Flanbwayan News

As Best Schools Compete for Best Performers, Students May Be Left Behind

admin — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 13:50:51 +0000

New York Times (On Education)

By MICHAEL WINERIP

July 24, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/25/nyregion/at-best-schools-competing-for-best-performers-students-may-be-left-behind.html?pagewanted=all

Mary Otero was not going to make the same mistake with her 11-year-old, Aaliyah, that she had made with her two grown children. They had both gone to Dewey — the neighborhood school, Charles O. Dewey Intermediate School 136 in Brooklyn — and it was all downhill after that.

“A lot of kids at Dewey cut class, hang out on the street,” Ms. Otero said. “Kids get jumped in the park.”

She worried that enrolling her daughter in a low-performing middle school like Dewey would relegate Aaliyah to a low-performing high school and then — well, both her older children had dropped out.

So last year when Aaliyah started fifth grade at Public School 24, Ms. Otero, a freelance graphic artist and a single mother, practically memorized the Education Department’s guide to middle schools. She attended the middle school fair for her district, District 15, and visited schools considered to be among the best.

Parents are supposed to rank their choices for the district lottery, but the guidebook is vague about what each school is looking for. Every school listing, under “Selection criteria,” says the same thing: “Review of grades and test scores.”

It is the guidance counselors who tell the parents how things really work. On both the state reading and math tests, the most selective schools generally want a raw score of at least 660 each — the equivalent of a 3 out of a top score of 4. Aaliyah was close; she had a 649 and 664.

Ms. Otero toured Middle School 51, one of the most coveted schools. “I heard the way they spoke,” she recalled. “Everyone was learning, sitting down, paying attention to the teacher.”

She also visited New Voices School of Academic and Creative Arts, which requires an audition. Aaliyah has never had a music lesson, but the family owns a guitar. “I’m just learning,” Aaliyah said. “I watch this TV channel — they have guitars, and I see where they put their fingers.” Asked how her audition went, she said, “A little messed up.”

Ms. Otero’s first choice for Aaliyah was M.S. 51, then New Voices; she listed Dewey last.

In mid-May, acceptance letters went out.

“Dewey,” Ms. Otero said. “A complete waste of my time. She could have gone straight into Dewey.”

Ms. Otero appealed.

Long before the Bloomberg administration, districts offered school choice. But in recent years the process has intensified. The reform movement has created an educational marketplace that presses schools to compete for students. This is good for the students selected for the strongest schools but not so good for children left behind and grouped as the weakest.

From 80 to 90 percent of pupils get one of their first three choices, according to an Education Department spokesman. But the better the test scores, the more in demand a child is, and the better the odds.

Christina Fuentes, the P.S. 24 principal, worries that children are being segregated by achievement, with students who earn 3s and 4s heading to one set of schools, and those with 1s and 2s to what is left over.

The 110 fifth graders at P.S. 24 are mostly poor with special needs (92 percent qualify for free lunch; for 46 percent, English is a second language; 19 percent are in special education, according to the most recent statistics on the Education Department’s Web site). They were accepted at nine different middle schools for the fall. The biggest group, 36, will go to Dewey.

Five will attend M.S. 51.

At Dewey, 90 percent of students qualify for subsidized lunches; for 39 percent, English is a second language; 21 percent are in special education.

Average language arts class size is 40.

At M.S. 51, 39 percent receive subsidized lunches; for 2 percent, English is a second language; 10 percent are in special education.

Average language arts class size is 29.

Academically, most children with 3s and 4s in elementary school continue to be 3s and 4s at M.S. 51, while the 1s and 2s continue to be 1s and 2s at Dewey.

At Dewey, 12 percent are proficient in language arts with a median state test score of 2.3; 20 percent are proficient in math with a median score of 2.4.

At M.S. 51, 82 percent are proficient in language arts with a score of 3.34; 83 percent are proficient in math with a 3.8 score.

Dennis Walcott, the schools chancellor, said in an e-mail, “Our goal is to ensure that every family, regardless of what choices they list on their application, gets matched to a quality school that puts students on track for success in college. I look forward to engaging every community to provide quality options for all middle school students.”

Perhaps some day, but not yet. And that dismays Ms. Fuentes, a principal who has devoted her professional life to working with poor children. In 2010, she was one of six New Yorkers to win a Sloan Public Service Award. “We need a policy,” she said, “so children can be better integrated.”

“How could this possibly be the right way when it ends up so lopsided?” she said.

Gloria Jaramillo, the P.S. 24 guidance counselor, wishes the guidebooks were transparent and named schools that mainly take 3s and 4s. The selection process is controlled at the district level, and most districts — 22 of 32 — like District 15 do not specify scores. “It’s very confusing to our parents,” she said.

Because the results of the fifth-grade tests are not available when students select a middle school, fourth-grade scores are used. “That’s so young for a decision that can affect them until they graduate high school,” Ms. Jaramillo said.

She estimates that 25 students from P.S. 24 heading for low-performing schools would do well at selective ones.

Mariela Torres is one student Ms. Jaramillo thinks would thrive at a demanding school. “Despite learning difficulties, she is able to overcome them,” Ms. Jaramillo said. “She’s a child committed to being successful.”

Mariela’s father, Albino Torres, listed Math and Science Exploratory School, one of the most selective in the district, as the family’s first choice. Two P.S. 24 students have been accepted in four years.

Mariela was not, and Mr. Torres appealed.

“It can be false hope,” said Tamara Estrella, the P.S. 24 parent coordinator. “Almost no one wins an appeal.”

Mariela did not, nor did Aaliyah. In September the two girls will be classmates at Dewey.

E-mail: oneducation@nytimes.com

GOING TO SCHOOL AND NOT GETTING AN EDUCATION

admin — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 19:45:47 +0000

GOING TO SCHOOL AND NOT GETTING AN EDUCATION

Illegal Immigrants’ Children Suffer, Study Finds

admin — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:43:27 +0000

By KIRK SEMPLE

Eulogia was scared and adrift. At 25, she was poor, pregnant and an illegal immigrant. She worried about how she would pay for medical care and raise her baby, and even whether a trip to the hospital might prompt her deportation to Mexico.

But when she plunged into a postpartum depression in 2003 after the birth of her daughter, the first of three children, a hospital social worker referred her and her husband to an East Harlem social service agency that has counseled them and helped them get care for their family and get the government assistance their children were eligible for as American citizens.

“I think I very am lucky,” Eulogia said in an interview this week, asking that her last name not be used because she still fears deportation. She said most illegal immigrant parents felt tremendously isolated and did not have “the confidence to ask for help.”

Indeed, a recently published study of the early development of children born to illegal immigrants in New York City suggests that most stories that begin like Eulogia’s do not end as well.

Even though the children have citizenship and live in an immigrant-friendly city that offers them a wide array of services, many are still hobbled by serious developmental and educational deficits resulting from their parents’ lives in the shadows, according to the study, whose author says it is the most comprehensive look to date at the effects of parents’ immigration status on young children.

“The undocumented are viewed in current policy debates as lawbreakers, laborers or victims — seldom as parents raising citizen children,” wrote the author, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, a Harvard education professor who has published the study as a book, “Immigrants Raising Citizens” (Russell Sage Foundation, 2011).

Professor Yoshikawa found that by the time the children of illegal immigrants reached age 2, they showed significantly lower levels of language and cognitive development than the children of legal immigrants and native-born parents.

“Millions of the youngest citizens in the United States, simply by virtue of being born to a parent with a particular legal status, have less access to the learning opportunities that are the building blocks of adult productivity,” he wrote.

The implications for the nation are potentially far-reaching and long-lasting, he said, considering that of all preschool children of illegal immigrant parents in the United States, an estimated 91 percent — four million children — are American citizens.

Poor cognitive development can lead to lower school performance, which in turn can lead to higher dropout rates, an undertrained work force and lower economic productivity. “Ignoring these children has costs for society,” Professor Yoshikawa warned.

He and his team began their research by visiting maternity wards at public hospitals around New York in 2004 and getting permission to study nearly 400 babies newly born to Chinese, Dominican and Mexican parents, as well as to native-born African American parents. The researchers, who were affiliated with the Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education at New York University, followed the children for three years.

The researchers found that poor immigrants cannot afford learning materials or stimulating programs in child care centers. Fear of deportation or ignorance about how the city works often prevents those parents from seeking help from government agencies that provide child care subsidies or food stamps.

Many illegal immigrants, particularly those belonging to newer immigrant groups, like Mexicans in New York, have smaller extended families or less-developed social networks than others, and therefore fewer people around to help raise children.

The psychological stress suffered by illegal immigrants — many of whom work long hours for low wages and live in crowded, poorly maintained apartments — can be transmitted to young children, the study says.

“Greater hardship among parents, both economic and psychological,” Professor Yoshikawa wrote, “can harm children’s learning by lowering parents’ active engagement with their children, the quantity or quality of their language or their warmth and responsiveness.”

In an interview, he pointed out that illegal immigrants’ anxieties about seeking help — and those anxieties’ effects on children — could be even worse in places with “harsher” immigration policies.

Eulogia, the East Harlem mother, said she was brought to the United States by her parents when she was 11 and lived in a succession of cramped apartments in New York. She helped her parents sell flowers on the street to make ends meet. Though she graduated from high school, she remained an illegal immigrant, and imagined that her own children would live the same kind of existence.

Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service — a community-based organization in East Harlem that provides counseling and other assistance to poor people, especially immigrants — helped Eulogia and her husband get food stamps and enroll in the federal Women, Infants and Children assistance program. Her eldest daughter, now 7, receives after-school tutoring at the center, while her second child, a 2-year-old boy, is getting speech therapy. And the family has secured better housing.

In his book, Professor Yoshikawa extols the work of groups like Family Health Service.

“By bringing these families out of the shadows and providing them with access to better work conditions and learning opportunities,” he wrote, “we can ensure that the nation’s most vulnerable young citizens have an equal chance to succeed in their early development, later schooling and adulthood.”

In Lean Times, Schools Squeeze Out Librarians

admin — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:42:26 +0000

By FERNANDA SANTOS

Budget belt-tightening threatens to send school librarians the way of the card catalog.

The schools superintendent in Lancaster, Pa., said he had to eliminate 15 of the district’s 20 librarians to save full-day kindergarten classes.

In the Salem-Keizer school district in Oregon, all 48 elementary and middle school librarians would lose their jobs under a budget proposal that faces a vote next week.

In Illinois’s School District 90, which spans several rural and suburban communities in the southern part of the state, parent volunteers have been running the libraries in the district’s seven schools since September, in what the schools superintendent, Todd Koehl, described as “a last-ditch effort” to avoid closing their doors.

And in New York City, half of the secondary schools appear to be in violation of a state regulation requiring them to have a librarian on staff, with the city currently employing 365 licensed librarians.

“The dilemma that schools will face is whether to cut a teacher who has been working with kids all day long in a classroom or cut teachers who are working in a support capacity, like librarians,” the city’s chief academic officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky, said in an interview.

In New York, as in districts across the country, many school officials said they had little choice but to eliminate librarians, having already reduced administrative staff, frozen wages, shed extracurricular activities and trimmed spending on supplies. Technological advances are also changing some officials’ view of librarians: as more classrooms are equipped with laptops, tablets or e-readers, Mr. Polakow-Suransky noted, students can often do research from their desks that previously might have required a library visit.

“It’s the way of the future,” he said.

Nancy Everhart, president of the American Association of School Librarians, whose membership has fallen to 8,000 from 10,000 in 2006, said that, on the contrary, the Internet age made trained librarians more important, to guide students through the basics of searching and analyzing information they find online.

Libraries, Ms. Everhart said, are “the one place that every kid in the school can go to to learn the types of skills that will be expected of them when it’s time to work with an iPad in class.”

Some states, including Arkansas, Indiana and Kentucky, require every public school to employ a certified librarian; others, like Maine, leave staffing decisions to districts. New York requires certified librarians in middle and high schools but not elementary schools, and also requires a certified library assistant for any school that has more than 1,000 students.

But an analysis of state and city data shows there is one librarian for every 2,146 students this year, compared with 1 per 1,447 in 2005. At least 386 schools serving students from grades 6 through 12 do not have a librarian on staff, the records show. A spokesman for the Education Department said some of those schools shared librarians, though he could not say how many.

Separately, Mr. Polakow-Suransky said that once principals received their individual school budgets for the coming year, “we will work with them to ensure compliance with the state’s regulations.” He noted that schools “need great flexibility to staff them in these tough times.”

Schools around the city have already been flexible: in addition to sharing librarians, some classroom teachers, particularly in elementary schools, have been trained to stand in for librarians. But there are also libraries sitting unused for lack of someone to staff them.

At a squat brick building on Underhill Avenue in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, parents at the elementary and middle schools that share the space banded together a few years ago to improve the library, whose books were so outdated that some still referred to the Soviet Union without reporting its demise. They convinced the Brooklyn borough president and the local councilwoman to provide $450,000 for the project. One parent, an interior designer, helped sketch the plans and supervised the renovation.

The new library opened on Nov. 17, with nine new computers and 4,200 titles, but has been used only as a reading space, mostly by kindergarten teachers who bring in their pupils once a week.

“We just put all this money into a project that may never be fully utilized,” said Kiki Dennis, 43, the designer.

The problem is that shortly after the library’s completion, the city announced plans to close the building’s Middle School 571 by 2013, prompting a drop in enrollment that officials expect to worsen in the fall

Because school budgets are largely tied to enrollment, the principal decided she could no longer afford to pay half the salary of a librarian, who earns about $70,000. The principal of the elementary school, Public School 9, decided she could not pay the salary alone, and so no librarian was hired.

At the Morris High School campus in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, where five schools — with a total of 1,900 students — share space, the central library has been closed all year because it has no librarian. At the John F. Kennedy High School campus, in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, the lack of a certified librarian was only part of the problem: the principal of one of the six high schools that share the building said the books there were too outdated to be usable.

The principals, with the help of New Visions for Public Schools, which will run two charter schools scheduled to open on the Kennedy campus this fall, submitted a request to Councilman G. Oliver Koppell for $1.8 million to create a media center equipped with e-readers, iPads and a language lab for students not proficient in English. Mr. Koppell sought $600,000 for the project in the budget, which must be approved by Thursday. Whether the request will be granted is uncertain.

But Mr. Polakow-Suransky said he understood that in tight times, principals had to make stark choices — as do their counterparts elsewhere.

Pedro Rivera, the Lancaster superintendent, said that when he realized a few months ago that his largely poor and immigrant district faced a $10 million deficit, he gathered his senior staff members and asked, “If this budget is an expression of our values, what is it that we value the most?”

The team decided to limit class sizes. They made sure there would be no cuts to physical education — “to prevent obesity and promote a healthy lifestyle,” Mr. Rivera said — or arts or music. And they protected prekindergarten classes.

Given what was left, he said, “it was either library or kindergarten.”

Robert Gebeloff contributed reporting.

Republican Challenges Administration on Plans to Override Education Law

admin — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:41:38 +0000

By SAM DILLON

In a sharp rebuke to the Obama administration, the Republican chairman of the House education committee on Thursday challenged plans by the education secretary to override provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Law, and he said he would use a House rewrite of it this year to rein in the secretary’s influence on America’s schools.

Responding to Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s promise to grant states waivers to the education law’s most onerous provisions if Congress failed to rewrite it, the committee chairman, Representative John Kline of Minnesota, sent Mr. Duncan a letter on Thursday demanding that he explain by July 1 the legal authority that he believed he had to issue the waivers.

Mr. Kline went further in a conference call with reporters, criticizing the administration’s use of the $5 billion Race to the Top grant competition to get states to adopt its reform agenda.

“He’s not the nation’s superintendent,” Mr. Kline said of Mr. Duncan, who assumed powers greater than any of his predecessors when, in 2009, Congress voted $100 billion in economic stimulus money for the nation’s school systems and allowed the secretary to decide how much of it should be spent.

“Unquestionably, Congress gave the secretary way too much authority in the stimulus bill when it said, ‘Here’s $5 billion, go do good things for education,’ ” Mr. Kline said.

Also, Mr. Kline for the first time outlined publicly a timetable for rewriting the sprawling school accountability law, President George W. Bush’s signature education initiative, saying he would move five bills to the House floor by year’s end.

A bill stripping several dozen federal educational programs from the No Child law, and another tweaking its provisions on charter schools, moved out of the education committee recently. A third bill, which would allow school districts new flexibility in how they spend federal education dollars, could be approved by Mr. Kline’s committee before Congress’s summer break, he said.

The fourth and fifth bills — one outlining new federal teacher effectiveness requirements and another rewriting the law’s school accountability provisions — will dominate the committee’s fall agenda, Mr. Kline said.

The Senate, led by Democrats, is working to rewrite the law with a single comprehensive bill, and experts said profound partisan disagreements could make a single rewrite difficult.

Still, Mr. Kline defended his legislative timetable and sought to undercut the argument underpinning Mr. Duncan’s waiver plans: that Congressional inaction had forced the administration to give states immediate relief from provisions like its accountability system, which requires that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014.

Mr. Duncan has predicted that unless the law is rewritten quickly, 80,000 of the nation’s 100,000 public schools could be declared failing this fall, demoralizing educators and paralyzing administrators with red tape. This month, Mr. Duncan said that if Congress failed to rewrite these and other provisions by September, he would use his executive powers to waive them — but only for states that agreed to embrace the administration’s education priorities. He used that formula in the Race to the Top grant competition, awarding money to states that opened new space for charter schools, for instance.

In his letter, Mr. Kline asked Mr. Duncan to explain how the Department of Education had the authority to grant waivers “in exchange for reforms not authorized by Congress.”

Justin Hamilton, a spokesman for Mr. Duncan, reiterated the administration’s plan to negotiate with states over waivers. “The best way to fix this broken law is for Congress to send a bipartisan bill for the president to sign by the start of the school year,” Mr. Hamilton said. “As a Plan B, we’ll be prepared to use the authority Congress has given us to grant relief in exchange for reforms that boost student achievement.”

The law itself clearly empowers Mr. Duncan to grant states waivers, but several experts have challenged his plan to demand that states undertake policies he favors to get the waivers.

“If you read the waiver language in the law, the secretary absolutely does not have the right to arbitrarily think up good reform ideas and require that states do them in return for waivers,” said Frederick Hess, a director at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group. “That’s a violation of constitutional design.”

Meanwhile, some states are taking matters into their own hands. On Tuesday, Idaho’s superintendent, Tom Luna, said his state would not lift its mandated testing targets this year, as required under the federal law. “If Congress and the administration will not act, states like Idaho will,” Mr. Luna wrote.

A New Web Site Aims to Help Families Compare Tuition

admin — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:41:03 +0000

By JACQUES STEINBERG

Thanks to a new Web site made available today by the Department of Education, families can compare the various costs of particular colleges and universities, as well as the trends in that pricing, according to an article in The Times by my colleague Tamar Lewin.

As Ms. Lewin writes:

The new lists, required by the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, show the institutions with the highest and lowest tuitions, the highest and lowest percentage tuition increases over the last two years, and the highest and lowest net price — that is, the actual price full-time students pay, including room and board, after financial aid like grants and scholarships are taken into account.

In each of several categories — public and private, for-profit and nonprofit, four-year and two-year — the most expensive institutions and those whose costs are rising most rapidly will be required to report to the Education Department why their costs are so high and what they plan to do about it.

Readers of The Choice who have already traveled down this road know that it can be perilous, and at times maddening, to try to weigh the tuition, board and other fees of one institution against those of another.

So in that respect, it seems fair to ask how helpful this information — and there is quite a bit of it — will be for families.

In an e-mail exchange this morning, not long after the lists went live online, Ms. Lewin explained to me:

The lists are an attempt to embarrass colleges into keeping their prices down. Even though there are no penalties for having unusually high tuition — beyond having to report why it’s so high, and how it’s going to be addressed — no institution wants to be singled out for high tuition.

Ms. Lewin went on to provide some examples that should give users pause, at least in terms of reading too much into the various rankings:

The colleges that top the list — the ones like Bates that use a comprehensive fee instead of breaking it down by tuition and room and board — may want to change their approach, so they won’t show up as the highest-priced, when there are plenty of other schools, like Sarah Lawrence, whose tuition is actually higher.

A lot of art schools, with their expensive facilities and low teacher/student ratios, show up among the most expensive — and a lot of religious colleges are among the lower-priced.

Even though these lists are being provided by the government — and not a publication like U.S. News and World Report — they would still seem ripe for manipulation by the colleges themselves. Ms. Lewin has already identified some areas for potential abuse:

Colleges may try to game the net-price rankings. Because they include only first-time full-time freshmen who get some aid, colleges will look better if they give a lot of aid to a few students than if they spread it more widely. And if they target their aid to freshmen, and taper it off in the later years, that will help them rise in the rankings, too.

Ms. Lewin ended her e-mail to me with a final “caution to users.” She wrote:

The numbers on the lists are a few years behind, and, with the economic downturn, the 2009 tuition reported may be quite different from next year’s tuition. And the comparisons of 2006 tuition to 2008 tuition, which were used to figure how fast the price is going up, are even more out of date.

What’s the Most Expensive College? The Least? Education Dept. Puts It All Online

admin — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:40:10 +0000

By TAMAR LEWIN

Students and families can compare colleges’ tuitions, the pace at which they are rising and the net cost of attending each college on a new Web site the Department of Education made public on Thursday, fulfilling a legislative mandate.

“This allows students and families to see the highs and lows of the distributions and highlights those good-performing institutions,” said David Bergeron, a department official.

Information about colleges that are not among the highest 5 percent or lowest 10 percent in their category, he said, can be found on the department’s College Navigator site.

A separate report to be released Thursday shows that community colleges — long seen as the affordable route to higher education — are increasingly unaffordable for American families. From 1999 to 2009, tuition at public two-year colleges increased 71 percent, while the median family income declined 4.9 percent, adjusted for inflation, according to a study by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

“We’ve gotten pretty jaded about this issue, with people saying, ‘Look how cheap community colleges are, compared with four-year colleges,’ ” said Patrick M. Callan, president of the center. “But actually, community colleges, which are supposed to be our safety net institutions, were losing ground even before the economic downturn, with huge tuition increases at a time when family income was declining.”

The Education Department data cover a smaller time period, reporting tuition from the academic year that began in the fall of 2009, but calculating increases from 2006 to 2008.

According to the lists, the average 2009-10 tuition at a four-year nonprofit college was $21,324. But the highest-priced institutions were far more costly: Bates College in Maine had the highest tuition last year ($51,300); Wells College, in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, the largest percentage increase in the two years before that (67 percent); and the Art Center College of Design in California the highest net cost for those receiving aid ($29,672).

A spokesman for Bates took issue with the department’s methods, noting that its price — and that of the other four most expensive schools listed — includes room and board, making for an apples-and-oranges comparison with colleges where tuition is listed separately.

“Bates’s average net price, taking into account financial aid, is below that of more than 400 other institutions,” noted the spokesman, Roland Adams. “Bates’ percentage increase in tuition and fees over the last three academic years is lower than that of more than 800 other institutions.”

Indeed, the data are uneven in other respects as well. The net cost numbers, for example, include only full-time, first-time students who received financial aid, a group that at many colleges is not very large.

But the Web site offers much more comprehensive data than had previously been readily available, and presents it in a user-friendly way, providing a useful window on college costs.

The average tuition at public four-year colleges was $10,747. Pennsylvania State had the highest tuition ($14,416), Northern New Mexico College the largest percentage increase (51 percent) and the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio the highest net price ($24,192).

Among public two-year colleges, the average tuition was $2,527, the University of Pittsburgh-Titusville charged more than four times that ($10,430), making it the most expensive in the group. And Sanford-Brown College had the highest tuition ($45,628) among four-year for-profit schools, where the average was $15,661.

In another effort to expand consumer information about higher education, the government will require career and vocational colleges’ promotional materials to show their tuition and fees, and their students’ median debt load, along with rates of graduation and job placement.

Union Shifts Position on Teacher Evaluations

admin — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:39:31 +0000

By SHARON OTTERMAN

CHICAGO — Catching up to the reality already faced by many of its members, the nation’s largest teachers’ union on Monday affirmed for the first time that evidence of student learning must be considered in the evaluations of school teachers around the country.

In passing the new policy at its assembly here, the 3.2 million-member union, the National Education Association, hopes to take a leadership role in the growing national movement to hold teachers accountable for what students learn — an effort from which it has so far conspicuously stood apart.

But blunting the policy’s potential impact, the union also made clear that it continued to oppose the use of existing standardized test scores to judge teachers, a core part of the federally backed teacher evaluation overhauls already under way in at least 15 states.

“N.E.A. is and always will be opposed to high-stakes, test-driven evaluations,” said Becky Pringle, the secretary-treasurer of the union, addressing the banner-strung convention hall filled with the 8,200-member assembly that votes on union policy.

The union’s desire both to join and to stand apart from a White House-led effort to improve teacher performance represents the delicate situation it finds itself in as it confronts what Dennis Van Roekel, the union president, called “the worst environment for teachers I’ve ever seen.” Amid deep budget cuts and layoffs, the union has lost more than 30,000 members this year, and is fighting back against legislative efforts to curtail its collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin, Tennessee, Arizona and other states.

In response, union leaders, who spent last year’s Fourth of July weekend challenging the Obama administration’s promotion of charter schools and high-stakes standardized testing, spent this year’s trying to close ranks and encouraging even those union members who are furious at those policies to embrace calls for change — if on their own terms.

On Monday, the assembly voted by secret ballot to give Mr. Obama an early endorsement for his 2012 presidential run, a move that will allow the union to begin channeling its considerable political resources to the campaign. The strong showing in favor — 72 percent — was foreshadowed by the standing ovations that greeted Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who gave an impassioned pro-union speech here Sunday.

“There is an organized effort to place the blame for the budget shortfall squarely on the shoulders of teachers and other public workers, and it is one of the biggest scams in modern American history,” Mr. Biden told the educators. In contrast to that threat, the differences between the White House and the union, he said, were like disputes within the same family.

Bertha J. Foley, a middle school teacher from Fort Myers, Fla., said: “All of the Republicans are worse on education than Obama. I’m not saying I agree with everything, but you have to pick the least evil, the one who will do the least harm.”

The union’s new dual role as defender of union protections and promoter of reform created some unlikely tableaus. At one point an angel-voiced folk singer with a guitar took to the stage to lead the thousands of teachers in a sing-along called “Solidarity Forever.” At another point, the narrator of a video projected on the hall’s multiple Jumbotrons began his report about inspiring teachers with the following sentence: “We have a huge problem of teacher quality in this country.”

“They’re just shifting back and forth,” said Jana Wells, 53, a teacher from Glendale, Calif., who called herself one of the few Republicans representing the California caucus. “And on the endorsement of Obama, it’s scare tactics — it’s like if we don’t do this right now, our enemies will win.”

The debate over the new teacher evaluation policy largely focused on the concern that by even mentioning test scores, the union would further open the door to their use. Some teachers also balked at another section of the policy — the proposal that failing teachers be given only one year to improve, instead of the standard two. But in the end a clear majority voted yes.

Segun Eubanks, the director of teacher quality for the union, said the new policy was intended to guide, not bind, state and local union chapters. It tries to close the disconnect between the many local union chapters that have already assented to using student test scores in teacher evaluations, and the union’s national policy that explicitly opposed their use. Now the union can offer those chapters support, and conduct research on the impact of standardized tests.

“What it says is, now we are willing to get into that arena,” Mr. Van Roekel said. “Before, we weren’t.”

The policy calls for teacher practice, teacher collaboration within schools and student learning to be used in teacher evaluations. But for tests, only those shown to be “developmentally appropriate, scientifically valid and reliable for the purpose of measuring both student learning and a teacher’s performance” should be used, the policy states, a bar that essentially excludes all existing tests, said Douglas N. Harris of the University of Wisconsin, a testing expert.

Mr. Eubanks said, “We believe that there are no tests ready to do that,” though he added that with the new national Common Core curriculum standards being rolled out, new tests might be created that could meet the bar.

The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union, with 1.5 million members, has already stated that student test scores “based on valid assessments” should be a part of improved teacher evaluations.

But how much these new national policy statements will actually shift state and local union practice remains to be seen, experts said, assessing the work of both unions.

“At the national level, what they are proposing really lacks much specificity at all,” said Sandi Jacobs, the vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonpartisan advocacy group in Washington. “There really isn’t much to hang your hat on. And with so many states and locals already out of the gate, it’s hard to see what new proposals they are bringing to the table at this point.”

Priscilla Savannah, a seventh-grade science teacher attending the convention from Shreveport, La., said, “It’s already too late.”

Ms. Savannah’s state is about to start using teacher evaluations that give standardized test scores heavy weight. “It’s going to take a major fight, and a lot of money, to change anything now,” she said.

Union Chief Faults School Reform From ‘On High’

admin — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:38:44 +0000

By ALAN SCHWARZ

WASHINGTON — Amid one of the most contentious periods in recent memory for teachers’ unions, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, on Monday called for education reform that emanates from teachers and their communities, rather than from “those who blame teachers for everything.”

“Let’s refuse to be defined by people who are happy to lecture us about the state of public education — but wouldn’t last 10 minutes in a classroom,” Ms. Weingarten told a crowd of about 2,000 here in kicking off the national conference held every two years by the union, which has 1.5 million members.

In the past year, particularly in Wisconsin and New Jersey, governors and some state lawmakers have castigated teachers’ unions and schools’ performance while slashing budgets and pushing newer education strategies like charter schools and more rigorous teacher evaluation.

Ms. Weingarten, who has long opposed the cuts — both budgetary and rhetorical — made to teachers, told her audience that the current debate on education “has been hijacked by a group of self-styled reformers” from “on high” who want to blame educators’ benefits and job security for states’ notorious budget problems. Calling the union gathering “an affirmation,” she countered that change to the education system should instead come through greater community support for teachers themselves and recognition for the commitment to children they already demonstrate.

The speech, preceded by a youth chorus singing “Money (That’s What I Want)” and ending with Dionne Warwick’s “Say a Little Prayer,” was a formalization of the points Ms. Weingarten has made in editorials and on television as states’ budget crises have landed at the schoolhouse door. It played well with union members like Dan Fray, an eighth-grade social studies teacher in Toledo, Ohio, where State Senate Bill 5 limited the collective-bargaining rights of 350,000 public workers earlier this year.

“We didn’t become teachers for the pay or the benefits or the schedule, and no one’s looking for a pat on the back for staying late to help kids,” Mr. Fray said. “But what’s happened in Ohio and Indiana and Wisconsin and elsewhere is the vilification of the schoolteacher.”

Ms. Weingarten’s speech followed impassioned comments from Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, Democrat of the District of Columbia, who said, “There is no way to be for our children and against teachers.”

Ms. Weingarten did offer conciliatory remarks, acknowledging the success of some charter schools while still expressing fear that they siphon talent and money from established school systems. She implored her members to avoid a “circle the wagons” approach to public skepticism of their value, saying that could cut teachers off from the communities with which they should connect more intimately.

The area in which teachers’ economic and ideological concerns appeared to converge was longevity in the classroom. Ms. Weingarten criticized an environment that discourages people from making education a life’s calling, noting that one-third of teachers leave after three years, and one-half leave after five. That is before they have a chance to reach their potential, she said — and, some detractors would counter, the comfort of tenure that can breed complacency and underperformance.

“I’m not saying that teaching needs to be the only job someone holds in a society where people have multiple careers,” Ms. Weingarten said. “But unless we move teaching from a service project to a sustainable profession, it will exact a huge cost on our schools, our children’s achievement and our progress as a nation.”

Ms. Weingarten did not address two notable subjects: the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers, and recent revelations of cheating among teachers in Atlanta and elsewhere to improve students’ test scores, which are often tied to funding.

In an interview afterward, Ms. Weingarten condemned the Atlanta situation but pointed to the role of the local teachers’ unions in helping uncover it. The cheating itself, she said, was a byproduct of when “targets become more important than learning” and of a teaching climate that in many areas has become “intimidating, fearful and retaliatory.”

“A new reality is what we’re fighting for,” she had told her audience an hour earlier. “One in which we improve the profession of teaching for teachers and outcomes for students.”

Ed Dept. evaded state law to pay $287,500 to controversial consultant, controller charges

admin — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:37:46 +0000

BY Rachel Monahan
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Sunday, June 26th 2011, 4:00 AM

The city Department of Education evaded state law to pay a controversial consultant $287,500, officials with the city controller’s office charge.

Even after the Education Department’s $20 million teacher-recruitment contract with The New Teacher Project got rejected in March on technical grounds, the city sneaked through three payments last month, the officials charge.

“We have requested a meeting with DOE to address their persistent attempts to circumvent the Education Law and pay outside consultants without registered contracts,” said Mike Loughran, a spokesman for Controller John Liu.

A review by Liu’s office after it discovered the New Teacher Project payments found that the city Department of Education also attempted to pay $1.3 million to Wireless Generation.

The company is now owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and overseen by former city Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.

Liu’s office blocked that payment because it had rejected the Wireless Generation contract earlier this month, saying Klein had not filed a necessary letter recusing himself from involvement in the contract.

The city Law Department and the city Department of Education, however, consider both contracts to be valid and are not recognizing the controller’s rejection.

In a Wednesday letter to Deputy Controller Geneith Turnbull, city Law Department Contracts Division Chief Steven Stein Cushman blasts the controller’s attempts to thwart its deal with The New Teacher Project, calling it “not consistent with the Education Law.

“Accordingly, the DOE rejected your return of the [New Teacher Project] contract and deemed the [New Teacher Project] Contract registered,” he wrote.

rmonahan@nydailynews.com