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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:
National Standards Gain Steam

Stimulus to Help Re-Tool Education, Duncan Says

Mayoral Control of NYC schools up for renewal

Westwood and Weymouth to offer full-day kindergarten

Students voice concerns about budget cuts

Ayer gets grant to study school regionalization

School zone plan to be reworked

State delays debut of MCAS history exam by 2 years

When worlds collide

Backers of 21st-Century Skills' Take Flak

ANNOUNCEMENTS

National Standards Gain Steam
Governors’ Embrace Rooted in Competitiveness Concerns

By David J. Hoff
March 2, 2009

National standards—once the untouchable "third rail" of American education policy—now have the backing of the nation’s governors, a growing number of education leaders, and the U.S. Secretary of Education.

The National Governors Association last week adopted a policy statement endorsing a process to develop common academic standards by comparing student performance on international tests.

The governors join several education groups—the Council of the Great City Schools, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and the American Federation of Teachers among them—in endorsing the idea that the nation should set a common definition of what students should know and be able to do.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said he wants the federal government to be "a catalyst" for the development of national standards, and wants to support the NGA and other groups working to set them.

"We want to get into this game, … and I’m not leading this game," Mr. Duncan said during an interview broadcast Feb. 22 on C-SPAN. "There are many great governors out there who have been talking about this, and not just talking about this, but working on this for a while."

Despite the convergence of high-powered opinion in favor of national standards, the work of creating them and winning public support will be difficult, one longtime advocate for such standards said.

"The United States does not have an obvious mechanism for doing them," said Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington-based think tank. "As a result, everything is improvisational and has drawbacks."

While common standards have the support of some leading policymakers, some educators argue they would take another step toward nationalizing school policy and usurping teachers’ judgment of what to teach and how to teach it.

"What I’m mostly concerned about ... is doing on a national level what we’re doing too much of on the state and local levels," said Deborah Meier, a former New York City principal and a senior scholar at New York University. (Ms. Meier contributes to the Bridging Differences blog
on www.edweek.org.)

"We’re governing by distance authority," she added.

Hot Topic

Proposals for such standards are now gathering support, unlike previous attempts to nationalize standards and testing.

During the term of President George H.W. Bush, the federal government made grants to groups of education experts to craft definitions of what students should know in several subjects.

The standards produced under the process by some groups came under harsh criticism, especially from conservatives such as Lynne V. Cheney. In 1993, Ms. Cheney, who had supported efforts for national standards as the chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, faulted the history standards for de-emphasizing important events and people in U.S. history.

Shortly thereafter, in a nonbinding resolution, the U.S. Senate criticized the proposed history standards.

In 1997, President Bill Clinton proposed creating national tests in 4th grade reading and 8th grade mathematics. Congress eventually blocked funding for the proposal.

After those experiences, President George W. Bush avoided national standards in proposing the No Child Left Behind Act, his signature education initiative. The NCLB law requires states to set their own standards and hold schools accountable based on whether students tested in grades 3-8 and one year in high school attain proficiency under them.

States Seen as Inconsistent

The recent endorsements of national standards have emerged, in part, because critics say the patchwork of state standards under the NCLB law set inconsistent goals for reading and math. In those two subjects, supporters say, educators should be able to agree on common standards.

Governors also are arguing that they want to improve students’ academic performance in an effort to ensure the nation’s economic
success.

"International benchmarking will move the American education system beyond comparing student performance against peers in neighboring cities or states—it will shift the focus to the skills students need to compete with other students around the world," the NGA policy statement says.

The Obama administration included a similar argument in its fiscal 2010 budget proposal, released last week.

"Building on the [economic-stimulus law], the new administration will help states increase the rigor of their standards so they prepare students for success in college and a career," the summary of the Education Department budget said.

The NGA statement was based on a December report, "Benchmarking for Success," released by the NGA, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve, a nonprofit group organized by governors and business leaders that seeks to improve the quality of schools through more-rigorous standards.

The agreement among governors and education policy leaders suggests to some observers that the development of national standards, in some form, is inevitable.

"The question is much more how it will happen," said Bruno V. Manno, a senior program associate at the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore and a political appointee at the U.S. Department of Education under the first President Bush. "Will it happen in a haphazard way, or will it happen in a thoughtful way?"

National, Not Federal

While many of those questions remain unanswered, advocates for common standards agree on one thing: The federal government should not define the content of such standards.

"We don’t want to federalize education," Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman, a Republican, said in an Feb. 23 interview, shortly after the governors formally approved the new NGA position at their winter meeting in Washington. "We want states to improve their standards, and one way to look at that is through international benchmarking. It’s got to be done through the states and local governments."

The combined effort of the NGA and the CCSSO would supplement Achieve’s ongoing work with the American Diploma Project, in which 34 states are creating policies aimed at preparing all students for postsecondary education.

Part of the undertaking is setting standards for high school English and math. The Fordham Institute and the Education Trust, a Washington group that supports improvements in the education of low-income children, are partners in the diploma project.

In the December report, the NGA, the CCSSO, and Achieve outlined a process of comparing U.S. students’ achievement on the Program for International Student Assessment, or pisa, with that of students in high-achieving countries. The work would yield standards outlining what U.S. students should know and be able to do to match that performance, the policy statement says.

But policymakers shouldn’t be relying on the content of PISA, according to Tom Loveless, a senior fellow for the Brown Center on Education at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

In math, he said, PISA questions are more focused on applying general math principles in real-life situations than on algebra, geometry, and other mathematical material taught in high schools.

"There's almost no higher-level mathematics in them," said Mr. Loveless, who published a report last week that criticized PISA as being ideologically biased. ("PISA Called Inappropriate for U.S. Benchmarking," this issue.)

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS—another major test examining student performance across the world—assesses students in the 4th and 8th grades and lacks the challenging mathematical content expected of high school students, Mr. Loveless said.

"There's nothing out there to benchmark high school achievement against internationally," he said.

Difficulties Ahead

Even with the growing support for the concept of national standards, putting them in place won’t be easy, said Mr. Finn, who served in the federal Education Department under President Ronald Reagan and has advocated national standards for more than two decades.

Congress isn’t yet on record supporting any effort or proposal to set such standards. And although language arts and mathematics may appear to be relatively easy subjects on which to find common ground, each field has experienced polarizing debates.

In beginning reading, the debate has been over whether to emphasize the decoding and other basic skills or to emphasize the development of reading habits. In math, educators and mathematicians disagree over whether to emphasize algorithms or conceptual knowledge.

"Saying you're for [national standards] is almost the easy part," said Mr. Finn. "There are 999 tough issues that will follow. I sort of feel like we’re nowhere near tackling them."

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Stimulus to Help Retool Education, Duncan Says

By Bill Turque and Maria Glod
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, March 5, 2009

To help struggling schools, the federal government will use stimulus funding to encourage states to expand school days, reward good teachers, fire bad ones and measure how students perform compared with peers in India and China, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said yesterday.

History has shown that money alone does not drive school improvement, Duncan said, pointing to the District of Columbia, where public school students consistently score near the bottom on national reading and math tests even though the school system spends more per pupil than its suburban counterparts do.

"D.C. has had more money than God for a long time, but the outcomes are still disastrous," Duncan said in an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters. He said the unprecedented influx of cash, which will begin to flow in the next 30 to 45 days, would target states, local school systems and nonprofit organizations willing to adopt policies that
have been proven to work.

"The challenge isn't an intellectual one, it's one of political courage," said Duncan, who developed a reputation for a willingness to experiment and disrupt the status quo in seven years as chief executive of Chicago schools.

The stimulus law, which will channel about $100 billion to public schools, universities and early childhood education programs nationwide, will help prevent teacher layoffs, overhaul aging schools and educate low-income children. But it also gives Duncan unusual power to shape change.

Duncan said he wants struggling schools to use federal aid to adopt on a grander scale ideas that are producing results on a trial basis in some locales. He pointed to longer school days, instituted by some public charter schools, as essential to help struggling students make up lost ground.

Duncan said schools should be treated as community hubs that provide health care, meals and other services to support at-risk families. Some schools in Chicago, for example, are open up to 14 hours a day and offer services from YMCAs to health clinics.

"School buildings don't belong to us. They don't belong to the unions. School buildings belong to the community," Duncan said. "Almost every school building has classrooms. They have computer labs. They have libraries. . . . Why are they open six hours a day? It's crazy."

Duncan said he will encourage states to adopt achievement standards that give a clear picture of whether U.S. students are prepared to compete with global peers. And the funding will help states create better tests to show whether students are on track for college.

Duncan said the Obama administration aims to support performance pay to reward good teaching, individually and schoolwide. Beyond standardized test scores, Duncan mentioned classroom observation, parent and student surveys, and attendance as ways to help rate teacher effectiveness.

"We also have to make it easier to get rid of teachers when student achievement isn't happening," Duncan said. He added, however, that teacher tenure -- a form of job security that is a key issue in contract talks for D.C. teachers -- is not the main problem. Duncan said it was vital to make acquisition of tenure more rigorous and establish a fair, expeditious process to remove low-performing teachers.

One element absent from Duncan's reform agenda is vouchers. Congressional Democrats are poised to eliminate future federal funding for the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides up to $7,500 a year in tuition for low-income children to attend participating private schools. House Democrats stipulated in a spending bill passed last week that the $14 million allocated to the program for the 2009-10 school year can be used only for current scholarship recipients. Congress and the D.C. Council would have to vote to continue the program after that.

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City schools work way off failure list

BY Meredith Kolodner
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Monday, March 2, 2009

The number of city schools on the state's failing list dropped to its lowest level since 1989 as a result of rising test scores, mirroring a trend statewide.

Thirteen schools were taken off the dreaded Schools Under Registration Review list - 12 of which are middle schools - which brought down the city total to 20.

"Today's news is another sign of the progress we've made turning America's largest school district around," said Mayor Bloomberg.

Although the mayor credited his takeover of the school system, advocates pointed to a recent increase in state funding for high-needs schools as a more likely factor.

"Proportionally similar declines occurred in Buffalo and Syracuse," said April Humphrey of the Campaign for Better Schools.

"Mayoral control of schools in New York City could not possibly have contributed to the progress made in those cities."

The city also hosts four of the five new schools added to the state's failing list, and three more would have been added if they were not in the process of being closed.

Two of the four new schools were opened as part of Bloomberg's initiative to replace large failing high schools with small ones.

Those schools, New Explorers High School in the Bronx and West Bronx Academy for the Future, got a B and C respectively on the city report cards.

Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn, also received a B while Public School 230 in the Bronx got an F.

All four added schools have a student body that is at least 97% black and Latino with an average 76% poverty rate.

There were 77 city schools on the SURR list when Bloomberg won control of the system in 2002, and the policy will soon come up for renewal in Albany.

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Mayoral control of NYC schools up for renewal

By Karen Matthews
Associated Press Writer / March 5, 2009

NEW YORK—Mayor Michael Bloomberg has touted his stewardship of the city's public school system as a key achievement of his administration -- and a reason to re-elect him to a third term.

So he's pushing hard to get lawmakers to reauthorize a 2002 law giving him sweeping powers to reorganize the schools and hire his own chancellor to run them.

He warned in a recent radio address that there would be "riots in the streets" if the law weren't renewed. Going back to the old system, he said, "would be a disaster."

Mayoral control of urban school districts has momentum around the country. Cities with some form of mayoral control include Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

Few in New York seem to want to return to the chaotic system Bloomberg inherited, in which power over 1.1 million students was split between the mayor, an appointed Board of Education and 32 locally elected school boards that at their worst were riddled with incompetence and patronage.

A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday found that New Yorkers support mayoral control of the public schools by a wide margin. Fifty-five percent of registered voters said mayoral control should continue and 35 percent said it should stop.

"No one's giving Mayor Bloomberg straight A's for handling the schools, but they want him or his successor to keep on trying," said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

The poll, conducted from Feb. 17-22, surveyed 984 New York City registered voters and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

Even critics who call Bloomberg an autocrat do not seek a return to the previous system.

"There was a lot of infighting," said Zakiyah Ansari, a Brooklyn public school parent who is active the Campaign for Better Schools, a group which is pushing to amend the mayoral control law. "There was corruption. But what we have now is way off the other end of the spectrum of total control with no checks and balances."

Under the old system, the mayor made two appointments to a seven-member Board of Education that ran the schools. That board was replaced in 2002 by a 13-member body that Bloomberg renamed the Panel for Educational Policy; he appoints eight of the 13 members.

Bloomberg and his team say improved test scores and graduation rates prove that students are flourishing under their watch.

Critics say the panel is powerless and serves only to rubber-stamp decisions by Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. Some say that means parents can influence school governance only by voting in mayoral elections every four years.

"This is certainly not what the Legislature had in mind," said Steven Sanders, who chaired the Assembly Education Committee before retiring from the Legislature in 2005.

Sanders, now a lobbyist working on education issues, said the mayoral control law was supposed to allow more community input than Bloomberg has permitted.

"It was never the intention of the Legislature to create a law in which the mayor and the chancellor would be unilateral," he said.

Bloomberg's changes will expire June 30 unless the Legislature renews it. Lawmakers could consider changing the composition of the Panel on Education Policy to give the mayor fewer appointees or establishing set terms so that members don't serve at the pleasure of whoever appointed them.

The teachers' union has proposed that the city comptroller, the public advocate and the City Council speaker each appoint a member, leavingthe mayor with five appointees instead of eight.

"The policy board would be a real policy board, which was the original intention," said union president Randi Weingarten.

Klein told the Assembly Education Committee that the law was not "holy writ" and he would be open to some adjustments. But he suggested that cutting the mayor's appointments would be disastrous.

Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott said the Bloomberg administration is listening intently to the committee's hearings.

"We're always looking to improve the system," Walcott said. But he added, "When it comes to decision making, authority should rest with the mayor."

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Westwood and Weymouth to offer full-day kindergarten

By Michele Morgan Bolton
Globe Correspondent / March 5, 2009

While some school districts are balking at a full-day kindergarten because of the high fees, officials in Westwood and Weymouth can hardly wait for September.

Both towns will begin offering full-day classes for 5-year-olds, and though the schools face the same economic pressures as others, thedistricts are taking a broader view.

"The [long-term] trend has been going toward full-day kindergarten, but the roadblock for many is finance," said Westwood Schools

Superintendent John Antonucci.
The budgetary issues are under control in Westwood, however, enabling the schools to implement their educational goals.

Rigorous state standards require schools to fit as much instruction as possible into the current 4-hour, 45-minute kindergarten day, said Antonucci. That can be stressful for a school's youngest students.

"So, for us, it was important to slow down the day for those kids," Antonucci said. "We're trying to pack a lot into three-quarters of a day, which doesn't allow for things like small-group and individual work. It's all about pace."

In Massachusetts, children are not required to attend school until age 6, but all schools must offer a half-day kindergarten program. About 69,000 children attend kindergarten in the public schools, and three-fourths of them are in full-day classes, according to state data for the 2007-2008 school year.

Roughly a quarter of the children in full-day kindergarten pay an additional fee, which averages $2,682. Though the state's goal is to have all public schools offer full-day kindergarten by 2018, public funding has declined in recent years and Governor Deval Patrick last fall cut a transition grant fund that was meant to help districts move to full-day programs.

Around the region, even some affluent districts such as Hingham, Winchester, and Lexington have recently put plans for full-day kindergarten on hold because parents don't want to pay high fees.

In Weymouth, meanwhile, some special circumstances helped the district bring back the longer day.

Full-day kindergarten was eliminated 10 years ago because of space constraints, but in 2004, the district began freeing up space by reconfiguring school buildings into blocks of K-4, 5-8, and 9-12, said School Superintendent Mary Jo Livingstone.

"We always intended to offer [full-day kindergarten] again," she said.

Last year, financial difficulties forced school officials to eliminate 40 professional positions and 40 support personnel, Livingstone said. As traumatic as that reduction in personnel was, it also opened up 10

classrooms around the district, she said.
"Through all the devastation, sometimes you can create good things," she said.

Weymouth will charge $3,500 per student for full-day kindergarten, Livingstone said. Like Westwood, half-day kindergarten will remain free.

A sliding scale will be considered for families who qualify for financial assistance from the government. If there are more students than spots, a lottery system will be employed, she said.

Beginning in September, full-day kindergarten will be offered in seven of the town's eight primary school buildings. But because Wessagussett Primary in North Weymouth does not have an extra classroom, its kindergarteners will be taught at the Johnson Early Childhood Center.

"The benefit here will be socialization," Livingstone said. "Certain kids need additional time for academic skills. But the biggest benefit is that all the children will be able to be working as a group. Now we can provide options we didn't have before."

In Westwood, parents this fall can opt for the current kindergarten schedule or the 6-hour, 20-minute day, with half-days on Wednesdays for teacher development. The cost for the full day will be $1,200 a year.

Antonucci said the fee won't completely cover costs, but the district is able to hold down expenses because it will save money by dropping bus routes to take home only kindergarteners, and because the district's kindergarten teachers are already full-time.

For years, the full-day issue has been studied by a group of Westwood educators and parents, including John Cummings, father of Hanlon School kindergartners Jack and Conor, and Camille, who is in fourth grade.

"Anytime I can give teachers more time to teach my kids is a win for everyone," he said.

A longer day means adding music, art, and a nap into a schedule that already includes language arts, math, and play time. He also noted a less-scholastic benefit: "The kids feel like they are more a part of the school and like the big kids."

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Students voice concerns about budget cuts
Hundreds attend forum with board

By Jenna Nierstedt
March 6, 2009

Angered and confused by inevitable school budget cuts, several hundred Boston public schools students gathered yesterday afternoon at English High School in Jamaica Plain to question their representatives and propose their own money-saving ideas.

"We felt that only adults have had a say, but this is mainly affecting the youth, and they should have a say in this," said Samantha Brea, 15, of Snowden International High School and a member of the Hyde Square Task Force. "I feel it's been a good turnout, mostly youth, to show that we care, that we are not selfish."

Five youth-serving organizations, including the task force, proposed the idea for, and led, the two-hour budget forum before the School Committee and Superintendent Carol R. Johnson.

The Hyde Square Task Force, based in Jamaica Plain, provides community-building and youth development activities for young adults.

The forum was driven by student concerns over how budget cuts would affect their college preparation, said Lorena Lopera, community organizer for Sociedad Latina, a Roxbury social club dedicated to helping Latino youth discover what is positive within themselves and their community.

Audience members asked the panel about layoffs, program cuts, how budget money is used, where it comes from, and how students can influence some of the board's decisions.

One student asked whether the school lunch program could be cut, contending that few students participate. She asked because her grandmother, who works for the school system, is facing layoffs and is
the family's only source of income.

David Magrass, a junior at Boston Latin, said he did not understand why arts programs were facing cuts, while unpopular classes in the classics were still being offered.

"How can we as a student body affect these decisions?" he asked the panel.

Helen Dájer, a member of the School Committee, promised students that if they gained enough support to bring a proposal to the board, she would work to make the change.

City Councilor and mayoral candidate Sam Yoon said he found the event "tremendous and inspiring," but believed it would have "limited influence on the school budget" because the students were not targeting "the right person."

"The most important person in this debate is the mayor because the mayor himself decides how much revenue the schools get," Yoon said.

Johnson reassured students that the committee is working to make cuts in the central office to avoid layoffs of teachers, "because we think that is a very important part of making sure you get exactly what you need."

She also outlined money-saving tactics the committee has proposed, including elementary school closings and improved conservation of utilities.

In addition, Johnson said the board has utilized resources, including Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who wrote a letter to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan asking for help in prioritizing resources.

But Marchelle Raynor, a member of the School Committee, interjected, reminding board members that the purpose of the forum was to discuss alternative tactics.

"We may have to dig deep and find new paradigms to educate ourselves," she said.

The School Committee is scheduled to vote on the budget proposal March 25. If approved, the budget would then be submitted to the mayor, who would incorporate it into his budget proposal for City Council approval.

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Ayer gets grant to study school regionalization

March 5, 2009

The Ayer school district was one of 12 in the state to be given grants of up to $25,000 last week to explore how regionalization might benefit their education systems.

Mitchell Chester said each of the districts chosen had to apply and show commitment to working with other school systems and needed to show a willingness to adopt new regional approaches.

Combining the Ayer, Shirley, and Lunenberg school districts has been in the works since late 2007. Milree Keeling, head of the regionalization planning board, said the panel is anticipating a finalized agreement by fall.

Officials from the three towns were to meet last night to discuss how to use the $20,000 granted to Ayer. Keeling said the money would most likely go toward professional development to help school employees work in a regional school system.

As a regional district, the school system would have 3,700 to 4,000 students. Shirley, which does not have a high school, already pays Ayer and Lunenberg to send its students to their high schools.

Governor Deval Patrick's administration awarded the grants Friday, saying regional partnerships can improve efficiency by combining administrative services and channeling more money toward classroom spending.

In addition to Ayer, grants were awarded to the communities of Boxford, Greenfield, Hadley, Harwich, Holland, and Westfield, and the Berkshire, Frontier, Mahar, Mohawk, and Nauset school districts.

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School zone plan to be reworked
Johnson cites lack of equal access

By James Vaznis
Globe Staff / February 26, 2009

Boston School Superintendent Carol R. Johnson will make changes to her school assignment proposal after an analysis revealed unequal opportunities for students in different parts of the city, she said last night.

The new map, which would replace the system's three sprawling school assignment zones with five smaller ones, would cause some areas with some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city to have a disproportionately large percentage of potentially failing schools simply because of the way the boundaries have been drawn.

Some of those same neighborhoods would also have more students than seats available at some grade levels.

"It's clear our current rezoning doesn't provide equal access," Johnson told the School Committee last night, just before her staff presented a statistical analysis of the proposed changes. "This is a work in progress. . . . Nothing is set in stone. This may change appreciatively."

In one of the more startling findings presented by her staff last night, a proposed geographic region spanning from the North End to Roxbury would lack 616 seats for students in grades 6 through 8 - the equivalent of an entire middle school. Another zone that covers most of Dorchester and all of South Boston would be short more than 100 seats in grades 7 and 8.

All the while, a newly created zone in East Boston and Charlestown would have more than 500 extra middle school seats.

District administrators offered no solution to address the disparity last night.

"I'm personally concerned about the 600-plus middle school students we don't have seats for," the Rev. Gregory Groover, the School Committee's chairman, said after the presentation.

Last night was the committee's first in-depth discussion of the proposal, coming on the same day the Globe reported that well over 50 percent of the schools in two zones that cover Roxbury and Dorchester have been designated for major overhauls by state education officials because of low scores on state standardized tests. That contrasts sharply with a proposed Allston/Brighton zone, where only one of six schools requires major restructuring.

Johnson offered no specifics about how the proposal might change. Groover and other School Committee members stressed the need to hold community forums before finalizing the proposal for a vote.

School leaders are considering changing the 20-year-old school assignment system as one way to remedy a more than $100 million budget shortfall for next year. Mayor Thomas M. Menino directed officials last year to redraw the map to help reduce the district's $76 million transportation budget by $10 million.

While it is not clear how much Johnson's plan would save, officials have said it could range between $5 million and $10 million. Other changes to the district's transportation plan, such as closing schools and reducing the number of special education students who require door-to-door busing, could save a few million dollars more.

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State delays debut of MCAS history exam by 2 years

By James Vaznis
February 25, 2009

MALDEN - Andrew Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr., and Franklin D. Roosevelt will have to wait for a place in the state's 10th-grade MCAS exams, after the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education decided yesterday to delay the history test's premiere as a high school graduation requirement.

The board voted 8 to 2 to put off the exam for at least two years because of concerns that state budget cuts would leave the agency without enough money to administer the test. They also questioned the wisdom of asking local school districts to do more at a time when cuts threaten their ability to comply with other state and federal mandates.

The vote followed a recommendation by Commissioner Mitchell Chester, who emphasized that the agency was not watering down standards and remained committed to developing the test.

"I have not come to this decision lightly," Chester said. Later, he added: "We are heading into tough waters fiscally in the state over the next several years. To me, it's a matter of fairness."

This year's ninth-graders would have been the first class required to pass a US history exam in order to graduate, and were scheduled to take the test at the end of next school year.

Now, under the change approved yesterday, this year's seventh-graders would become the first class required to pass the exam. But the board left open the possibility that it could waive that class, along with subsequent ones, from the requirement should fiscal conditions not improve quickly enough.

The history exam would have been the latest component to the more than 10-year-old test. This year's high school juniors must pass a new science exam along with the English and math tests. After the addition of the science exams, the MCAS passing rate declined for the first time since the MCAS became a graduation requirement earlier this decade.

Testing student knowledge in US history enjoys strong support from MCAS advocates as well as social studies teachers. They are concerned that a failure to include that subject on MCAS tests could diminish the importance of the subject because schools tend to devote their resources to areas covered by the exam. Several supporters pleaded with the board against a delay yesterday.

In an interview after the meeting, Jamie Gass, director of the Center for School Reform at the Pioneer Institute, expressed disappointment.

"There is no question a working knowledge of US history is part of the civic principles that bind the country together," Gass said. "If students don't understand history, how will they appreciate the significance of events, such as President Obama's inaugural address?"

Others, however, said the delay comes as a much-welcome relief to financially strapped districts as well as students who are still adjusting to the new science exam. They doubted the delay would lessen the importance of the subject because many schools require students topass a US history class to graduate.

"I think for students who are living in an extraordinarily stressful time, it will mean one less level of additional stress," said Glenn Koocher, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees. "The board made a gutsy move."

Secretary of Education Paul Reville said in a statement that he supported the delay. "During this difficult time, we need to do everything we can to ensure that we are targeting state dollars in ways that have the greatest impact on our children," he said.

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When Worlds Collide
Universal preK brings new challenges for public elementary schools

by David McKay Wilson

In 2005, when Boston mayor Thomas Menino announced his plan to make prekindergarten available to all four-year-olds in the city, parents and early childhood advocates applauded this initiative to add a 14th year to the city’s public school system.

Three years later, after preK classrooms were established in 50 of the city’s 67 elementary schools, educators say implementing the mayor’s vision has proved to be a major challenge. There were facility issues: none of the classrooms had running water or bathrooms, so administrators lobbied to build toilet facilities in the rooms—at the cost of $35,000 each. There were oversight issues: many of the elementary school principals weren’t sensitive to the needs of four-year-olds, so Boston established a professional development academy for administrators faced with the prospect of educating preschoolers.

Then there was the impact on the elementary schools where those four-year-olds were getting ready for kindergarten. When those students turned five, they were so well prepared that the district had to retool its kindergarten curriculum to keep pace with children much

more ready to learn.
The issues faced in Boston are similar to those experienced by educators across the country as they grapple with the flood of public support for preschool education. PreK is the fastest-growing sector in public education, with scores of elementary schools adding preK classes or developing early childhood centers for young children. But adding another grade to a school isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially when those being taught are three or four years old.

“At the outset, elementary schools are gloriously unprepared to serve preschoolers,” says Jason Sachs, director of early childhood for the Boston Public Schools, who is in charge of implementing Menino’s vision. “With the district’s support, we’ve made great strides. It has been a fascinating ride.”

Spreading the Benefits of PreK

Since the late 1990s, the push for universal preK has caught the fancy of politicians and education leaders in many states. Advocates tout high-quality preK as a crucial element in comprehensive school reform, citing numerous studies that show a variety of benefits, particularly for low-income students. Some studies show that children with solid preK backgrounds are more prepared for kindergarten, with bigger vocabularies, the ability to recognize some letters, and a sense of how to interact with peers and adults. Others provide evidence of long-term economic and social benefits, in addition to academic gains (see Research Points to the Long-Term Benefits of Preschool, HEL, January/February 2006). Public preschool has also been a boon to working parents in search of quality care for their children.

Critics, however, question whether research findings indicate the likelihood of significant benefits for middle-class children. And they cite evidence that some of the gains of high-quality preK may fade out by third grade. A recent study by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, for example, found that the state’s program failed to provide long-term benefits.

Nevertheless, public funding for preK continues to flow to early childhood programs, and much of it has gone to public school systems (see The Many Faces of Universal PreK). Public spending for preK rose to $3.7 billion in 2006–07, a 12 percent increase from 2005–06, and two-thirds of the children attending publicly funded preschool are in public school programs, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research. State-funded programs in Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Maryland are predominantly located in public schools. In Oklahoma, school districts are required to provide half-day preK, and by 2011 they’ll have to offer a full-day program. Some states also provide funding for three-year-olds.

“Now it’s just another grade in school, except that it’s voluntary,” said Ramona Paul, assistant state superintendent of education in Oklahoma, where 70 percent of the state’s four-year-olds are attending preK in public schools.

In Yonkers, N.Y., a diverse urban district bordering New York City, four-year-olds have attended preK in public schools for the past decade. Students learn letters, numbers, shapes, and colors, part of a curriculum map that’s linked to the state learning standards. A 2008 study of student performance on state English language arts and math exams found that 64 percent of students in grades 3 to 8 who attended Yonkers preK classes attained proficiency on the English exam, compared to 48 percent who did not attend preK. In math, 72 percent who attended preK were proficient, compared to 59 percent for those who didn’t.

At Scholastic Academy in Yonkers, about half the preK students are English-language learners. All instruction at Scholastic is in English. “We see them coming in not speaking English, and in six months, they are speaking it fluently,” says principal Taren Washington. “They pick up so much through their interactions with other students.”

An “Activity-Based” Curriculum

Early childhood educators say that a quality preK experience can lay the foundation for learning in upper grades by focusing on language development, fine motor skills, and social and emotional learning. Many programs work on preliteracy skills, teaching letter and number recognition as well as basic counting. But just how much academics is taught, and how it is taught, is a subject of considerable debate among early childhood educators and researchers. Private preK providers say some public school teachers and administrators aren’t in tune with the proper instruction for this age group and may try to adapt lesson plans they’ve used for kindergarten or first-grade students.

“It must be very activity based,” says Oklahoma assistant superintendent Paul. “The children need to be interacting with each other and [with] materials in the room.”

Even more than their older peers in elementary schools, three- and four-year-olds learn best by engaging in activities through exploration and interaction with their agemates, early childhood experts say. They don’t do well with direct instruction. Drilling four-year-olds with flash cards doesn’t work. Neither do worksheets, sitting at desks, memorization, or focusing on handwriting skills before a child has the fine-motor skills necessary to write.

Lilian Katz, codirector of the Clearinghouse on Early Education and Parenting at the University of Illinois, says that preK students need activities that engage their minds through investigation, exploration, and close observation of what’s going on in the world. She says it’s premature to focus on academics in preschool because the children first need to learn about the world so they know what they are reading or writing about.

“Academic skills need to be put in the service of your intellectual work,” says Katz, who taught in one of the first Head Start programs in San Francisco in 1965. “The purpose of reading and writing is to be able to represent what you are thinking, observing, and finding out.”

In Boston, finding the right curriculum for preschoolers in the elementary school setting involved some trial and error. “There was a tendency to push literacy into preK in a way that’s not developmental,” says Ben Russell, assistant director of the Department of Early Childhood. “Instead of watering down the curriculum from kindergarten, we’ve found an appropriate curriculum.”

The arrival of preK at the Boston schools in 2005 brought the need for a citywide curriculum, which the district purchased from publishing houses. The new instructional framework—adapted from the Pearson Learning Group’s Opening the World of Learning curriculum—replaced lesson plans that had been developed on a school-by-school basis and that did not always promote best practices for four-year-olds. The new preK curriculum is organized around themes. One week, students explore the concepts of wind and water, the next week shadows and reflections, using literacy and math materials based on those themes.

The progress made by students in preK, however, raised issues for kindergarten teachers, who were receiving students with more preparation than they were used to. For example, to teach the progression of numbers, Boston uses a “number line” to show the ascending value of numerals. Before the city’s preK initiative, the concept was introduced in the kindergarten curriculum. Now it’s unveiled in preK, so kindergarten teachers have to find new ways to deepen the approach to the concept with students who have already seen the number line. “We still have work to do at the kindergarten level,” Russell concedes.

A Step Ahead

The benefits of preK instruction in elementary schools are often appreciated by the kindergarten instructors who teach those students the following year.

School districts that include preK classes are finding that students who have attended preK enter kindergarten a step ahead of those who haven’t. In one recent study, Georgetown University professor William Gormley found that children who had been in preK for a year had a 52 percent increase in letter-word recognition and a 27 percent edge in spelling over children the same age who were just entering preK.

Jenny Dorl, a kindergarten teacher at Charter Oak Academy in West Hartford, Conn., says she noticed a marked difference in her classroom in 2007–08, when the school’s first cohort of preK students arrived. They knew how to take instruction from their teacher, behave in a classroom, and find the bathroom. They could share, wait for their turn, and be responsible for their own belongings. They’d learned to follow through on a task and use language to express their needs. The preschoolers had become part of the school, fueling aspirations to take part in activities they’d seen older children do.

School administrators knew the children too, making kindergarten assignments much easier. “The kids coming into kindergarten from preK understood what school meant, and in the past that has taken some from six weeks to six months,” she says. “And it took much of the guessing out of placement in kindergarten classes. We were living next door, so it makes it a lot easier to produce balanced kindergarten classrooms.”

Making Room for “The Babies”

Space considerations often dictate where preK classrooms are located. Yet where they are placed can also have an impact on all students in the school. Some districts place them in preK–5 elementary schools, while others are included in preK–8 schools, an increasingly popular configuration in urban districts.

Carolyn Cobb, Ready School coordinator for the North Carolina Department of Education, says she has seen preK classrooms become isolated at elementary schools. “There was one principal who told me he didn’t worry about ‘the babies over there’ who were ‘doing their own thing,’” she says. “We are working hard to break that [barrier] down.”

On the other hand, having preschoolers in the building offers new opportunities for older students. PreK classrooms can provide an outlet for older children who need a break from their classroom. In West Hartford, for example, struggling fifth graders discover they can feel effective by nurturing cranky four-year-olds.

One emerging option is the preK–3 school (see Bridging the PreK-Elementary Divide, HEL, July/August 2005). Ellen Frede, codirector of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, says that having a preK–3 school forces the administrator to become an expert in young children. She said principals in preK–8 schools can become preoccupied with behavior issues of the older students or preparing students for the standardized tests, the results of which can reflect on the administrator’s performance. Creating a preK–3 school allows school leaders to focus on the younger students while also integrating preK classrooms into the entire school, Frede notes. Professional development at a preK–3 school can also be more focused on early childhood development.

“I have been in schools where the preK students get marched down to the auditorium for a presentation on drug abuse or the children are sent down to the cafeteria for lunch,” she says. “That’s inappropriate.”

Educating Principals

Finding ways to educate principals about the needs of three- and four-year-olds is crucial to integrating preschools into public schools. Many administrators earned their certification at a time when school began at age five or six. Others moved up to the administrative ranks from roles as, say, high school athletic coaches. They arrive at elementary schools to find preschool children who are noisy, messy, and don’t want to sit at desks doing worksheets.

Public school administrators can also be frustrated because they’ve based their decisions about curriculum and students on data generated by standardized tests and other assessment measures, which don’t apply to preschoolers.

Researchers often use assessments such as the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening or the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, on which students respond to questions to measure the progress of preschoolers in structured settings. Classroom assessments, such as the Work Sampling System, the Child Observation Record, or the Developmental Continuum, allow teachers to collect data from children in a more natural setting, as teachers observe student behavior over time and then compare it to benchmarks.

To help instructional leaders adapt to new demands, Boston created the Schott Principal Fellowship program, which in 2007 provided a year of professional development for nine elementary principals. Participants discussed the social and emotional development of preschoolers and learned ways to create classroom environments that encourage play and exploration. The principals met six times over the year and then visited the classrooms of other principals in the program.

Russell, who served as principal at Boston’s East Zone Early Learning Center from 2006 to 2008, prior to taking his current position at the Department of Early Childhood, says the fellowship program broadened his approach to engaging his four-year-old charges. He learned they are quite different from the five-year-olds in kindergarten, who readily engage with their classmates and play together.

“Four-year-olds don’t have the same back-and-forth with each other,” says Russell. “They see the world revolving completely around them. They are with each other in the same space but might not be aware of each other. It’s not as simple as you think, and it takes some adjustment.”

David McKay Wilson is a New York–based journalist who writes about education and other topics for the New York Times and for university magazines across the country.

For Further Information

W.S. Barnett. “Preschool Education and Its Lasting Effects: Research and Policy Implications.” Boulder, Colo., and Tempe, Ariz.: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research, 2008. Available online at http://epicpolicy.org/publication/preschool-education.

National Institute for Early Education Research, http://nieer.org/.

D. Olsen and D. Johnson. “Hard Lessons Learned: Applying 40 Years of Government Pre-K to Benefit Tennessee’s Children Today.” Nashville: Tennessee Center for Policy Research, 2005. Available online at www.tennesseepolicy.org/publications/studies/S2005_1.pdf. (PDF)

Pre-K Now, www.preknow.org.

Schott Principal Fellowships, www.schottfellowship.org.

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Backers of '21st-Century Skills' Take Flak

By Stephen Sawchuk
March 2, 2009

The phrase “21st-century skills” is everywhere in education policy discussions these days, from faculty lounges to the highest echelons of the U.S. education system.

Broadly speaking, it refers to a push for schools to teach ­­­critical-thinking, analytical, and technology skills, in addition to the “soft skills” of creativity, collaboration, and communication that some experts argue will be in high demand as the world increasingly shifts to a global, entrepreneurial, and service-based workplace.

But now a group of researchers, historians, and policymakers from across the political spectrum are raising a red flag about the agenda as embodied by the Tucson, Ariz.-based Partnership for 21st Century Skills, or P21, the leading advocacy group for 21st-century skills.

Array of Skills

In the Partnership for 21st Century Skills’ vision for K-12 education, the arches of the rainbow depict outcomes, while the pools represent the resources needed to support those outcomes. But critics contend that states implementing this vision might focus too heavily on discrete skills instruction, at the expense of core content.

Unless states that sign on to the movement ensure that all students are also taught a body of explicit, well-sequenced content, a focus on skills will not help students develop higher-order critical-thinking abilities, they said at a panel discussion here in the nation’s capital lastweek.

The president of P21, Ken Kay, repeatedly disagreed with those experts’ characterization of the movement.

And several prominent educators reacted to the debate with weariness, saying it echoes long-standing disagreements about the

place of content and skills in education.
“We are stuck,” Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford University, said in an interview. “We’ve been having this curriculum war for years.”

A Long History

The notion that students need a new approach to education in the age of lightening-fast access to information has become something of a catch-all in education circles. President Barack Obama, for instance, called for “a new vision for a 21st-century education system” in December when introducing his nominee for U.S. secretary of education, Arne Duncan.

Advocates are not all in agreement over the set of skills such a system would encompass. But over the past five years, the framework advanced by the P21 group has gained traction. Ten states have agreed to work with P21 to incorporate a focus on technology, analytical and communication skills into their content standards, teacher training, andassessments.

The loudest protests so far have come from Massachusetts, which unveiled an initiative to adopt 21st-century skills last November. The move generated competing commentaries in The Boston Globe from officials who argue the movement would water down the state’s standards and assessment system­—widely considered to be among the best in the nation—and from those who say that it will supplement and advance the system.

Historians, though, say the debate is much older, and the moniker “21st-century skills” glosses over calls for skills instruction that go back more than a century.

“There is nothing new in the proposals of the 21st-century-skills movement,” said Diane Ravitch, a research professor of education at New York University and a co-chairwoman of Common Core, the Washington-based nonprofit group that sponsored the panel discussion. “The same ideas were iterated and reiterated by pedagogues across the 20th century.”

The latter part of the 20th century witnessed successive education battles between content-based approaches and those that focused on skills, but went under a variety of names, such as the “life adjustment movement” in the 1950s and “outcome-based education” in the 1980s, Ms. Ravitch recounted.

Mr. Kay, in contrast, painted the P21 vision as one that transcends this debate. The partnership tries to encourage states to be more deliberative about how they help students learn the skills, he said. “There’s no question from the beginning that our work has been built on the premise that skills and content support each other, and the notion that you have to choose between them is a false dichotomy,” he said in an interview. “[But] the liberal arts movement, which we embrace, has not been as purposeful and intentional about the skill outcomes as we need to be.”

Questions of Content

At the panel debate and in interviews, several experts sharply disagreed with Mr. Kay. They contended that the P21 framework is not based on sound principles about how students learn.

Critics pointed to statements in P21’s foundational documents suggesting that critical-thinking and analytical skills can be taught outside of specific content. Cognitive science doesn’t support that notion, according to Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville.

Mr. Willingham argued not only that the teaching of skills is inseparable from that of core content, but also that it is the content itself that allows individuals to recognize problems and to determine whichcritical-thinking skills to apply to solve them.

As a result, critical-thinking skills cannot transfer from the specific content in which they are exercised to real-life contexts such as in the workplace, said E.D. Hirsch, a professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and the founder of the Core Knowledge, a curriculum designed

to increase students’ background knowledge.
Students become proficient critical thinkers only by gleaning a broad body of knowledge in multiple content domains, he said.

The P21 idea, Mr. Hirsch asserted, “is that once you acquire [these skills], they are all-purpose muscles. That error is fundamental, and it is fatal.”

Mr. Kay, a lawyer with experience in the information-technology industry, took issue with that.

“I understand the research that critical thinking looks different in math and history, but we actually have to teach people to apply it in settings they haven’t been in,” he said. “It would suggest every company that’s only in one [business] application can’t grow in other applications. Growth in the economy is [dependent on] bringing ideas into new contexts.”

Panelists at the Feb. 24 debate also questioned the feasibility of the teaching techniques endorsed by the P21 group, whose members include both businesses and education groups, such as Cable in the Classroom, Cisco Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp., and the National Education Association.

Those techniques include student-directed methods such as project-based learning, which requires students to work in groups to solve a specified problem, relying on teachers for guidance rather than for explicit instruction.

Although the panelists said such methods can be effective ways to deepen children’s content knowledge, they are difficult for teachers to put into place.

For instance, Mr. Willingham said, a teacher leading a whole classroom-based discussion of Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger can largely control themed discussions.

A project-based setting allowing small groups to explore different ideas might give students a chance to examine a diverse, richer set of subtexts—such as the history of existentialist thought or colonization in 1930s Algeria—but it also forces teachers to make many more snap judgments about how to guide students, provide resources on topics with which they may be unfamiliar, and ensure students are on task.

“There’s a reason teachers have been taught for 75 years to do projects and they don’t do them,” he said.

Another concern is one of equity, said Andrew J. Rotherham, a directorof the Washington-based think tank Education Sector.

“The amount of content kids get elsewhere varies by [socioeconomic] status, so the thing that worries some people is that [the 21st-century skills movement] has the potential to be an intervention that’s the weakest in the schools that have to be the strongest,” Mr. Rotherham said.

Mr. Hirsch of Core Knowledge warned that curriculum based primarily or entirely on projects could carry a heavy opportunity cost for poor students.

“You don’t want to waste a lot of time, particularly for disadvantaged kids, on teaching things they already know and omitting things they don’t know,” he said.

Supporters of the P21 framework said such concerns, while legitimate, should not prohibit careful attempts to improve teaching in ways that help students better exercise the 21st-century skills.

“The problem I have is in the implication [that] if it’s hard, don’t do it,” Mr. Kay said.

Such efforts must be accompanied by major changes in the system of teacher training and development, said Tony Wagner, a co-director of the Change Leadership Institute at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, which seeks new ways to improve schools.

“It took Finland close to 20 years to transform the education profession. But they’ve accomplished it,” he said. “Teachers will rise to the challenge given the kind of supports they need.”

Common Ground?

The panelists attempted to find some common ground with Mr. Kay, but even that proved challenging.

Mr. Kay, for instance, remarked on the scattered content objectives in districts’ curriculum—a phenomenon often deemed the “mile-wide, inch-deep” problem of U.S. education. “I’m having sort of an out-of-body experience,” he said, arguing that much of what educators do in the classroom now is focused on subject matter.

But Antonia Cortese, the secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Teachers and the discussion’s moderator, cited her union’s findings that much of that curriculum is not well guided by state content standards, which tend to be repetitive and vague.

“If [curriculum] is just picking up a manual, or a series of nonconnected or nonsequenced experiments in science or literary works with no connection and no background knowledge, it’s not going to help our kids think any better,” she said in an interview.

Academics like Ms. Darling-Hammond said that setting forth a clear understanding once and for all about what students should know, and which teaching methods best help students engage that content in depth, will be crucial to putting such debates to rest.

The highest-scoring countries on international exams, she said, undertook efforts to outline such goals specifically 20 to 30 years ago.

“When you really think about delivering a rich curriculum, it takes a very skillful type of teaching,” Ms. Darling-Hammond said. “It can be done badly; we have to acknowledge that. But we don’t really have a choice, if we want to join other nations.”

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ANNOUCEMENTS

Dr. Jackson will be a featured speaker at the following event.  Please contact Marcela Castrillon Velez if you are interested in attending or would like more information.

"Transforming No Child Left Behind"
sponsored by National Council of Churches Committee on Public Education and Literacy
Hilton Alexandria Mark Center Hotel
Alexandria, VA
Friday, March 13, 2009
9:30am-10:00 am