guru James J. Trelease wants everyone to know a "dirty secret." It isn't really the schools' fault two-thirds of children are not proficient readers by the time they finish third grade.

Parents are children's first and most-important teachers. They spend far more time with their children, they make sure children have access to newspapers, books and libraries and they are the ones who should be reading to children at least 20 minutes a day, said Trelease, a Springfield author of the best-selling "Read-Aloud Handbook."
He joined with Springfield Superintendent of Schools Alan J. Ingram, members of the Irene E. & George A. Davis Foundation, local business leaders and others at the Springfield Central Library to kick off an all-city initiative that will ensure children have the skills they need to be proficient readers at a young age.

Trelease said schools have tried many methods to help children read: there was phonetics, there was "whole language," there has been plenty of testing, but the real secret is children need to be read to, they need to be talked to, they need to be exposed to varied vocabulary before they can start to learn to read in kindergarten.

"Stop lying to the parents and bring them on board by telling them the truth," he said.

The campaign, which is being headed by the Davis Foundation's "Cherish Every Child" initiative to expand early childhood education, will use a logo which fit exactly with Trelease's message.

"Read! Your day's most important 20 minutes."

The campaign will reach out to as many community organizations as possible to get everyone working toward the goal of early literacy. A 14-member research board will also work over the summer to come up with a basic plan to promote the goal, said Sally C. Fuller, project director for Cherish Every Child.

Other communities across the country have tried similar programs and seen success. Ingram said he was hopeful this project can help all of his students achieve in school, in early grades as well as when they get older.

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Controversial elementary school reorganization plan approved in Ludlow

by SUZANNE McLAUGHLIN of The Republican Newsroom
Thursday April 30, 2009

LUDLOW - A controversial elementary school reorganization plan is now scheduled to take effect in the fall.

With a 3-2 vote on Wednesday, the School Committee approved a plan that will even out class sizes and allow the district to leave seven teaching positions unfilled. The financial savings will amount to about $500,000, school officials said.

Under the plan, preschool, kindergarten and first grade classes will be held at the East Street School, second and third grade classes at the Chapin Street School, fourth and fifth grade classes at the Veterans Park School.

School Superintendent Theresa M. Kane said the plan will require no layoffs. The positions to be eliminated will be dealt with by retirements, she said.

The plan also will allow for the reduction of health and special education teachers.

The move came after a meeting attended by more than 200 parents, most of whom said they opposed the proposal and lobbied the committee to keep the traditional neighborhood kindergarten-Grade 5 schools.

School Committee Chairman Joseph A. Santos, who voted for the plan, said it will treat all schools and children equitably.

"Nobody will be more equal than others," he said.

He noted that in previous years Chapin Street has had classes of 18, while the Veterans Park School has had 22 or 23 children in a class, and the East Street School has had 24-28 pupils in some classrooms.

School Committee member James P. Harrington said he thinks it will be detrimental to children's education if they change schools every two years.

Santos said the moves will not be traumatic to children. What is traumatic, he said, is when students need help and the school system does not have the resources to provide it.

The reorganization plan will allow the district to stave off layoffs in future years during the economic downturn, he said.

Along with Santos, committee members Susan D. Gove and Jacob Oliveira voted for the reorganization. Voting against it were Harrington and school board member Natalina J. Tulik.

The School Committee is scheduled to meet on Monday at 7 p.m. to discuss the funding of athletics at the High School, and on Tuesday it will sit with the Finance Committee at 6:30 p.m. to discuss funding for elementary sports.

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Scholars Probe Diverse Effects of Exit Exams
State Graduation Tests Found to Hit Certain Groups Harder

By Debra Viadero
April 27, 2009

A study released last week suggesting that California’s high school exit exams are affecting some student demographic groups more than others is the latest in a small spate of studies pointing to trade-offs from policies that require high school students to pass state tests to graduate.

Twenty-six states have exit exams in place or will by 2012, according to the Center on Education Policy, a Washington-based group that tracks accountability policies.

While proponents see the exams as a way to spur students to higher levels of achievement, critics worry that the requirements come down harder on students from poor families, minority groups, or underresourced schools.

The California study, which was released April 22 by the Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice at Stanford University, gauges the effect of the Golden State’s 6-year-old graduation policy on the first three graduating classes to take the new exit exams in four of the state’s largest districts. Collectively enrolling 110,000 high school students, the districts serve students in Fresno, Long Beach, San Diego, and San Francisco.

Researchers found that, after 2004, when 10th graders took the exit exams for the first time, graduation rates across the four districts declined by 3.6 to 4.5 percentage points each year.

During the same time period, student achievement, as measured by other state tests that the students take in 11th grade, did not significantly improve.

The detrimental effects of the new policy were harder on girls in the bottom achievement quartile than on boys. Girls experienced a 19-percentage point drop in graduation rates after the California High School Exit Exam, or CAHSEE, was implemented, while the graduation rate for boys with similar academic profiles decreased by 12 percentage points over the same period.

Likewise, graduation rates among the poorest-performing black, Hispanic, and Asian-American students declined by 15 to 19 percentage points following the enactment of the exit-exam policy. The comparable graduation-rate drop for white students in the same achievement quartile was 1 percentage point.

“These are clearly troubling, and no one can be happy with a policy that is having such disproportionate effects,” said Sean F. Reardon, an associate professor of education at Stanford who led the study.

Effects of Failing

Results for other working papers that are being circulated in academic and education policy circles suggest somewhat similar stories in other states.

In Massachusetts, for instance, a group of Harvard University researchers, in a study looking just at students who barely passed or barely failed that state’s exit exam in 10th grade, found that being labeled a failure can have a detrimental effect on low-income students in urban schools.

Even though students have plenty of opportunities to retake the exam—and most do—poor, inner-city students who just missed the passing cutoff in 10th grade are 8 percentage points less likely to graduate on time than demographically similar students who just barely passed, even though both groups scored at roughly the same levels on the 10th grade exam. Failing or passing the tests seems to have no statistically significant effect, though, on the probability of graduation for wealthier, suburban students.

And in New Jersey, which in the 1980s became one of the first states to require students to pass a statewide assessment to get a diploma, a not-yet-published study that also looks at students at the pass-fail margin shows a similar result. It finds that barely failing the test decreases the likelihood of graduation for students overall and especially so for black, Hispanic, and low-income students.

“I’m very sympathetic to the argument that we need to convey and find ways to enforce high expectations for students,” said Thomas S. Dee, an economist at Swarthmore College, in Swarthmore, Pa., who has also studied what happens in states across the nation when they enact graduation-exam requirements. He is not connected to the California, Massachusetts, and New Jersey studies.

“But I’m uncomfortable with this form of doing it, because it targets very strong penalties on the most at-risk students,” Mr. Dee continued. “The pejorative consequences appear to be concentrated in populations and communities that lack the capacity to meet these standards.”

But Jay P. Greene, another expert who has studied the effects of exit-exam policies across states, said apparent test-score disparities may not be reason enough to dismantle such policies.

“It’s sort of like blaming the thermometer for fevers,” said Mr. Greene, a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. “There are differential passing rates for racial and ethnic groups, but it doesn’t speak about the test. It speaks about different educational opportunities and differing levels of social change.”

“The easiest way to maximize the graduation rate and ensure there is no differential impact is to give everyone a diploma at birth,” he said. School systems don’t do that, he added, because their diplomas are intended to signal that students possess certain skills that are needed to succeed.

Benefits vs. Costs

In California, state schools Superintendent Jack O’Connell, agreed with Mr. Greene.

“I continue to believe that the exit exam plays an important role in our work to ensure that a high school diploma has meaning,” he said in a statement. “I believe that the biggest mistake we could make is to view this report as a reason to lower our expectations for any student.”

While California’s effort did not seem to spur any achievement gains, the lead author of the Massachusetts study noted that achievement scores in that state, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, have risen in the 11 years since the state began administering its rigorous Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS, tests. Passing the tests became a graduation requirement with the class of 2003.

“But there’s no evidence on whether that’s the result of the exit exam or more money being put into the system,” said John P. Papay, a graduate student in education at Harvard and the primary author of that study.

At this point in the research process, the Harvard researchers are also hard-pressed to say whether the differential effects they found among Massachusetts students at the passing margin were due to the positive effects of passing the test or the negative effects of failing.

“Passing might give students more confidence,” Mr. Papay added, “but failing might make them more discouraged.”

Likewise, theories vary as to why exit-exam requirements seem to affect different groups of students differently. The usual explanation is that disadvantaged students often attend schools with fewer resources, greater challenges, and less-credentialed teachers than the schools that enroll more-advantaged students. And students from affluent families, many of whom typically are white, may have better access to tutors and other kinds of supports to enable them to pass their exams on another try.

In the California study, though, those kinds of explanations didn’t fit the data. For one, the researchers could find no effect for the policy change on low-income students, only for students of color and female students. The researchers also tried to test the idea that differences among schools were to blame by analyzing data for students within the same schools, but they got the same pattern of results.

That led the research team to advance a new explanation for the differences in effects: stereotype threat. The term refers to the tendency of people to fare less well on tests when they fear their efforts will confirm a negative stereotype about their group.

Psychological Threats

It was first coined by the psychologists Claude M. Steele and Joshua Aronson, who showed in a 1995 experiment that African-American students performed more poorly than white students when their race was emphasized in some way.

More than 300 experiments since then have demonstrated the same tendency among women, Asian-Americans, and even a group of white men taking a math test alongside Asian-American students.

The California researchers said stereotype threat became a likely explanation after they looked at students’ past scores on state tests. The data suggested that black students, girls, Latino students, and Asian-Americans had all underperformed on the exit exam in ways that could be deemed characteristically stereotypical. Asian-American students, for instance, turned in lower-than-predicted performances on the English section. Girls underperformed in math.

“It’s a very specific pattern, so it’s hard to explain based on effort,” said Mr. Reardon. “That’s what persuaded me that we have this stereotype-threat story going on, that we have this other set of tests to compare it to, and they don’t show the same pattern.”

Mr. Reardon said a large body of research points to classroom interventions to lessen perceived psychological threats for students. Schools might also provide additional instruction to low-achieving students or explore new ways to hold schools accountable for student achievement, he suggested.

Russell W. Rumberger, a professor of educational leadership and organization at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said growing numbers of states, including Indiana, Massachusetts, and Texas, are also exploring requiring students to pass end-of-course tests in individual subjects, rather than broader exit exams, as a potentially fairer way to boost graduation rates for some students without diminishing the value of a diploma. ("Exit Scramble," Aug. 13, 2008.)

“The cynic in me worries that we’re just going to continue to see these policies proliferate, because it seems like an obvious way to convey the expectations that we should have for students,” Mr. Dee said, “and the negative effects appear to be hidden from public discussion.”

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Grantee Highlight 1

Highlighted below are some of the exciting projects of the Schott Foundation’s grantees.  Please visit the Schott Foundation website at www.schottfoundation.org to see a listing of current grantees.

CAYL President Honored by BAEYC

On April 17, 2009, Valora Washington, Ph.D. received the Abigail Eliot Award at the Boston Association for the Education of Young Children (BAEYC). The award, presented annually by BAEYC, is named after Abigail Adams Eliot, a pioneer in both early childhood education and training for teachers of young children.

The Eliot Award is given to honor outstanding commitment to young children and the early childhood profession not only through the work on behalf of BAEYC, but also through a record of distinguished professional achievement.

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Grantee Highlight 2

Wilson-Giarratano named president,
CEO of Girls Inc.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009
By Michael Goot (Contact)
Gazette Reporter

SCHENECTADY — Girls Incorporated of the Greater Capital Region announced today that Gail Wilson-Giarratano has been named president and chief executive officer.

Wilson-Giarratano has 20 years of experience in the nonprofit field. She relocated to the Capital Region from Springfield, Mass., where she was most recently executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Western Massachusetts.

Wilson-Giarratano joined Girls Inc. on April 1 following a national search.

“We are delighted to introduce Gail to the Capital Region. Her background in human and social services and nonprofit management, including child and family services, as well as her personal dedication to the well being of girls, makes her the ideal leader for Girls Inc.,” said Lisa Reddy, chairwoman of the board of directors of Girls Inc. of the Greater Capital Region, in a press release.
Wilson-Giarratano has held leadership positions at the Brightside Treatment Center in West Springfield, Mass., the New England Learning Center for Women in Transition in Greenfield, Mass. and the Early Childhood Centers of Greater Springfield.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in education from Winthrop College in Rock Hill, S.C., a master’s degree in leadership and policy from Wheelock College in Boston and is a Ph.D. candidate in applied management/decision science at Walden University in Baltimore. Wilson-Giarratano has been a Leadership Fellow in the Schott Foundation for Early Care and Education since 2004.

Wilson-Giarratano succeeds long-time Girls Inc. executive Teri Bordenave, who left the organization last November to help organize efforts to build low-income houses both internationally and in the United States.

The organization delivers educational programming to more than 20,000 youth annually between the age of 5 and 18 in Albany, Rensselaer, Saratoga, Schenectady, Fulton, Montgomery and Schoharie counties.

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Grantee Highlight 3

The New England Journal of Higher Education Spring 2009 Edition Features Annual Special Report on "Trends & Indicators," Forum on Internationalization

BOSTON—New England's population continues to grow more slowly than the rest of the United States and though the region outperforms the nation on most indicators of "college readiness," New England's college costs still take a bigger bite out of family incomes than those in other regions, according to data in the Spring 2009 issue of The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE).

The Spring 2009 issue features NEJHE's annual special report on "Trends & Indicators in Higher Education," which includes 60-plus updated tables and charts exploring New England's demography, high school performance and graduation, college enrollment, college graduation rates and degree production, higher education financing and university research.

The annual trends data are complemented with a thought-provoking typology of "multiple pathways" to success and measures of college readiness from the College Board, among other features. Supplemental College Board data is available online here.

The Spring 2009 issue also features a Forum on the internationalization of higher education. NEJHE asked Forum authors to explore angles such as foreign enrollment in the United States, study abroad and critical issues in international partnerships.

Among articles in the Spring 2009 NEJHE:

Needed in School Teaching: A Few Good Men · The number of male teachers is at a 40-year low for reasons ranging from fear of abuse allegations to low pay. Valora Washington, president of the CAYL Institute, explains how her Cambridge, Mass.-based outfit aims to close the gender gap in teaching.

Thriving Through Recession · The constant flow of alarming economic and business news, rapidly declining endowments and potential disruption to the student-loan industry have all beaten down optimism about higher education's financial outlook. Moody's Investors Service VP Roger Goodman explains how good financial management can help colleges and universities survive the downturn, emerge more nimble and fuel overall economic recovery.

Many Sizes Fit All · To increase the number of young people with skills to succeed in the 21st century, New England needs "multiple pathways" to high-quality postsecondary options, according to independent education consultant Ephraim Weisstein and David Jacobson, senior education specialist at Cambridge Education. The two authors of a Nellie Mae Education Foundation research paper, "Building Multiple Pathways: Approaches, Relevant Programs and Implementation Considerations," offer a typology of pathway options.

Urban Interventions · Joseph Cronin, the former Massachusetts secretary of education and past president of Bentley University, who is the author of the book Reforming Boston Schools: Overcoming Corruption and Racial Segregation 1930-2006, explains how universities have contributed thousands of hours trying to help city schools to improve and asks, "With what effect?"

New England's State of College Readiness · Roxanna P. Menson, Thanos Patelis and Arthur Doyle of the College Board paint a picture of college readiness in New England by assembling the national organization's indicators of academic knowledge and skills, success in college-level courses, SAT performance and college and career planning.

Creating a Retention Quilt · Southern Vermont College President Karen Gross and her colleagues Albert DeCiccio and Anne Hopkins Gross explain how the Bennington, Vt., college uses tools ranging from discussion of Robert Frost to fireside chats to create a learning community and boost retention.

First Generation, Low-Income Students · Lyndon State College President Carol A. Moore and colleagues Donna Dalton and Robert Whittaker advance strategies to bolster the first- to second-year retention rate of first-generation, low-income students.

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