Study considers challenges to recruiting new teachers.
Education Week (9/10, Sawchuk) reports, “With demand for new teachers expected to exceed 1.5 million over the next decade, a new survey illuminates the challenges school districts will face as they look to recruit fresh talent among people who already have experience in other fields.” The survey suggests that “more than two of five professionals between the ages of 24 and 60 would consider teaching as a second career in the future.” The survey also indicates “that recruiting those individuals into the profession would require policymakers to consider carefully how to address low teacher pay, appeal to an increasingly diverse population, and design training pathways and supports tailored to midcareer professionals.” Among the survey’s “surprising findings” were that those “deemed potential teachers” were interested “in shortage subjects and in certain types of schools, including those that serve low-income and minority students.” Also, many of those “interested in teaching high school were more likely than other potential teachers to hold degrees in the so-called STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, specialties for which schools tend to have a hard time finding qualified candidates.”
In the Classroom
Rate of seniors passing California’s exit exam drops slightly.
The Los Angeles Times (9/10, Mehta) reports, “One in 10 high school seniors in the class of 2008 failed to pass California’s exit exam by graduation, the lowest rate of passage since the test became mandatory to earn a diploma three years ago, according to data released Tuesday by the state Department of Education.” Officials attributed the decline to the inclusion of special education students, who “were required to take the exam to receive diplomas” for the first time this year, “and their test results were included in the tally.” The Times notes, “Nearly half of special education students — those with learning, physical or mental disabilities such as autism or dyslexia — did not pass the exam.” Further, “efforts to narrow the achievement gap between white and Asian students and their black and Latino peers also showed little success.”
The AP (9/10) notes that, according to the data, “about 90 percent of the graduating class of 2008…passed the test,” down from 94 percent the previous year. “About 54 percent of blind, deaf and other disabled students who are classified as special education passed it.”
The San Diego Union Tribune (9/10) adds, “All students in California must take the exit exam during their sophomore year.” Students are given “two more opportunities to pass it in the 11th grade and three chances as seniors.”
California’s Mercury News (9/9, Hull) noted, “The vast majority of California’s special education students have learning disabilities such as dyslexia.” Sid Wolinsky of Disability Rights Advocates said, “Parents of kids with disabilities are horrified by the exit exam, and they are more horrified now that we have the statistics. … Dyslexia is a killer on tests, even for students who are very bright.” California’s Press Enterprise (9/10, Parsavand) also reports the story.
New York school offers accelerated instruction for pre-K through first grade.
Capital News 9 Albany (9/9, 10:42 a.m. ET) reported on the Saratoga Academy of Arts and Science in Clifton Park, New York, which “offers daily instruction for students in pre-K, Kindergarten and first grade.” The school offers an “accelerated instruction” approach “in which students are challenged to reach their potentials as learners.” School officials explained that the students are challenged to develop “reading skills at an earlier age,” for example, and similarly challenged in areas of math, science and social studies. School principal Michael Christensen added, “We recognize that preschool and Kindergarten, there’s still a big need for them to play. We want to have happy well-developed kids, but we also want to be able to take them to levels that other people don’t expect they’re capable of.”
Teacher intervention may encourage students to eat more fruits, vegetables.
UPI (9/10) reports, “U.S. school-based intervention efforts can help children buck a national trend by increasing their consumption of fruits and vegetables, researchers said.” Researchers investigating “the effects of school, family, and community environments on the food-related behavior of elementary schoolchildren” applied “three types of interventions” with students: “teacher training with a tested curriculum and parent events, teacher’s use of the curriculum without events involving parents, and an Extension educator teaching in student classrooms.” Results indicated that, regardless of which intervention method was used, 60 percent of study group participants “increased their taste for fruits and vegetables, and 50 percent either maintained their higher-than-average intake or increased intake.”
Rhode Island district to revamp school registration process.
Rhode Island’s Providence Journal (9/10, Borg) reports that Providence Superintendent Tom Brady “said he wants to revamp the school registration process, and promised that a new system will be ready by January.” In order to do that, Brady said, the School Department “will revive the student registration complaint committee to investigate how to make the registration process less difficult for families.” He also noted that “the opening of school” this year “was the smoothest in recent memory,” with “only 52 teacher vacancies on the first day of class, down from 81 the previous year, and…only 10 teachers with emergency certification, down from 19 last year.”
Message from our sponsor
LinkedIn is the largest online professional network of 25 million professionals, with millions of professionals in the education field. Connect with colleagues, find and post jobs, and exchange knowledge on the best place to do business online. Get started here, or learn more about LinkedIn here.
More Maine schools miss NCLB math targets.
The AP (9/9) reported, “More than one-third of the state’s public schools fell short of performance targets in 2007-08 under the federal government’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the Maine Department of Education (DOE) said.” Of the state’s 632 “elementary, middle and high schools,” 38 percent “missed federal performance targets on standardized reading and math tests taken last spring. That’s an increase over the previous year, when 37 percent of 635 schools failed to make what the government calls ‘adequate yearly progress.’” A state DOE spokesman “noted that while there were 30 additions to the list of underperformers, 16 schools went off the list.”
On the Job
Two Connecticut schools cede management to teachers, parents.
The AP (9/9) reported that two schools in Waterbury, Connecticut, Washington Elementary School and West Side Middle School, “are including teachers and parents in management decisions under an experiment aimed at turning around the struggling schools. City education officials are ceding management of” the two schools “to teachers and parents,” and “experts from the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education” will also be involved. “Under the program, budget, hiring, scheduling and other major decisions will be made by a collaboration of educators in the school, neighborhood leaders and parents.”
Law & Policy
American Indians voice concern over alternate NCLB progress definitions.
Education Week (9/9, Zehr) reported, “American Indian tribal representatives” recently “told members of Congress…that the federal government has been ineffective in helping them to create alternative definitions for adequate yearly progress at Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) schools under the No Child Left Behind Act, although the law permits them to do so.” The complaint coincides with “the release of a new U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report (pdf) saying that the federal government has not informed tribes well of the process to establish alternatives nor been responsive to their requests for assistance.” However, the GAO report also indicated that “the government has begun to rectify the problem by starting to meet with tribes last fall.” Education Week noted that the BIE “operates 174 schools in 23 states, with a total enrollment of 48,000.”
Judge denies California district’s motion to dismiss classroom banner case.
The San Diego Union Tribune (9/10, Soto) reports, “A federal judge has ruled that school officials” from the Poway Unified School District “can’t tell a Rancho Pe