The AP (11/14) reported that Maryland education officials “said 83 percent of public schools in Maryland met federal No Child Left Behind standards in the 2007-08 school year. That’s up from 77 percent last year.” Also, “The increase comes despite tougher standards for meeting” Adequate Yearly Progress. Nevertheless, as “usual, the most schools that failed to meet the standards are in Baltimore City and Prince George’s County.”

Education Week (11/14, McNeil) reported that the “much-debated standardized test in Washington state may be headed for a major overhaul now that Randy Dorn, a union official who has served as a teacher and principal, is replacing a three-term incumbent to become the superintendent of public instruction.” According to Education Week, Dorn “said one of his top priorities would be revamping the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, or WASL. … Revamping the WASL, which would require legislative approval for significant changes, is the most prominent of his priorities as he prepares to take office. Mr. Dorn also said he wants to change the school funding system, improve the dropout rate, and increase access to early education.”

The New York Times (11/15, A10, Kovach) reported, “Eager to hire teachers for bilingual education programs, the Dallas public school system assigned fake Social Security numbers to newly hired foreigners so it could get them on the payroll quickly, an internal investigation found.” According to the Times, he district “continued the practice for years, the investigation found, even after it was admonished by a state agency. It was only halted this summer. … Jon Dahlander, a Dallas schools spokesman, said Friday that the intention of the practice ‘was good – they wanted to help the employees get paid. But you cannot use inappropriate procedures to do that.’”

The Riverside (CA) Press-Enterprise (11/16, Vittachi) reported the Hemet [CA] Unified teachers union says the district “could have avoided altering a program that capped the size of kindergarten classes by ‘sharing the pain’ and making $1.2 million in managerial cuts proposed in February. Instead, the district made only half of those managerial cuts.” The move has raised the ire of union leaders and members, as they say “kindergarten teachers and students now will suffer the consequences of the decision to change kindergarten class sizes. Instead of 20 students per teacher, there can now be as many as 33.” Also, the district “decided to fill half of its vacant management positions. If it had left all of those positions unfilled, it could have saved an additional $600,000 in its 2008-09 budget — which is the same amount of money that was cut by changing the class-size program,” said Jerry Hall, president of the Hemet Teachers Association.

Illinois’ News-Gazette (11/16, Reiter) reported that the ranks of second-career educators a growing, as Eastern Illinois University’s alternative teacher certification program “regularly gets many more applicants from hopeful career-changers than it has room for. That number might only increase, given the downward economy and demand for new teachers to hire – between 2.1 million and 5.9 million hires between now and 2020, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago published in September.” Also, according to a study by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, a “mass of eager would-be teachers might be available, given the right circumstances, like enough money. More than 40 percent of college-educated people between 24 and 60 years old would consider teaching, the study found.”

The Boston Globe (11/16, Rathi) reported that the Newton [MA] school district “says teachers need more time for professional development. Parents say their children need more hours in class.” Thus, the “decision by the Newton district to add two early release days to the middle-school calendar has brought this long-simmering debate to the surface. … Many parents contend increasing the days that students are let out early throws off work schedules, leaves many children who have working parents without supervision, and takes away from quality learning time.” However, school officials “say professional development time is essential to improving curriculum.”

The Christian Science Monitor (11/17, Luscombe) reports that Florida School now must “comply with a state law that came into effect this semester requiring children in kindergarten through fifth grade to receive 30 minutes of continuous physical education every day. While efforts within the education system to curb soaring rates of childhood obesity are not new, Florida’s recent inclusion of the word ‘continuous’ presents a specific difficulty to schools trying to juggle already crowded curricula.” According to the Monitor, before the law was implemented, “there were reports of some schools including the children’s walk to the cafeteria at lunchtime as part of a looser requirement of 150 minutes’ exercise, in any combination, per week.”

The St. Petersburg Times (11/17) editorializes, “Accountability has been the watchword for most industries and government agencies for many years. Now it finally has come to companies that tutor public school students.” According to the Times, a bill signed by Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R) would mandate that as of next year, “all 258 state-approved tutoring firms must be graded on a scale of A through F. These companies, such as Sylvan, offer tutoring through a mandate in the federal No Child Left Behind Act requiring low-scoring children in high-poverty schools to have access to free, private tutoring.” The Times adds that “until now, the companies have operated without having to demonstrate their effectiveness.” Yet, “Republican state Sen. Alex Diaz de la Portilla, who sponsored the bill, and other skeptics…are justified in wanting to know if the companies are helping students’ classroom performance improve as required by NCLB.”

New Jersey’s Courier-Post (11/16, Rosen) reported that “with 1,458 incidents of bullying reported in just 307 of the 2,400 public schools” in New Jersey for the 2006-07 school year, “some legislative eyebrows have been raised. The number of incidents is 49 more than were reported the previous year and 324 more than reported in 2004-05, according to the state Department of Education’s report on harassment, intimidation and bullying.” However, “Those totals do not represent all the bullying that goes on, experts and officials say. ‘Getting reliable data about bullying is one of the huge challenges we have to address,’ said Stuart Green, chairman of the Governor’s Commission on Bullying in Schools. ‘We need to strengthen data collection and assessment.’”

The Baltimore Sun (11/16, Fuller) reported, “Schoolyard bullies — and how school systems deal with their threats — are an age-old problem. In the past decade, schools across the country have become increasingly aggressive in dealing with threats of violence, instituting zero-tolerance policies after two Colorado high school students went on a deadly shooting rampage inside Columbine High School.” Also, school systems “are trying new strategies and recycling old ones to deal with disciplinary issues, such as employing police officers at schools, using peer mediation and conflict resolution, and raising the bar for behavior that constitutes severe disciplinary measures.”

The WJZ-TV Baltimore, MD (11/14, Barnett) reported, “As the nation slumps into an economic downturn, Baltimore County (MD) schools continue to build and repair. … Nationwide, the economic downturn is hitting schools hard. Many school districts have frozen new construction projects, but Smith says build on.” However, according to WJZ, Baltimore [MD] County Executive Jim Smith said, “It’s critical that we continue education as a priority. We’re going to get out of this economic downturn that the world is experiencing, but one of the ways we’re going to do it is through educated people.’”

Boston Society of Architects President Diane Georgopulous wrote in an op-ed in the Boston Globe (11/15), “With the costs of building schools in Massachusetts skyrocketing, the state cannot afford the ‘edu-palaces’ some communities want, replete with extra municipal amenities such as swimming pools and hockey rinks. The state created the Massachusetts School Building Authority to rein in cost overruns, and state Treasurer Timothy Cahill is appropriately focused on creative approaches to bring school building costs under control.” Georgopulous added, “Those of us who design schools across America have learned valuable lessons — some good, some bad, and some we can do nothing about. For example, with the rising cost of energy, the cost of construction materials has also risen sharply. But there are elements that can be contained.” In order to save money, the state must modernize “construction bidding and management practices; develop a centralized design clearinghouse to rotate ‘best practice’ ideas; and build energy-efficient schools that dramatically reduce operating costs for decades to come.”

The Los Angeles Times (11/17, Song, Blume) reports that the Los Angeles Unified School District “has developed stark new plans including larger class sizes, layoffs and early retirement incentives to deal with a worsening state budget situation. District officials — already in the process of identifying $400 million in cuts for next year — almost certainly will have to reopen this year’s budget and find about $200 million to $400 million to meet an anticipated shortfall.” According to the Times, the budget-cutting “is becoming a painfully familiar routine: Officials had to eliminate 680 jobs just to balance the books last June.”

Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross write in a column for the San Francisco Chronicle (11/17, Matier, Ross), “The economic crisis just gets worse and worse, so the California Association of School Business Officials is hosting a symposium this week on how to deal with the tough times – at the Marriott Hotel and Spa in Newport Beach. The first order of business for the assembled 300 superintendents, deputies and finance officers: a golf tournament Wednesday at the nearby Black Gold Golf Club.” According to Matier and Ross, Brian Lewis, the “school association’s executive director, tells us this year’s confab will be ‘more important than ever,’ given that the governor’s latest budget plan could mean ‘devastating cuts to the schools.’”

The AP (11/14, Kaczor) reported, “Florida’s public schools have laid off lunchroom workers and bus drivers, slashed administration, put maintenance on hold and soon will exhaust their reserve funds. Any more budget cuts, though, would reach into the classroom, said Wayne Blanton, executive director of the Florida School Boards Association.” According to the AP, “School districts will be at the bottom of their reserves after the latest round of cuts announced last week, Blanton said Friday. … School districts began the year with almost 2 percent fewer dollars per student. The Department of Education, in a Nov. 10 memo to school superintendents, served notice they’ll also be getting a 2 percent midyear cut.” Also, “additional reductions are possible before the budget year ends June 30 and more are almost certain in 2009-10 because state tax revenues are continuing to fall amid the national economic slump.”

New York’s Newsday (11/16, Hildebrand) reported, “As Long Island school districts brace for their worst financial crisis since the early 1990s, fewer than one-third have managed to set aside the maximum 4 percent in ‘rainy day’ funds allowed as a hedge against such emergencies. To be sure, some districts face complaints from taxpayer groups and others that they are sitting on large reserves of cash.” However, a Newsday “review of school reserve funds across the Island finds a decidedly mixed picture, with some systems in solid shape and others reporting little or no financial backup at all. … On Tuesday, state lawmakers will hold a special session in Albany to consider cost-cutting proposals aimed at helping the state weather the gathering economic storm.”

In an article in the Washington Post (11/17, B2), education writer Jay Mathews details the growing impasse between proponents of value added school assessments, and those who oppose using the system to assess teacher performance. Suggesting that state legislatures are hedging against using value-added assessments to gauge teacher performance, Mathews adds, “California banned in 2006 any use of student growth data in teacher evaluations or compensation decisions. New York last year prohibited the use of such data for tenure decisions for at least two years. Other states are staying away from anything that ties student success to a teacher’s pay or job security.” He notes that unions oppose the approach, as he “asked two National Education Association officials, Joel Packer, director of education policy and practice, and Bill Raabe, director of collective bargaining and member advocacy, why we couldn’t test students in September and May, calculate how much they improved and use that information in deciding whether to keep particular teachers and how much to pay them.” Raabe “said that would only work if the distribution of students in classes was randomized. I understood his point but did not see why good teachers couldn’t show some progress no matter what sort of students they have.”

The Greencastle (IN) Banner Graphic (11/17, Ward) reported that in Indiana, North Putnam High School parents “are invited to spend the day at school with their student on Tuesday, as part of a celebration of American Education Week. The 87th annual American Education Week (AEW) sponsored by the National Education Association (NEA) spotlights the importance of providing every child in America a quality education from Kindergarten to college.”

The Houston Chronicle (11/18, Mellon) reports that for the past three years, “the Houston school district’s effort to improve teacher quality has focused so far on rewarding the top performers.” Now, however, “some Houston Independent School District (HISD) officials want to use the teacher data they’ve gathered to do something about educators at the bottom of the pack.” According to “Houston schools Trustee Natasha Kamrani, an advocate for increased accountability…HISD needs to step up its training for struggling teachers and then consider removing those whose students consistently under-perform.” School board President Harvin Moore agreed that the district should “be prepared to sever ties with teachers who, after receiving extra training, still fail to get results from students.” The Houston Chronicle points out that HISD “already has detailed data on about 3,600 elementary and middle school teachers…and for the last two years, the district has awarded performance bonuses based on the data.”

Give your K-3 students real-life motivations for reading while providing a structure that supports effective literacy instruction with the new book Reading for Real. You’ll be inspired to launch reading clubs–student partners reading and talking about a collection of related books–in your own classroom. Click here to preview the entire book online!

Los Angeles District Considers Increased Class Sizes, Layoffs To Meet Budget Requirements.

The Los Angeles Times (11/17, Song, Blume) reports that the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) “almost certainly will have to reopen this year’s budget and find about $200 million to $400 million to meet an anticipated shortfall.” LAUSD “has developed stark new plans including larger class sizes, layoffs, and early retirement incentives to deal with a worsening state budget situation.” When “moment the Board of Education approved a budget for the fiscal year that began July 1,” school “officials avoided the teacher layoffs that befell other state school systems, but officials also made overly optimistic assumptions.” For instance, “the budget included four unpaid furlough days for employees — to shave off about $55 million — without negotiating the furloughs with employee unions.” But, “Los Angeles teachers union officials have asserted that they would not accept furlough days.”

In the Classroom

Houston School Officials Suggest Using Data To Address Ineffective Teachers.