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TRENTON — New Jersey’s public school students racked up slightly higher test scores in most grades in the 2010-11 school year, despite Gov. Chris Christie’s cutting about $1 billion in state aid to schools that year, according to standardized test results released today by the state Board of Education.

Students posted slightly higher test stores in math and language arts in most grades, from 3 through 8, and in high school. In science, however, a subject in which students are tested only in fourth and eighth grades, scores dropped.

Many schools experienced cuts in staff and other areas in 2010-11, due to the steep drop in state aid. But results of the NJASK tests, given in grade school, and the High School Proficiency Assessment showed most weathered the storm.

“The year that generated that cut, actually turned out to be a year where we had decent student (achievement),” said Acting Commissioner Christopher Cerf, cautioning “I don’t want to leave you with the impression that means we can cut more. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Christie, in fact, returned some of the money to schools the following year.

The state each year releases data from tests taken the previous spring, as a snapshot of how New Jersey’s students are learning. In high school, scores showed steady progress up. The percentage of students passing language arts rose from 94.3 in 2010 to 96.1 percent in 2011, and the math passing rate went from 82.8 to 83.6. A new high school biology test also showed improvement.

The scores are for students in the “general population,” and do not include special education students or those with limited English proficiency.

In the younger grades, most improved or held steady. Fourth-graders’ passing rate went from 82.5 percent, to 84.4 percent in math; and from 66.9 to 70.0 percent in language arts — bouncing back up after a drop there, the previous year.

Eighth-graders rose in math, from 77.4 to 80.4 percent proficient. In language arts, eighth-graders fell slightly, from 90.6 percent to 90.1 percent.

Science was the spoiler in each of those grade levels. The eighth-grade passing rate fell from 89.8 to 88.4 percent in science, and the fourth grade proficiency rate dropped from 96.0 to 93.8. Cerf pointed out that in science, the scores were very high to begin with, however.

Cerf said despite the overall positive year, the state needs to do more. The achievement gap, between poor and wealthier students, or between students of different minority groups, remains “extremely large,” he said. Numerous reform efforts are under way to address it.

“In some cases it is expanding and in some cases narrowing, but in all cases, it remains large,” Cerf said. “”We are not fulfilling the basic purpose of public education.”

TEWKSBURY TWP. – Think your property taxes are too high? State Sen. Mike Doherty, R-Hunterdon, says he has a solution.

As part of a tour that has taken him to municipalities throughout the state, Sen. Doherty came to Tewksbury Tuesday, Jan. 17 to pitch his controversial Fair School Funding Plan (FSF), legislation he maintains would increase school funding and lower property taxes for 85 percent of the state.

How? Currently, state education aid is calculated via a formula approved under former Gov. Jon Corzine as part of his School Funding Reform Act. The formula calculates aid per student by several designations, including whether a student receives free or reduced school lunches or speaks another language at home.

Sen. Doherty’s proposal would do away with the formula altogether, and instead give each New Jersey student equal state funding, at $7,481 per child. The legislation would increase aid to suburban and rural districts while drastically reducing funds currently reserved for urban schools in so-called Abbott districts, including Newark, Camden and Asbury Park.

Under existing regulations, “It’s a very unequal distribution,” said the senator Tuesday. By his calculations, using figures he said came from the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Education and the Office of Legislative Services, the average Tewksbury resident contributes 14 times as much to the income tax fund as the average resident in urban Asbury Park, while Asbury Park receives 29 times more in state education aid.

Under Doherty’s plan, every town in Hunterdon County would receive an increase in state education funding, $130 million in total, that could then be used towards lowering income taxes.

In northern Hunterdon, he said Califon would receive an additional $884,565 in aid; Clinton an additional $1,209,546; Clinton Township $10,547,299; High Bridge $1,277,519; Lebanon $702,906; Lebanon Township $3,537,368, Readington Township $13,665,423; Tewksbury Township $5,131,403; and the North Hunterdon-Voorhees Regional School District $16,457,452.

Asbury Park, meanwhile, which the senator said currently receives $57,632,816 in state education funding for 2,316 students, would lose $40,306,820 in aid.

“I don’t think this is heartless. I think this is pretty fair,” said the senator. “Every student is treated equally.”

Doherty also railed against the State Supreme Court saying that it has interfered in education funding decisions that New Jersey’s constitution outlines as the legislature’s domain.

“It has been hijacked by the Supreme Court,” he said. “I think the constitution right now gives the power to the Legislature. We just have to take it back.”

Notwithstanding, the FSF plan also includes a constitutional amendment that Doherty said in his presentation “would specify a method of providing for the maintenance and support of public schools,” though he later acknowledged that the amendment might not be necessary.

Local Reaction

Tewksbury Mayor Dana Desiderio, who attended the meeting along with several other municipal and state officials, said she stands behind the senator’s plan.

“The current School Funding Reform Act is not only unfair to our students who receive far less per capita than the majority of other municipalities in our state but is unfair to our residents who pay an unfair percentage of the costs,” she said following the meeting.

Desiderio added, “The taxes assessed on Tewksbury residents are excessive. The result is catastrophic and the impact on property values is negative.”

Others, however, are not as supportive of the plan.

“It seems to be an overreaction,” said Nicholas Nacamuli, vice president of the North Hunterdon-Voorhees Regional High School Board of Education and a Tewksbury resident, who also attended Doherty’s presentation.

Nacamuli agreed that the current system “does seem very unfair,” but instead proposed a modification that would make the funding distribution more equitable. “The formula could be redone in a way that keeps more funds being sent to the districts that need it,” he said.

Following Doherty’s presentation, Assemblyman Erik Peterson, R-Hunterdon, who is also backing the plan, remarked, “This isn’t about rich versus poor. This is about educating kids.

“All our kids are the same,” he said. “They all deserve an equal opportunity.”

Officials pointed out that a public school student in Newark currently has a 23 percent chance of graduating high school, while almost all of Hunterdon County’s students go on to higher education.

Doherty cited corruption and misappropriation of funds as a primary factor behind the failures in many of the state’s urban public schools.

Current regulation “is supporting a system that’s failing,” he said.

When questioned, the senator suggested that urban students should be given the option of attending parochial or experimental charter schools at what he maintained would be a lower cost to the state, rather than sending those tens of thousands of students to faltering public schools.

Chance For Success

Actually getting the FSF plan passed in a Democratically-controlled state Legislature will prove a significant challenge, which is why the senator has been pushing his proposal at town-hall style meetings throughout New Jersey since introducing the plan in May.

He said he wants to encourage suburban and rural residents to talk to their representatives in support of the legislation.

“I think that people are going to have to demand change,” he said. “We can’t maintain the status quo.”

TRENTON — Gov. Chris Christie said he can institute an across-the-board 10 percent income tax cut and still increase state aid to education.

As part of a day-long victory lap Wednesday to promote the ideas unveiled one day earlier in his State of the State address, the Republican governor told a town hall audience in Vorhees he would phase-in the cut over three years at a cost of $300 million per year.

“The fact is there’s a lot of waste in government to be ferreted out over time,” he told hundreds of people in the atrium of a shopping mall, some perched over a balcony to get a good look. “I would tell you we’ll be able to do that not only without cutting aid to education but with increasing aid to education.”

The promise is a direct reaction to Democrats in control the Legislature who pounced on Christie’s income tax plan, calling it rhetoric aimed at boosting the governor’s national profile. They labeled it a gift to the wealthy that would decimate revenues so much that schools would suffer.

“Don’t let the Democrats who are opposing this fool you into thinking you have to make a choice between the two,” he said.

Christie, who said more details about how he’ll slash state spending would come in his Feb. 21 budget address, took his message of responsibly reducing the size of government around the state and over the airwaves. The whirlwind day started at 7 a.m. with an interview on NBC’s “Today Show,” followed by an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

As soon as the hour-and-a-half-long town hall ended, he held three quick-fire radio interviews before heading to the New Jersey Agricultural Convention in Atlantic City Wednesday night. He’s got interviews lined up today on CBS and Fox.

 Asked on WNYC whether he would sign the same sex marriage bill Democrats have made a priority of the new session, Christie said he remains unconvinced the Legislature can muster the votes to deliver a bill to his desk.

“This type of societal change is something we need to do very deliberately and have as much public input as we possibly can before people decide whether we can to overturn hundreds of years of social mores and traditions,” he said.

Christie said he would not “prejudge” the measure, and signaled he’d be open to strengthening the current law.

“I want to see what they come up with,” he said in an interview on New Jersey 101.5. “There might be other ways to address the issues, the legitimate issues that advocates have raised. I’d be willing to listen to all that stuff.”

Christie commands the national spotlight more than ever as GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s most outspoken surrogate – a position that may help him at home.

Though 60 percent of Garden State Republicans said it is “somewhat likely” or “very likely” the former Massachusetts governor will tap Christie as his running mate, 68 percent of them agree with Christie, who has said time and time again he that he does not have the “right kind of personality” to fill the number two spot.

The numbers, released in a Quinnipiac University poll Wednesday, found 53 percent of New Jersey voters approve of the job he’s doing.

Just as New Jersey prepares to revamp its tenure laws, an exhaustive new study on teacher quality indicates that Gov. Chris Christie is on the right track.

The study’s conclusion is simple: Getting rid of the worst teachers, and holding onto the good ones, leads to lifetime benefits for their students. And test scores are a tremendously helpful tool in helping to evaluate teacher performance.

The study, by a team of economists at Harvard and Columbia universities, tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years. When they started the study, the economist expected to find that judging teachers in part on test scores was a big mistake.

But they found just the opposite, that tests are telling. Understand that it’s not a simple matter of crediting teachers whose kids score the highest. That would reward a lazy teacher who is lucky enough to have classrooms full of attentive kids with supportive families, and punish a heroic teachers who works with the state’s poorest kids.

Instead, the study measured the impact a teacher had on a classroom full of kids, taking into account where they began. So a teacher who helps poor kids read more effectively gets credit, even if the students remain behind grade level. It’s known as “value-added ratings” and several school districts across the country have begun using it in teacher evaluations.

No one wants to rely exclusively on test scores. There is no substitute for classroom visits. And checking lesson plans and other nuts and bolts of the profession is important as well.

But the teachers union, and many obedient Democrats in the Legislature, are resisting all use of test scores in teacher evaluations.

Perhaps this study can help change their minds. It finds that the kids who attended classes with effective teachers were more likely to avoid teen pregnancy, attend college and to earn more money later in life.

TRENTON — A bill that paves a legal path toward new public-private schools in three cities – including the Lanning Square Elementary School in Camden – passed two legislative committees Thursday.

The Democratic-sponsored bill was amended to overcome Republicans objections, though a legal advocate for low-income students threatened to bring a lawsuit to stop the program if the bill becomes law.

The Urban Hope Act would allow for up to four privately operated public schools to be authorized and built each in Newark, Trenton and Camden.

The bill (A4426/S3173) passed both the state Assembly and Senate budget committees and is expected to be voted on in both chambers Monday, the last day of the two-year state legislative session.

South Jersey Democratic leader George E. Norcross III has been pushing for the bill, particularly because he wants to see a new private-public school in the Lanning Square section in the center of Camden.

Gov. Chris Christie had indicated earlier he would support it, but the administration has been reviewing the bill, which changed in recent days and on Thursday.

The bill is sponsored by Norcross’ brother, state Sen. Donald Norcross, D-Camden. It is controversial because it circumvents the state’s School Development Authority, which had been charged with constructing schools in 31 of the state’s low-income school districts that are protected under two decades worth of state Supreme Court rulings.

The bill is also controversial because it allows nonprofits that would eventually build the schools to be exempt from public bidding requirements.

However, school operators will have to find private financing. Republican Assembly members objected to a provision that allowed for public bonding for the schools, so it was removed.

George Norcross, in an interview Wednesday, said that public bidding laws have proven to escalate the costs of projects, not lower them.

“Public bidding causes all sorts of litigation, arbitration and change orders,” he said. “Why hamstring someone from going in and negotiating?”

Sen. Norcross reiterated the stance in comments Thursday. He said private school operators will be able to make payments on the buildings simply from the per-student aid they receive from the school districts, thus saving taxpayers millions of dollars.

David Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center in Newark, which has successfully sued the state to gain billions of dollars in additional state aid for the 31 low-income school districts, said that his organization was readying to file a lawsuit to block the bill. He contends the state, not a private entity, should build the school.

Sciarra said that state taxpayers have already spent $11 million to purchase the land at Lanning Square, demolish buildings that had been on the property and clean it from environmental hazards. A design for the new school has already been completed, he said.

And the state has cash on hand in its school building funds to construct it, and even if not, the state has already authorized $3.9 billion in new school construction statewide, Sciarra said.

“The money is there. It’s not a financial issue,” Sciarra said.

He estimated it would take another $25 million to $30 million to build the Lanning Square school.

The state’s school construction effort, however, has also seen its share of controversy. The agency burned through its initial $8.6 billion allocation and completed a fraction of the schools it was supposed to complete as projects faced cost overruns and were bloated with professional fees and project management contracts.

Camden resident R. Mangaliso Davis opposed the bill at the Assembly Budget Committee hearing. He complained that the community had no input into the program.

“This bill will take away the one school that we should have gotten 10 years ago,” he said.

Republican Assembly budget officer Declan O’Scanlon of Monmouth County, said he believed the pilot program would provide new alternatives for urban students.

“I think what you’ll find is the school will perform,” O’Scanlon said.

The bill allows school boards in the designated districts to approve up to four “renaissance” school projects in their districts.

The districts would be able to appoint non-profit organizations to build and operate the schools. But those groups may buy or rent land from for-profit entities or may authorize a for-profit company to build the new school.

If the school were to become defunct, the land would immediately be deeded back to the school district. That raised a question from some GOP Assembly members about how a bank might secure a loan for a building.

The school district would pay nearly all of the per-child education costs to the nonprofit agency, which could use that money to pay to construct and operate the schools.

The bill calls for renaissance schools to be authorized to operate for ten years, but will face an annual review on whether it was meeting goals and improving school achievement. An independent researcher is to review the program after five years, according to a provision in the bill.

The New Jersey Education Association backed the bill because the new school will still be considered a public school and all staff must meet state certifications.

“It provides innovation within public education, along with accountability,” said Ginger Gold Schnitzer, the top lobbyist for the NJEA.

JACKSON — The mother of two girls who became separated from them in Tunisia in a marital struggle in August was reunited with them and is back home in New Jersey.

Suzanne Feimster returned with one daughter on Nov. 15. Her husband, Walid Bensayeh, returned on Nov. 23 with their younger daughter and Suzanne’s mother, indicating that, at the very least, the couple had made some progress in attempting to work through their parenting difficulties. They have been separated for two years.

Now, they have begun proceedings to divorce and a hearing is scheduled soon in Ocean County, said Christine Hayes, a spokesperson for Feimster. Hayes is a teacher at Asbury Park Middle School, where Feimster also was employed before going to Tunisia with Bensayeh and the girls, Sumyra, then 4, and Rayhana, 3, for a visit with his parents.

“Now she’s in a secure, safe location with the kids,” Hayes said. “She has no idea where he (husband) is and he has no idea where she is.”

Feimster said in an email this week that she cannot comment at this time because of pending court cases, but added that “Sumyra, Rayhana and I are safe on American soil.”

Walid could not be reached for comment. Before the trip to Tunisia, he was living in the couple’s house that they owned in Pine Hill, Camden County. Feimster and the girls lived with her parents in Jackson.

Both in their 30s, the estranged couple became news when Bensayeh wanted to take the girls to the Tunisian capital of Tunis to visit his parents and Feimster went also. Although separated, they continued to do activities together with their children.

On their third day in Tunis, Feimster became very ill, she has said, and wanted to return to the United States with their daughters. But she could not take them back home without her husband’s permission under Tunisian law. He has dual citizenship in Tunisia and the United States.

Feimster’s mother joined her, bringing her medicine that she needed, and with support of other family members and a lawyer, Feimster worked with the Tunisian courts and American Embassy to eventually gain court custody of the children Aug. 29.

Still, she had to get Bensayeh to give the children back and also work out some form of agreement to be able to leave Tunisia. That evidently happened and they are in New Jersey, proceeding with the next stage to some form of custody decision.

My Mom Lee and her husband Matt sold all of their belongings and relocated their comfortable lives from New Jersey to Cebu, Philippines to start an orphanage that rescues impoverished kids from the dangerous streets. Street Kids Philippine Missions, a 301(c) non-profit corporation, is dedicated to giving those most vulnerable a place to live, learn, and be loved while being raised to be disciples of God’s Word.

On Saturday October 15th from 2pm-6pm, Street Kids PM is holding a fundraiser event at Chico’s House of Jazz in Asbury Park. With special guest performances by recording artists Sophie Dupin, Jay Loftus and others; win a Kindle Fire and other prizes in our raffle. Recommended donation is $50.

—I hope you can make it!

With that being said, and I speak of how we, as APEA members are a family, dysfunctional most of the time, but still a family, I must inform the Association that one of our members, Suzanne Fiemster from the APMS, is in a serious situation. Suzanne left for a visit to Tunisia on August 1st with her husband and two young daughters, Sumyra and Rayhana. Her husband has prevented the family from returning to the US on August 31st. He is keeping the children captive in Tunisia. Suzanne and her mother are being housed in a hotel by the US Embassy under an alias. She has retained a Tunisian attorney and was awarded custody, however the father will not comply with the order- making it extremely impossible to gain custody and return to the USA. As you can imagine, the legal costs for this battle are extraordinary and insurmountable. Once she returns to the USA she must repeat the legal process in the USA because Tunisian law does not apply to the USA. I am asking the AP Faculty and staff to keep her and her girls in your thoughts and prayers. A foundation has been set up to help offset the legal costs. For more information please speak to Christine Hayes at APMS.
I wish each and everyone a successful school year.

TRENTON — Gov. Chris Christie will announce legislation today to create public-private partnerships to run some schools in New Jersey, three people with knowledge of the plan said.

The governor is scheduled to make the announcement at noon at the Lanning Square Elementary School in Camden.

Two of the sources said Christie will be appearing with Camden Mayor Dana Redd, a Democrat who has worked with the Republican governor on education issues.

It’s unclear exactly how the public-private partnerships would work, and the sources said it would start as a pilot program. They declined to speak on the record in advance of the public announcement.

One source said individual districts would need to opt into the pilot program and approval from local school boards would be required.

Christie’s acting education commissioner, Christopher Cerf, has experience in public-private school partnerships. He previously led Edison Schools, a for-profit company that became the largest private-sector manager of public schools. Cerf left the company, now called EdisonLearning, in 2005.

Christie is also connected to for-profit education companies, including Cerf’s.

From 1999 to 2001, Christie was a registered lobbyist at a law firm that lobbied New Jersey government on behalf of Edison Schools, according to filings with the state Election Law Enforcement Commission. While the firm was representing the multinational education company, Chris Cerf was its general counsel.

The firm, Dughi, Hewit and Palatucci, also represented Mosaica Education, a for-profit charter school operator, and the University of Phoenix, a for-profit online university. At the time, the firm listed two lobbyists, Christie and William Palatucci, a longtime political ally of the governor who is a named partner in the firm.

During the 2009 gubernatorial campaign, then-campaign spokeswoman Maria Comella said the “overwhelming” majority — “over 90 or 95 percent” — of the firm’s lobbying was done by Palatucci, who remains a close friend of Christie.

The governor’s office declined to comment before today’s announcement.

Since Christie’s campaign for governor two years ago, he has criticized the state of urban education in New Jersey, saying public schools and teacher unions have perpetuated a failing system.

Angel Cordero, who helped create the Community Education Resource Network, an alternative school for dropouts, applauded the plan for public-private schools.

“It’s time we think out of the box and break up the monopoly” of the teachers unions, he said. “This is the perfect storm right now. People are ready.”

Christie was in Camden for the Community Education Resource Network’s graduation ceremony on Friday, where he and other political leaders called for a shakeup in the public school system.

Steve Baker, a spokesman for the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, expressed skepticism about the partnership proposal.

“Anything that turns public schools over to private operation, and reduces public accountability, would be very problematic,” he said tonight.

Christie has enraged the NJEA with his push for more charter schools and a voucher program.

The voucher proposal, called the Opportunity Scholarship Act, has stalled in the Legislature despite support from both sides of the aisle as some Democrats have pushed to downsize it.

Star-Ledger staff writer Jessica Calefati contributed to this report

NJ Senate Democrats Consider Budget That Would Increase School Funding By $600M, Reintroduce ‘Millionaire’s Tax’

TRENTON — Senate Democrats are thinking of introducing their own budget that would increase school financing by as much as $1.1 billion, including about $600 million for non-Abbott school districts, according to four people familiar with the plan.

The money would come from a combination of additional revenue, some cuts in spending, and possibly a millionaire’s tax, said the sources, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the plan.

The proposal is emerging less than three weeks after the state Supreme Court ordered the state to increase financing for poor school districts, known as Abbott districts, by $500 million, and with three weeks to go until the legislature is required to approve a budget for the next fiscal year.

The plan was unveiled by State Senate President Stephen Sweeney at a recent Senate Democratic caucus, the sources said. Derek Roseman, a spokesman for the Senate Democrats, said he would not comment on internal deliberations, nor would he confirm or deny the proposal.

The state Supreme Court stopped short of ordering the restoration of the full $1.7 billion in cuts that Gov. Chris Christie relied on to balance this year’s budget. The governor said he would comply with the order after giving some mixed signals, but left it to the Democrat-controlled legislature to work out the details — as long as there is no tax increase.

The Senate plan would satisfy the court ruling as well as provide additional money for up to 240 other districts that are not spending as much as they should be under the school funding formula. Many of those districts have high numbers of at-risk students, but were not granted any financial relief by the court.

David Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center, who has lobbied lawmakers and Christie to restore the funds, said the additional money would go to all students who need it, not just to those in the poorer districts.

“If this were done it would go a long way towards fulfilling the commitment made by the Legislature in the (school funding) formula, which was to make sure that at-risk students, whichever district they were in, received the funding they were entitled to receive,” he said.

Woodbridge, a district with 13,000 students, about 30 percent of whom are low income, would receive $18.6 million in additional aid, he said, while Hamilton Township in Mercer County, also with about 13,000 students, would get an additional $9.8 million.

To pay for the proposal, Democratic Senators would rely on the revenue estimates provided by the non-partisan Office of Legislative Services instead of the less optimistic figures put forth by the Christie administration, sources say. The OLS figure of $913 million is $400 million higher than the administration’s figure.

The Democrats would also rely on up to $300 million in budget cuts that have not yet been determined, sources said. A millionaire’s tax has been discussed despite Christie’s objection to it.

The sources said Democrats are divided on whether to pursue the strategy in part because it would require them to sponsor the budget and make it difficult for them to criticize the governor for his handling of the state’s finances.

Last year, the budget was approved with the slimmest of Democratic support, handing Republicans ownership of a plan that included huge cuts and froze property tax rebates.

Lawmakers have until June 30 to approve Christie’s $29.6 billion budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1. Christie has called for tripling current property tax rebates next year, but only if legislators agree to make changes to health and pension benefits for state and municipal workers.

Kevin Roberts, a spokesman for the governor, said he wouldn’t comment on a plan put forward by lawmakers until it was more than a rumor.

“We will review a budget bill once the legislature fulfills its own obligation to pass such legislation and it reaches the governor’s desk for consideration,” Roberts said in an e-mail message. “We won’t be responding to abstract proposals in the interim.”

A spokesman for the Assembly Democrats, Tom Hester Jr., said the governor’s budget puts the heaviest burden on working-class residents, and that lawmakers are committed to doing everything possible to resolve that problem.

“But as everyone is also well aware, nothing gets to the governor’s desk without garnering Assembly support,” Hester said. “We look forward to a cooperative discussion in the month ahead built around the goal of advocating for working class residents.”

By Jarret Renshaw  (jrenshawstarledgercom)   and Matt Friedman  (mfriedmanstarledgercom)  /Statehouse Bureau

TRENTON — An opinion by a divided state Supreme Court on Tuesday sets up a state budget confrontation between a Republican governor who vows not to raise taxes and a Democratic-controlled state Legislature seeking to funnel even more money to local schools.

The state Supreme Court, in a 3-2 decision, ordered New Jersey to provide full funding for 31 school districts that have long received massive state aid under previous court orders.

The ruling presents the state with a much smaller bill — estimated to be $500 million — than it would have if the court had ordered New Jersey to provide full state aid, some $1.75 billion more, to all school districts.

But the decision also marks a rebuke for Gov. Chris Christie, who has criticized the court over the school funding issue since he was a gubernatorial candidate.

Christie, who had broached the idea of defying the court in a radio appearance, said in a press conference that he would comply with the order. Christie said the Legislature should now determine the state budget that takes effect July 1, but he said he did not want to see new taxes.

Christie also castigated the decision.

“As a fundamental principle, I do not believe it is the role of the state Supreme Court to determine what programs the state should and should not be funding, and to what amount,” he said in a news conference. “The Supreme Court is not the Legislature. It should not dictate policy…and it should not have any business deciding how tax dollars are spent.”

State Democratic leaders called for the state to find additional money for local school districts. State Senate President Stephen M. Sweeney, D-Gloucester, wanted some $500 million more for lower and middle-income school districts.

The decision was the latest hearing in the state’s long-running school funding case. Advocates for children in 31 low-income school districts had asked the court to enforce a state aid formula agreed to in a 2009 ruling that provided additional funds to districts across the state.

The ruling then had finally moved the state from protecting the 31 districts and allocating aid on a statewide basis. Tuesday’s decision moves New Jersey back to the prior position of having select school districts protected by the court and those that are not.

In the majority opinion, Justice Jaynee LaVecchia wrote that the court could only order funding for the Abbott districts because of the precedent set by prior rulings.

The 2009 formula had determined how much money was expected to be spent educating various types of students and required the state to provide full funding after the school district’s “fair share” of property taxes was raised.

For example, that formula then determined the base cost of a general elementary student’s education was $9,649.

More money was allocated to educate students from low-income families, as well as for students who had trouble speaking English or who suffered with physical or educational disabilities or speech problems.

The Supreme Court decisions in the case, beginning in 1990, have been highly controversial because they have directed tens of billions over the years into large urban districts like Newark and Trenton, as well as poorer small districts, such as Keansburg and Asbury Park.

Even now, more than half of the state’s $7 billion in local state aid goes to those districts. But in many cases, test scores have remained low and dropout rates have held high, which has prompted criticism of the program.

In legal arguments, the Christie administration had said it planned on fulfilling the school funding formula, but had to cut state aid last year because of declining tax revenues amid the financial crisis.

Yet Christie often publicly criticized the court’s long-running decisions on school funding.

He had said that the notion that more money can lead to better results is “failed legal theory.’’

Christie had refused last year to reappoint Justice John Wallace and cited the court’s previous decisions as a reason, though he did not name the school funding case specifically as the reason Wallace was not reappointed.

The court has operated short-handed on the school funding case. Chief Justice Stuart Rabner, who was an Attorney General for then Gov. Jon S. Corzine, had worked on the school funding formula and has recused himself from the case.

Justice Virginia Long recently had recused herself from the case.

The reason was not announced.

LaVecchia was joined by Justices Barry T. Albin and Judge Edwin H. Stern, who was appointed to temporarily fill Wallace’s seat.

Justices Roberto A. Rivera-Soto and Helen E. Hoens dissented in the opinion.

“Like anyone else, the State is not free to walk away from judicial orders enforcing constitutional obligations,’’ LaVecchia wrote in her opinion.

She later added “the state may not use the appropriations power as a shield from its responsibilities.”

Rivera-Soto called the court’s school funding decisions, stretching back to the 1970s, a “well-intentioned but now fundamentally flawed and misguided approach.’’

Rivera-Soto questioned how the court could order full funding for children in some districts, while allowing others not to receive funding that met the state’s constitutional requirement.

Hoens, in a separate opinion, said the state’s budget cuts were necessary and showed no defiance of the court.

She questioned the finding in March by a special master that Christie’s budget cuts had violated the constitution.

INSIDE: Jerseyans split on continuing growth of charter schools, poll finds.

Gov. Chris Christie, spelling out his teacher tenure reform plans in the most detail yet in front of an audience of national experts, wants each school district to have significant discretion in constructing its own teacher and principal evaluation systems.

Appearing at an event hosted in New York Thursday by the prominent Washington-based think tank, the Brookings Institution, Christie said growth in test scores, grades and other metrics should serve to make up half of each teacher’s annual evaluation. Districts should also design their own subjective evaluation based on administrators’ in-class observations and other criteria.

Christie again attacked the state’s powerful teachers union through much of his speech, but also praised teachers and said they needed to be part of reform. Christie said he had learned much from meeting with small groups of teachers privately in recent weeks.

“If you empower teachers to be a large part of the decision-making process, it will work,” Christie said in response to a question. “I think that will lower the fear level.”

He stressed that he would not allow the unions to influence the creation of local evaluation criteria. He also said teachers and administrators know their local students best and should have influence on how staff is measured for raises and tenure.

“What needs to be done in Short Hills is significantly different than what needs to be done in Paterson,” Christie said.

Acting Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf said in an interview after the event that the state still planned to create a more complete statewide database of student test scores and other information.

The state would provide guidance to districts on how to create a teacher measurement model, Cerf said.

Grover J. Whitehurst, director of an education policy center at Brookings, said in an interview afterward that although Christie’s proposal would help gain support of some educators, it would lead to a range of standards across the state.

“The details will be worked out by the local school districts, and that’s hard and difficult work,” Whitehurst said. “”But can the state tolerate a system where it is much easier, say, to be (classified) an exceptional teacher in Asbury Park than it is in Trenton?”

In other details, Christie said:
Teachers should not be paid based on seniority, adding that they should not automatically receive raises because they have obtained advanced degrees.

Tenure should be revoked for teachers who receive poor evaluations for two years in a row. In order to obtain tenure, new teachers should have to be rated effective for three consecutive years.

The state should offer teachers more money to teach in urban districts or in subject areas where there is a shortage of teachers, such as science.

Echoing comments he made on ABC-TV on Wednesday, Christie called lobbyists for the state’s largest teachers union, the New Jersey Education Association, “bullies and thugs.”

Christie, a Republican, said that he is better able to drive educational reform than the Democratic Party, which he described as beholden to the campaign contributions of the teachers union. He also said that he can better bridge the political divide between low-income areas and the suburbs.

“In the same way that only Nixon can go to China, you need a Republican governor who can go into the urban areas and say he cares about those kids,” Christie said.

The NJEA contended the proposals are an expansion of high-stakes testing that has proved ineffective.

“Anytime someone resorts to that much name calling, he’s not that confident in his ideas,” Baker said. “When people focus on the substance of what he’s saying, they’ll realize what a disaster this is.”

Christie again criticized the state Supreme Court on the day the administration and a nonprofit advocacy group were scheduled to file their final briefs in the long-running case over school funding.

A special master had ruled last month that Christie’s budget cuts had violated a constitutional requirement that the state provide a “thorough and efficient system” of education by leading to reductions in programs for low-income and other students considered at-risk for failure.

The state Supreme Court is expected to order the state to spend more money on local education to support a formula the court endorsed in a 2009 decision. Christie mocked the idea that more money would “tip us over into raging success” in low-income schools.

In a report released last year, Brookings advocated a school choice program in which parents would choose schools for their children, though it favored choice among public schools. The program also called for the creation of virtual schools so that students would have the option of taking classes online.

In comments before Christie’s speech, Whitehurst said that if school funding followed the students, who had the opportunity to transfer out of district, it would create much pressure for schools to perform better.

Whitehurst said that would be an especially powerful incentive in New Jersey if students in certain low-income districts, which receive massive amounts of state funding, were able to take those dollars with them upon transferring.

“The entire U.S. economy operates through choice and competition,” Whitehurst said.

“Public education does as well for affluent parents, who choose their schools by purchase of a residence,” Whitehurst added. “Eliminating or severely restricting choice for low-income parents generates striking inequities in the quality of educational opportunity.” Christie’s address comes a day after President Barack Obama visited New York and called the disparity in school test scores between black and white students a civil rights problem. He urged reinvigorated efforts to close the achievement gap.

Christie, who has criticized Obama on a number of issues, has repeatedly said his policy positions on education are virtually indiscernible from the president’s. On Thursday, he praised Obama for “speaking strongly and firmly about education reform.”

Christie Tells Diane Sawyer He Won’t Run for President in 2012, But Will His Friend Donald Trump?

By BRADLEY BLACKBURN
April 6, 2011

In an interview with ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer, Christie offered no apology for his often tough talk that has left some teachers feeling bruised. He also talked about the presidential possibilities of both himself and his “friend” Donald Trump, and criticism by Jersey rock icon Bruce Springsteen.

While sitting in the school library at Lincoln School in Kearney, N.J., Christie told Sawyer that it’s essential for his state’s education system to change and he blames the teachers union for the harsh cuts his administration is making, that includes layoffs and larger classrooms.

“I believe the teachers in New Jersey in the main are wonderful public servants that care deeply. But their union, their union are a group of political thugs,” Christie said.

He said the New Jersey Education Association refused to negotiate on a salary freeze last year. “They should have taken the salary freeze. They didn’t and now, you know, we had to lay teachers off.”

“They chose to continue to get their salary increases rather than be part of the shared sacrifice,” he said.

Dismissing objections to his blunt talk, Christie said, “We’re from New Jersey and when you’re from New Jersey, what that means is you give as good as you get.”

Christie is also suggesting a dramatic change in the state’s tenure program, forcing tenured teachers to undergo a yearly review and face removal from tenure if they’re found to be ineffective.

Christie: I’m Not Running for President

Christie’s tough talk for teachers unions has found a receptive audience beyond his state borders. A political unknown on the national stage just two years ago, Christie, 48, is now mentioned as a possible presidential candidate.

But the governor repeated his claim today that he has no plans to run in 2012.

“No, I’m not running for president,” Christie said. “I don’t feel ready in my heart to be president. And unless I do, I don’t have any right offering myself to the people of this country.

“I don’t want to participate in the vanity exercise just because people ask me to do it or because people say, ‘You could win.’ That’s not the point,” he said.

Will Donald Trump Get In the Republican Race?

Christie also downplayed the idea that Trump might actually seek the Republican presidential nomination.

“Donald’s a really good friend of mine. I don’t know that Donald really wants to be President,” he said.

“We’ve spoken about it, and all I can say to you is that, you know, I’ll believe it when I see it,” Christie said. “I think he likes what he does. I think he likes building things. And I think he likes being on TV, and you know, he does that well.”

Referring to Trump’s hints about running, Christie added, “I wouldn’t call it stunt, but I think he’s very outspoken and… he loves to be on the stage and to express his opinions.”

Christie’s Advice to the President on Budget: Get in and Lead

As the nation’s political leaders wrangle over the federal budget in Washington, Christie said his experience cutting billions from the New Jersey state budget in 2010 taught him some lessons about the importance of executive power.

“We had the same kind of situation a year ago, and I just got in the room with the Democrats in the legislature, and we came to a principled agreement,” Christie said. “I have a particular message for the president: He should get in and lead and bring them together.”

Christie said that no matter the differences, a government shutdown is unacceptable.

“Shutdown is a failure of everybody, including the president. Because in the end, we’re here to stand up for principles, to say the things that we believe in, but we’re also here to lead and run a government,” Christie said. “It would be a failure of everyone involved, of the Congress and the president, if they don’t get this done.”

Christie Slims Down, Responds to Criticism from Springsteen

Christie, who has an outsized frame to match his bold personality, has recently begun to slim down. With the help of a trainer, he’s exercising several times a week and says he has lost weight, though he won’t reveal a number.

“Let’s just say this — I feel better, I have more energy, and my wife’s happier because, you know, we’ve got four kids,” Christie said.

“What do you say to psyche yourself into it?” Sawyer asked.

“I just look in the mirror, Diane, and I go, ‘Okay, I’ve got to get healthier,’” Christie said. “This job has really forced me, because it’s such a draining job from an energy perspective… If I want to be good, I’ve got to do this.”

Christie, born and raised in the Garden State, is also a huge fan of Bruce Springsteen, but the musician and Jersey icon hasn’t been shy about criticizing his fan.

Springsteen, who declined to play at the governor’s inauguration, recently wrote to a New Jersey newspaper saying that Christie’s policies favor the wealthy.

Christie’s “cuts are eating away at the lower edges of the middle class, not just those already classified as in poverty, and are likely to continue to get worse over the next few years,” Springsteen wrote.

“Are you surprised to hear that from Bruce? I mean, you know, Bruce is liberal,” the governor said. “Doesn’t mean I like him any less.”

Christie’s direct, even confrontational nature has certainly grated on some, even as its drawn him millions of fans who click on YouTube videos of the governor berating teachers that he says have disrespected him at town halls.

For his part, Christie says he’s determined to defend his positions, stridently if need be.

“If you treat me with respect even when you disagree with me, I’ll treat you with respect back. You treat me with disrespect, that’s what you’re going to get back,” Christie said.

“I kind of wake up every morning excited to get going and to get to work,” he continued. “Cause the things that we’re working on are so important. And I have a chance to actually do something, not just talk about it, but actually do it.”

Pay Teachers More
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

From the debates in Wisconsin and elsewhere about public sector unions, you might get the impression that we’re going bust because teachers are overpaid.

That’s a pernicious fallacy. A basic educational challenge is not that teachers are raking it in, but that they are underpaid. If we want to compete with other countries, and chip away at poverty across America, then we need to pay teachers more so as to attract better people into the profession.

Until a few decades ago, employment discrimination perversely strengthened our teaching force. Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren’t open to them. It was profoundly unfair, but the discrimination did benefit America’s children.

These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers — and 47 percent of America’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores). The figure is from a study by McKinsey & Company, “Closing the Talent Gap.”

Changes in relative pay have reinforced the problem. In 1970, in New York City, a newly minted teacher at a public school earned about $2,000 less in salary than a starting lawyer at a prominent law firm. These days the lawyer takes home, including bonus, $115,000 more than the teacher, the McKinsey study found.

We all understand intuitively the difference a great teacher makes. I think of Juanita Trantina, who left my fifth-grade class intoxicated with excitement for learning and fascinated by the current events she spoke about. You probably have a Miss Trantina in your own past.

One Los Angeles study found that having a teacher from the 25 percent most effective group of teachers for four years in a row would be enough to eliminate the black-white achievement gap.

Recent scholarship suggests that good teachers, even kindergarten teachers, increase their students’ earnings many years later. Eric A. Hanushek of Stanford University found that an excellent teacher (one a standard deviation better than average, or better than 84 percent of teachers) raises each student’s lifetime earnings by $20,000. If there are 20 students in the class, that is an extra $400,000 generated, compared with a teacher who is merely average.

A teacher better than 93 percent of other teachers would add $640,000 to lifetime pay of a class of 20, the study found.

Look, I’m not a fan of teachers’ unions. They used their clout to gain job security more than pay, thus making the field safe for low achievers. Teaching work rules are often inflexible, benefits are generous relative to salaries, and it is difficult or impossible to dismiss teachers who are ineffective.

But none of this means that teachers are overpaid. And if governments nibble away at pensions and reduce job security, then they must pay more in wages to stay even.

Moreover, part of compensation is public esteem. When governors mock teachers as lazy, avaricious incompetents, they demean the profession and make it harder to attract the best and brightest. We should be elevating teachers, not throwing darts at them.

Consider three other countries renowned for their educational performance: Singapore, South Korea and Finland. In each country, teachers are drawn from the top third of their cohort, are hugely respected and are paid well (although that’s less true in Finland). In South Korea and Singapore, teachers on average earn more than lawyers and engineers, the McKinsey study found.

“We’re not going to get better teachers unless we pay them more,” notes Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust, an education reform organization. Likewise, Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform says, “We’re the first people to say, throw them $100,000, throw them whatever it takes.”

Both Ms. Wilkins and Ms. Allen add in the next breath that pay should be for performance, with more rigorous evaluation. That makes sense to me.

Starting teacher pay, which now averages $39,000, would have to rise to $65,000 to fill most new teaching positions in high-needs schools with graduates from the top third of their classes, the McKinsey study found. That would be a bargain.

Indeed, it makes sense to cut corners elsewhere to boost teacher salaries. Research suggests that students would benefit from a tradeoff of better teachers but worse teacher-student ratios. Thus there are growing calls for a Japanese model of larger classes, but with outstanding, respected, well-paid teachers.

Teaching is unusual among the professions in that it pays poorly but has strong union protections and lockstep wage increases. It’s a factory model of compensation, and critics are right to fault it. But the bottom line is that we should pay teachers more, not less — and that politicians who falsely lambaste teachers as greedy are simply making it more difficult to attract the kind of above-average teachers our above-average children deserve.

Behind the scenes of standardized testing
By Jessica Lussenhop
published: February 23, 2011

Dan DiMaggio was blown away the first time he heard his boss say it.

The pensive, bespectacled 25-year-old had been coming to his new job in the Comcast building in downtown St. Paul for only about a week. Naturally, he had lots of questions.

At one point, DiMaggio approached his increasingly red-faced supervisor at his desk with another question. Instead of answering, the man just hissed at him.

“You know this stuff better than I do!” he said. “Stop asking me questions!”

DiMaggio was struck dumb.

“I definitely didn’t feel like I knew what was going on at all,” he remembers. “Your supervisor has to at least pretend to know what’s going on or everything falls apart.”

DiMaggio’s question concerned an essay titled, “What’s your goal in life?” The answer for a surprising number of seventh-graders was to lift 200 pounds.

Although DiMaggio had been through a training process, he found himself tripped up as he began scoring the essays. What made the organization “good” as opposed to “excellent”? What happens when the kid doesn’t answer the question at all, but writes with excellent organization about whatever the hell he wants? Did it matter that it was insane for seventh-graders to think they’d be benching 200 pounds?

DiMaggio had good reason to worry. His score could determine whether the school was deemed adequate or failing—whether it received government funding or got shut down.

DiMaggio soon learned that his boss was a temp like him. In fact, the boss was only the team leader because he’d once managed a Target store.

DiMaggio found out that the human resources woman who’d hired them both was a temp. He realized that their office space—filled with long tables lined with several hundred computer monitors and generic office chairs—was rented.

Eventually, DiMaggio got used to not asking questions. He got used to skimming the essays as fast as possible, glancing over the responses for about two minutes apiece before clicking a score.

Every so often, though, his thoughts would drift to the school in Arkansas or Ohio or Pennsylvania. If they only knew what was going on behind the scenes.

“The legitimacy of testing is being taken for granted,” he says. “It’s a farce.”

THOUGH THE EFFICACY of standardized testing has been hotly debated for decades, one thing has become crystal clear: It’s big business.

In 2002, President George Bush signed the infamous No Child Left Behind Act. While testing around the country had been on the rise for decades, NCLB tripled it.

“The amount of testing that was being done mushroomed,” says Kathy Mickey, a senior education analyst at Simba Information. “Every state had new contracts. There was a lot of spending.”

The companies that create and score tests saw profits skyrocket. In 2009, K-12 testing was estimated to be a $2.7 billion industry.

The Twin Cities were early beneficiaries of the gold rush. Minnesota’s history as an early computer hardware hotbed led to the creation of some of the earliest data-scanning and numbers-crunching businesses here, including Scantron and National Computer Systems. By the ’90s, NCS was grading 85 percent of the standardized tests for the nation’s largest school districts.

In 2000, NCS was bought by Pearson, a multinational corporation based in London, making it a part of the largest education company in the world. In 2009, it posted $652 million in profits.

Today, tens of thousands of temporary scorers are employed to correct essay questions. This year, Maple Grove-based Data Recognition Corporation will take on 4,000 temporary scorers, Questar Assessment will hire 1,000, and Pearson will take on thousands more. From March through May, hundreds of thousands of standardized test essays will pour into the Twin Cities to be scored by summer.

The boom in testing has come with several notable catastrophes. The most famous happened in 2000, when NCS Pearson incorrectly failed 8,000 Minnesota students on a math test. Pearson shelled out a $7 million settlement to the students, and Gov. Jesse Ventura participated in a makeup graduation for students who were wrongly denied their diplomas. In 2010, Pearson again miss-scored two questions on Minnesota’s fifth- and eighth-grade tests. Delays in its Florida scoring resulted in a $3 million fine and glitches in Wyoming led the company to offer a $5.8 million settlement.

But while a mistake on a bubble form is a black-and-white problem, few scandals have broken on the essay side of the test-scoring business.

“It requires human judgment,” says Michael Rodriguez, of the University of Minnesota’s educational psychology department. “There is no way to standardize that.”

Now scorers from local companies are drawing back the curtain on the clandestine business of grading student essays, a process they say goes too fast; relies on cheap, inexperienced labor; and does not accurately assess student learning.

“The entire testing system in the U.S. needs to be restructured,” says Robert Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest. “That would likely result in the disappearance of these essay-scoring sweatshops.”

DANI INDOVINO DIDN’T want to score tests. She wanted to work in nonprofit administration.

But she was fresh out of school in September 2008, just as the economy was entering its freefall. Desperate to get out of her parents’ house, she perked up when some friends told her about becoming a “reader” for one of the local test companies. It was easy work to get and there was lots of it. All you needed was a college diploma.

“I was like, ‘Yeah, I have a degree, I can do that,’” she recalls.

On Indovino’s first day, she drove out to Questar Assessment in Apple Valley, a beige warehouse, and followed the signs that said “Scoring Center” in bright red letters. During her brief interview, she’d been asked repeatedly if she was able to follow a “rubric”—a set of guidelines to assess the essays in as uniform a way as possible.

“I guess they’ve had bad experiences with English teachers,” she says.

Inside Questar, Indovino took a seat in a room that looked like a classroom, crammed with as many computers and desks as could fit. It was here that the team leaders unveiled the scoring rubric, which was like a secret decoder ring for the job.

The rubrics are most often developed in conjunction with the state’s department of education and its testing contractor. Currently, Minnesota contracts both its test writing and scoring to Pearson. Local teachers are included in the rubric-writing process, as well as test-writing academics called “psychometricians.”

At first blush, the rubric seemed simple enough to Indovino. It was a chart with one- or two-sentence explanations of each number grade. Scorers are forbidden from taking the rubrics out of the Questar building or talking about them, but they generally look something like this:

6. An excellent response, the essay includes

• excellent focus and development

• excellent organization

• excellent language skills and word choice

• excellent grammar, usage, and mechanics

5. A good response, the essay includes

• good focus and development

• good organization

• good language skills and word choice

• good grammar, usage, and mechanics

4. An adequate response …

On down to 1s, which were reserved for barely decipherable language.

As part of their training, Indovino and her co-workers read through pre-graded examples out loud, then discussed why each had been scored the way it was. The process quickly divided the room into two camps—the young, unemployed kids who were just there for a paycheck, and the retired teachers.

“The retired teachers would argue everything,” says Indovino.

After two days of going through example papers, each scorer had to pass a qualifying exam. Indovino scored three sets of ten pre-scored papers. In order to be approved to work on the project, she had to pass two of the sets with at least an 80 percent “agreement rate” with the rubric. She did so with relative ease; most of the rest of the room passed on their second try.

Her first project was from Arkansas, an essay written by eighth-graders on the topic, “A fun thing to do in my town.”

And that’s where the troubles began.

Suddenly, she was being asked to crank through 200 real essays in a day. The scanned papers popped up on the screen and her eyes flitted as fast as they could down the lines. The difference between “excellent” and “good” and “adequate” was decided in a matter of seconds, to say nothing of the responses that were simply off the reservation. How do you score a kid who rails that his town sucks? What about an exceptionally well-written essay on why the student was refusing to answer the question?

All over the room, the teachers were raising their hands and disputing the rubric. Indovino preferred to keep her head down and just score the way she was told to.

“I was good at the bad system,” she says.

Over the next several months, Indovino got to know her co-workers better. The young people were mostly laid off or in foreclosure. They came straight from paper routes and went off to waitressing jobs afterward.

They also made for a very dedicated workforce. Indovino says she saw her co-workers hung-over, extremely ill, and even fresh from surgery.

“I scored a full day without glasses on,” Indovino says with a shrug. “I sat with my nose up to the glass all day. I couldn’t read it.”

When she eventually got a full-time job, Indovino quit scoring. Although she’d done well by the company’s standards, following the rubric provided little sense of accomplishment.

“Nobody is saying, ‘I’m doing good work, I’m helping society,’” she says. “Everyone is saying, ‘This isn’t right.’”

DAVID PUTHOFF WAS an experienced reader with Questar when he started getting the warnings that his job performance wasn’t up to snuff.

“Your numbers are down a little bit,” his supervisor said at the end of one day. “Make sure you bring those back up.”

Most essays, depending on the criteria established in the state, are scored by two readers. As Puthoff and his fellow scorers whipped through their essays, their supervisor had their own eyes glued to a screen, keeping them apprised of whether Reader #1 agreed with Reader #2. If so, both got a 100 percent agreement score for that essay. If one differed by a point or so, the essay would be counted as “adjacent” agreement.

Puthoff had thus far been an agreement-rate superstar. He was consistently in the high 80s.

Then came the question from hell out of Louisiana: “What are the qualities of a good leader?”

One student wrote, “Martin Luther King Jr. was a good leader.” With artfulness far beyond the student’s age, the essay delved into King’s history with the civil rights movement, pointing out the key moments that had shown his leadership.

There was just one problem: It didn’t fit the rubric. The rubric liked a longer essay, with multiple sentences lauding key qualities of leadership such as “honesty” and “inspires people.” This essay was incredibly concise, but got its point across. Nevertheless, the rubric said it was a 2. Puthoff knew it was a 2.

He hesitated the way he had been specifically trained not to. Then he hit, “3.”

It didn’t take long before a supervisor was in his face. He leaned down with a printout of the King essay.

“This really isn’t a 3-style paper,” the supervisor said.

Puthoff pointed out the smart use of examples and the exceptional prose. The supervisor just shook his head and pointed out how short the paragraphs were.

“You know, it’s more of a 2,” the supervisor repeated. “Not enough elaboration.”

Puthoff quickly learned these were not arguments he could win. But as time went on, he found himself having more and more of them.

There were the students who wrote extremely well but whose responses were too short—in his mind he saw them, bored with the essay topic, hurrying to finish. Or the essays where the handwriting got rushed and jumbled at the end, then cut off abruptly—he imagined the proctor telling the frantic student to lay down his pencil on a well-written but incomplete response.

And there were the kids who just did what they wanted. Like the boy from Arkansas who, instead of writing about the most fun thing to do in his town, instead wrote a hilarious essay on why his town is terrible and how he wanted to burn it down and pee on the ashes.

“I wanted the kid to get the score they deserved,” Puthoff says of his time in the business. “But they want to put them in boxes.”

In defiance, Puthoff started giving creatively written essays an illicit score bump. His agreement numbers noticeably suffered.

The industry calls this “scorer drift,” a well-documented tendency to begin deviating from the rubric over time. One case of scorer drift actually resulted in some 4,100 teachers failing the essay portion of their certification exams. The teachers successfully sued for $11.1 million.

What was different about Puthoff’s scorer drift was that he was doing it on purpose.

“I’ll bring them up, don’t worry,” he’d say of his agreement rate, then go back the next day and do the exact same thing.

“I know this kid is good,” he’d tell himself. “I know this kid’s a good writer.”

TODD FARLEY TREATED his supervising position at a scoring company like a joke.

“At the time, testing wasn’t that big,” he says. “I never had to feel like I’m actually deciding someone’s future. It was just silly.”

Farley had started at the bottom rung of the testing industry in Iowa City. A part-time graduate student with bills to pay, he was more interested in partying and trying to become a writer than he was in getting a real job. So he took one scoring job after another for NCS.

“It was always a temporary gig,” he remembers. “It was a lovely, slacker-y life.”

Farley had no official training in teaching, education, or test writing, but the longer he remained at NCS, the more responsibilities he was handed. He took the offer to become a team leader because it paid a little extra money and got him out of scoring.

Teaching his first group of scorers, Farley walked them through the rubric the same way he’d been shown. He fielded the inevitable bombardment of confused questions as best he could, in particular from one man: Harry the laid-off refrigerator plant worker.

Even though Harry eventually passed his qualifying exams, he was a disaster. As Farley monitored Harry’s scoring, he found himself walking back over to Harry repeatedly.

“Look,” Farley would say. “You’re giving this essay a 2 even though it’s perfectly formatted.”

Harry would nod. But a short time later, another ridiculous low ball from Harry would land on Farley’s desk. Before long, Harry began to drag down the all-important agreement level.

Farley now understood the reasons why, when he’d been a scorer, his team leaders would tell the room he wanted to start seeing more 3s or 4s or whatever. Supervisors were expected to turn the test scores into a nice bell curve. If his room did not agree at least 80 percent of the time, the tests would be taken back and re-graded, wasting time and money. The supervisor would be put on probation or demoted.

When Farley complained to a fellow supervisor about his problem, she smiled wryly and held up a pencil.

“I’ve got this eraser, see,” she told him. “I help them out.”

So Farley simply began changing Harry’s scores to agree with his peers’. The practice soon spread well beyond Harry.

“I’d just change a bunch of answers to make it look like my group was doing a great job,” Farley says. “I wanted the stupid item to be done, and so did my bosses.”

There were a few other tricks to keep the numbers up. One was to send a wayward scorer off into a corner to study example papers long enough for the group’s numbers to rebound. Another was to pair up a couple of bad scorers and make them decide together what to give a paper.

Or he could make the same announcement he’d heard from his supervisor back when he was a scorer.

“It’s time we see more sixes,” Farley would tell the group, which was code that his bell curve was off. “We’re in trouble here, we need higher scores, give higher scores.”

Though Farley and his fellow team leaders were fudging the numbers, even he was shocked when a representative from a southeastern state’s Department of Education visited to check on how her state’s essays were doing. As it turned out, the answer was: not well. About 67 percent of the students were getting 2s.

That’s when the representative informed Farley that the rubric for her state’s scoring had suddenly changed.

“We can’t give this many 1s and 2s,” she told him firmly.

The scorers would not be going back to re-grade the hundreds of tests they’d already finished—there just wasn’t time. Instead, they were just going to give out more 3s.

No one objected—the customer was always right.

Eventually, Farley was hired away by a rival testing company and moved to the East Coast. As he saw standardized tests becoming more and more important to the fate of schools and kids, he got fed up, quit the industry, and decided to write a whistle-blowing book.

Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry, came out in 2009. Though the tell-all chronicles Farley’s many misdeeds while scoring tests and supervising, he has nonetheless been invited back to work for the testing companies several times. The boom has just made his experience too valuable.

“They get paid money to put scores on paper, not to put the right scores on papers,” he says. “They have a bottom line. Why anyone would expect anything else is beyond me.”

PEARSON SPOKESMAN ADAM Gaber warns against taking the opinions of former scorers too seriously.

In an email, he characterized their concerns as “one-sided stories based upon people who have a very limited exposure and narrow point of view on what is truly a science.”

Questar declined a request to visit their facilities, but reached by phone, Susan Trent, vice president of assessment services, said that the essays are scored as objectively as is possible.

“We’re really insistent that readers understand they’re dealing with kids,” she says. “Decisions are being made about these kids based on these scores, and we’re absolutely committed to getting them right.”

She denies that graders are pressured to work too quickly and says that any evidence of scorer drift results in test re-scoring. She is also adamant that well-trained temps are the best way to score essays objectively.

“You do not have to be a teacher in order to score student response,” adds Terry Appleman, vice president of performance assessment. “You have to have a good rubric and good training.”

Asked what to make of the former Questar employees who felt they couldn’t do a good job given their training and time constraints, Appleman quickly answers: “If they don’t think they’re qualified, it’s not the job for them.”

Most of the scorers interviewed for this story agree, but nearly all plan to return to the scoring center. They say they need the money.

In a recent interview Ryan spoke out against the bill saying it is just an effort by Republicans to divide the work force:
“This isn’t the old New England moderate Republican we’re seeing now.  This Tea Party radicals, quite frankly, and ideologues who are trying to jam this agenda down the throat of a very moderate state in Ohio.  I think there is  going to be some backlash. They may have the ability to get it passed, but they will feel the blowback from it.”

Read more on the APEA Philanthropic Fundraiser for Firefighter Jason Fazio page.

The San Francisco Chronicle (2/10, Tucker) reports, “California schools placed among the best in the country when it comes to students passing Advanced Placement tests, one of the few education rankings in which the state doesn’t sit at the bottom of the barrel with Mississippi, according to a national report released Wednesday. Almost a quarter of the state’s high school Class of 2010 passed at least one Advanced Placement test before graduation, according to the nonprofit College Board, which oversees the Advanced Placement Program. Only five states topped California’s pass rate of 22.3 percent: Maryland, New York, Virginia, Connecticut and Massachusetts.” Carla Rivera also covered this story in a blog for the Los Angeles Times (2/9).

Sharon Otterman wrote in a blog for the New York Times (2/9), “Roughly 8,000 of last year’s New York City high school seniors, or about 15 percent, passed at least one Advanced Placement exam, the city said on Wednesday. In 2002, when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took control of the school system, about 6,000 students passed at least one Advanced Placement test, which is equivalent to a passing grade in a college-level course. Yet it wasn’t immediately possible to calculate how much of a percentage gain this represented, because the city did not provide data for how many seniors there were back then.”

Education Week (2/9, Gewertz) reported, “The proportion of each high school graduating class that passes an Advanced Placement exam continues to grow, with nearly 17 percent of the class of 2010 passing at least one such exam, according to a College Board report released today. New figures show that 16.9 percent of students in last spring’s graduating class scored a 3 or better on one or more AP exams by the time they graduated, up from 15.9 percent in 2009 and 10.8 percent in 2001. … Of the 3 million students in last year’s graduating class, 28.3 percent took an AP exam sometime in high school, up from 26.4 percent in 2009 and 16.8 percent in 2001.” The Minneapolis Star Tribune (2/10, Draper), the Chicago Tribune (2/9, Malone) and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (2/10, Badertscher) also cover this story.

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In the Classroom
Duncan Supports Raising Standards In Michigan For Passing State Exams.
The Detroit Free Press (2/10, Higgins) reports, “Tuesday’s decision by the [Michigan] Board of Education to raise the standard for passing state exams is getting support from US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Duncan, since he took office two years ago, has often criticized states for what he’s described as lying to parents by not having tough standards. ‘I applaud Michigan for being honest with students on where they stand,’ Duncan said in a statement this afternoon. ‘Michigan’s education leaders are putting kids first by taking critical steps to help them compete in a global economy.’”

The Grand Rapids (MI) Press (2/10, Murray) reports that Duncan “says state Board of Education members did the right thing by raising the bar to earn a passing grade on MEAP tests. Duncan on Wednesday released a statement on the plan, a day after the board voted 7-1 to raise the ‘cut scores’ – the percentage of questions students must answer correctly to be deemed proficient on Michigan Educational Assessment Program and Michigan Merit Exam tests. … In 2009 he called Detroit ‘ground zero’ for the nation’s public education crisis, and last year he called the city’s schools ‘arguably the worst urban school district in the country now.’”

Denver Preschool Program Scores Well In Evaluation.
The Denver Post (2/9) reported, “Assessments measuring the effectiveness of the Denver Preschool Program, which provides tuition credits to families and grants to qualifying preschools, show a majority of kids leaving ready for kindergarten. Kids enrolled in DPP facilities made better than average progress in vocabulary, literacy and math during their preschool year, according to a 2010 evaluation, which also included surveys, interviews and focus groups.” According to the Post, “Among 74 DPP sites, 96 percent either improved or maintained their rating by Qualistar, which assesses early childhood programs. The evaluation was conducted by Augenblick, Palaich and Associates, a Denver-based policy consulting firm, and the Clayton Early Learning Institute.”

On the Job
South Carolina Education Chief’s Proposal Re-Ignites Teacher Merit Pay Debate.
SC Now (2/9, Lamb) reported, “South Carolina State Superintendent of Education Mick Zais’ new teacher pay plan would completely overhaul the way public school teachers in the state are paid. Under Zais’ plan, unveiled earlier this week, teachers and principals would be paid using a performance-based system, as opposed to the current system which uses a base salary and mandated upgrades for seniority or post-grad credentials.” According to SC Now, “The proposal, which is moving through the House and could be implemented as early as the 2012-13 school year, reopens the long-simmering debate over teacher compensation.”

Teachers Fight Republican-Led Education Policy Proposals.
Sean Cavanagh wrote in a blog for Education Week (2/9), “As we’ve reported, teachers and the unions that represent them are scrambling on several fronts as they struggle to fight what they see as misguided Republican-led proposals rolling through statehouses around the country. This week teachers in a couple states have made a public show of force against those measures, while one state teachers’ union took the opposite approach, offering a surprise plan of their own to overhaul how educators are evaluated.” Among a number of similar initiative across the country, the “Wisconsin Education Association Council, a 98,000-member union, unveiled a broad proposal to create a new teacher evaluation and pay scheme-and called for breaking up the Milwaukee Public School System.”

Law & Policy
Indiana Lawmakers Start Work On Teacher Merit Pay Bill.
The AP (2/10, Martin) reports, “Indiana lawmakers have started work on one of the more controversial aspects of Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels’ sweeping education agenda: a plan to tie teacher pay to student performance. … Lawmakers may tweak some specifics, but the idea is that Indiana teachers would be evaluated each year and ranked into one of four categories: highly effective, effective, improvement necessary or ineffective. Local districts would create their own evaluations systems but would have to include objective measures of student achievement.”

Kansas Education Officials To Ask For NCLB Waiver.
The Topeka (KS) Capital-Journal (2/10, Deines) reports, “Kansas State Department of Education officials will ask for a waiver from the federal government within the next few days that would allow Kansas to have more flexibility within the achievement requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act. Diane DeBacker, state education commissioner, told members of the Kansas State Board of Education this week that she will submit a letter next week to US Education Secretary Arne Duncan requesting the waiver as part of the state education department’s accountability plan. She said on behalf of the state board, she is asking for a cap on the 2009-10 adequate yearly progress targets for reading and math the state had to set to comply with as part of No Child Left Behind.”

New York District Representatives To Attend Labor-Management Conference.
The Watertown (NY) Daily Times (2/9, Munks) reported, “Representatives from two north country school districts were chosen to attend a conference in Denver next week that will address a change brought about by new state and federal mandates: the management-labor relationship. … The topics at the conference will focus on more effectively supporting teachers and administrators to advance student achievement by organizing teaching and processes for hiring and evaluating the work force.” The Daily Times added, “The conference, arranged by US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, comes at a time when state education officials are implementing some major changes” spurred on by a $646 million Race to the Top award.

Duncan Criticized For Backing NCLB Testing Components.
Monty Neill, interim executive director at The National Center for Fair & Open Testing, wrote in a blog for the Washington Post (2/9), “A new USA Today/Gallup poll shows that a strong majority of Americans support a major overhaul of No Child Left Behind or total elimination of the law.” However, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan “pays lip service to the public desire to overhaul the law. He recently said that NCLB has been too narrowly focused on standardized testing, yet keeps pushing for states to use student test scores as a ‘significant factor’ in evaluating, tenuring, firing and paying teachers.”

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School Finance
Georgia Governor Urged To Maintain Funding For Pre-K Program.
Cynthia Tucker wrote in a blog for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (2/10), “For nearly two decades, Georgia was hailed as an educational innovator because of its merit-based college scholarships and its pre-kindergarten classes.” Now as lawmakers consider “cuts to the HOPE scholarship, Gov. Nathan Deal has announced that he also wants to slash nearly $20 million from the pre-K program, a decision that will certainly affect the program’s quality.” Deal’s “proposal to cut pre-K is shortsighted and wrong-headed – exactly backwards. Deal is sacrificing the state’s future at a time when educational standards need to be raised, not lowered. … ‘We don’t need another study to tell us the importance of early childhood education,’ Education Secretary Arne Duncan told me. ‘These are extraordinarily tough times, but I think where we cut quality or cut access, the long-term implications are huge. We need to think of education as an investment.’”

Also in the News
Board Of Education Delays Implementation Of Parent Trigger Law.
The Los Angeles Times (2/10, Watanabe) says the California Board of Education met Wednesday and the panel “put the brakes on” the parent trigger law, which “gives parents the right to force major reforms at low-performing schools.” The board “took no action on proposed regulations to implement the law but instead will set up a working group to help determine the procedures. … In what one critic called a ‘bombshell’ statement, state education officials said Wednesday that it would be difficult to write clear regulations based on the law because it was too vague.” So, education officials are working with Assembly Education Committee chair Julia Brownley (D) on a “cleanup” bill. That disclosure “set off alarm among supporters, including Parent Revolution. … ‘This is clearly nothing more than an attempt to repeal the law,’ said Gabe Rose, the group’s deputy director.”

Grading Of Teacher Colleges To Be Revamped.
Education Week (2/9, Sawchuk) reported, “The organizer of a plan to review all 1,400 schools of education and publish the findings in US News and World Report is altering several key aspects of its methodology-an attempt, officials for the group say, to respond to mounting complaints about the study. The National Council of Teacher Quality posted its grading criteria online Wednesday morning to address concerns among education school deans that the review wouldn’t be transparent or accurate.” The NCTQ “also plans to supplement the content-based analysis at the heart of its methodology with information on candidate classroom performance culled from ‘value added’ data.”

New Jersey Teacher Colleges Oppose Magazine Rating. The Star-Ledger (NJ) (2/10, Heyboer) reports, “Last fall, US Education Secretary Arne Duncan said it was time to hold colleges more accountable for the quality of the teachers they train to work in the nation’s public schools. But plans by US News & World Report to partner with an education research group to issue ‘A’ through ‘F’ grades to teachers’ colleges around the country is running into an academic roadblock” as “deans of 23 of New Jersey’s 24 teacher training colleges sent the editor of US News a letter earlier this week questioning whether the rankings will ‘mislead the public.’” Also, a number of colleges are “boycotting the survey.”

Rhee Faces Renewed Scrutiny Over Depiction Of Students’ Progress.
The Washington Post (2/11, Anderson) reports, “Former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, known for her crusade to use standardized test scores to help evaluate teachers, is facing renewed scrutiny over her depiction of progress that her students made years ago when she was a schoolteacher. A former D.C. math teacher, Guy Brandenburg, posted on his blog a study that includes test scores from the Baltimore school where Rhee taught” and “Brandenburg contended that the data show Rhee ‘lied repeatedly’ in an effort to make gains in her class look more impressive than they were. … Rhee, who resigned last year as chancellor, denied fabricating anything about her record” yet “she acknowledged this week that she could have described her accomplishments differently.”

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In the Classroom
Detroit Public Schools To Probe Allegations Of Grade-Fixing.
The Detroit Free Press (2/11, Dawsey) reports, “Retired teacher Marjorie Pasqualle was contacted by an investigator from the Detroit Public Schools Office of Inspector General on Thursday regarding allegations that someone changed her students’ grades last school year. … Other teachers and Keith Johnson, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, told the Free Press in Thursday’s report that grade-changing has occurred for years, but it’s hard to prove. They say it’s the reason some DPS students graduate with low skills.”

Class Sizes Swell In Virginia District Amid Budget Cuts.
The Richmond (VA) Times-Dispatch (2/11, Green) reports, “Classes of 30 students or more are ‘the new norm’ for the Chesterfield [VA] district, said School Board member U. Omarh Rajah. … According to district statistics, 470, or 9 percent, of high school classes have 30 or more students.” The Times-Dispatch adds, “The district raised its teacher-to-pupil staffing standard by one student in 2010 after two straight years of severe budget cuts, which included the elimination of nearly $80 million and close to 500 teaching positions.”

Minnesota Education Stakeholders Weigh State’s Progress.
KAAL-TV Austin, MN (2/10, Miller) reported on its Website, “Each school day hundreds of thousands of Minnesota parents send their kids off to school. A school that’s supposed to be preparing our kids for a successful future. But is it? … ‘Minnesota has some great strengths,’ says US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.” However, KAAL reported that 2009 National Assessment of Education Progress statistics indicate that “more than half of” Minnesota “4th graders…are not proficient in science. ‘What I haven’t just felt, candidly recently from Minnesota, is a sense of urgency,’ says Duncan. … ‘The President says everyday is that the countries that out educate us, are going to out compete us,’ Duncan says.”

On the Job
Bennet Proposes National “Teachers Corps” In Letter To Obama.
The Denver Post (2/11, Sherry) reports that Sen. Michael Bennet (D) “wrote in a letter to President Obama today that he will propose the ‘Presidential Teachers Corps’ to craft an army of 100,000 new mobile teachers in the next five years. … The plan would start with teacher preparation schools – like the University of Northern Colorado – which would dole out a certain number of these special ‘Presidential Teachers Corps’ teaching licenses every year to students who want to go for them.” According to the Post, these teachers “would be funneled to high-need, lower-income schools” and their national license would allow them to “move anywhere – from Florida to Colorado to Washington, D.C.” and “not have to navigate burdensome certification differences in states.”

Houston Proposal Ties Teacher Ratings To Student Scores.
The Houston Chronicle (2/11, Mellon) reports, “Teachers in the Houston school district would be held much more accountable for their students’ learning under a highly anticipated proposal to change the way they are evaluated. Under the draft plan, released for public comment this month, roughly half a teacher’s rating would be based on student test scores and other evidence of academic progress. The current system relies almost solely on principals’ observations of teachers at work.”

WPost: Arbitrator Wrong To Order Reinstatement Of Fired DC Teachers.
The Washington Post (2/11) editorializes that the 75 DC “teachers fired for cause in 2008…were rookies or transplants from other school systems, on probation, who had been told when they were hired that they would need recommendations from their principals to win tenure. Nonetheless, arbitrator Charles Feigenbaum, acting on a complaint by the Washington Teachers’ Union, ordered this week that all 75 be reinstated with back pay. … It’s a mind-boggling decision that essentially affords probationary teachers some of the rights that protect tenured teachers.”

Law & Policy
Michigan Bill May Strip Detroit School Board Of Academic Oversight.
The Detroit Free Press (2/11, Dawsey) reports, “As the Detroit Board of Education and the state-appointed emergency financial manager work toward settling an 18-month-old court case that gave the board power over academics, a bill in the Legislature has the potential to strip the board of its new authority. The Local Government Accountability bill, introduced Wednesday in the state House, would strip school boards and city councils of power and compensation if an emergency financial manager is appointed. Those officials couldn’t run for office for 10 years after the district or municipality is placed into receivership.”

Houston School Board Approves Expansion Of Reform Agenda.
The Houston Chronicle (2/11, Mellon) reports, “A sharply divided Houston school board agreed Thursday to expand Superintendent Terry Grier’s signature school reform program to 11 elementary campuses next year despite concerns about a looming budget crisis. The board voted 5-4 to spend $1.6 million on the so-called Apollo program, which will include daily math tutoring for all fourth-graders and Saturday tutorial sessions for struggling students. … The district plans to pay for the elementary schools by scaling back its contract with Community Education Partners, the private company that runs its alternative program for students with discipline programs.”

Florida Senate Panel Advances Teacher Merit Pay Bill.
Leslie Postal wrote in a blog for the Orlando Sentinel (2/10), “A teacher merit-pay bill won its first favorable vote in the [Florida] Senate education committee today.” According to Postal; “The new bill leaves untouched current pay plans – based largely on years worked – for teachers already on the job. But new teachers would get raises based on their performance and would not have the tenure-like protections current teachers have.”

Ravitch: School Turnaround Efforts Have Failed To Improve Schools.
Helen Gym wrote in a blog for the Philadelphia Public School Notebook (2/10), “Turnaround is a failed measure that’s led to instability in schools and ‘massive demoralization’ among teachers and school officials, said New York University professor and author Diane Ravitch Monday night in New York City. Ravitch was the featured speaker along with a dynamic panel of parent activists from across the country in an event sponsored by Parents Across America to launch a new national network of parent leaders.” Ravitch “said policies thrust onto urban education – including privatization, school turnaround, standardized testing, and test-based merit pay for teachers – are unproven,” citing “Chicago’s Renaissance 2010, initiated by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan when he was in Chicago.”

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Safety & Security
Lessons In Online Safety A School Staple In Illinois.
The Daily-Journal (IL) (2/10, Zambo) reported, “Experts say there is no surefire way to protect children from online predators, inappropriate Internet content and other dangers lurking in the shadowy corners of cyberspace. But a year after Illinois law required schools to incorporate Internet safety education into the curriculum, they agree that teachers and parents can work together to help keep children safer.” According to the Daily-Journal, “Since the start of the 2009-2010 school year, educators have been required to teach Internet safety at least once a year to children in grades three and up.”

School Finance
Texas Facing Major School Financing Challenges.
The Dallas Morning News (2/11, Weiss) reports, “Because the Texas Legislature meets every two years, many other states have a year’s head start on the challenges of public school financing” yet no “magic solution” has been identified to “fill a $10 billion gap. … Even some states that have annual budgets are coming late to the game, having used federal stimulus money last year to help bridge budget issues.” Though “Texas, some experts say, has some flexibility compared with some other states,…the basic issues are the same” as the “recession sharply reduced tax revenue” and “the vast majority of the money spent on public education pays for salaries, with most of it paying for teachers.”

North Carolina Budget Shortfall Imperils Teaching Positions.
The Public News Service (2/11) reports, “Education majors at North Carolina colleges and universities will be paying close attention to Gov. Beverly Perdue’s State of the State address on Monday and to her budget, expected to be released later in the week. Education programs and teaching positions are being threatened by the state’s close to $3 billion budget shortfall.” According to PNS, “Based on preliminary estimates from a report being released later this year by the National Education Association, North Carolina ranks 45th in the country for teacher salaries.”

Also in the News
Minnesota District School Boundary Plan Will Redistribute Students.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune (2/11, Burnette) reports, “As many as 265 Stillwater [MN] students will move to different schools in the district next year as part of a new boundary plan approved by the school board on Thursday night. The move was made to relieve crowding at two of the district’s elementary schools.” According to the Star Tribune, “Other boundary options that were considered included moving sixth-graders from elementary schools to junior high schools” yet “board members said the district’s junior high schools wouldn’t be able to handle the large amount of students and ‘segregating’ the alternate students was unfair.”

Illinois Charter Schools Coping With High Demand.
The Chicago Tribune (2/11, Rubin) reports, “In the quest to obtain the best possible education for their kids in the Chicago Public Schools, many families have pinned their hopes on a magnet school, but with 32,000 applications for 3,000 slots, they are seeking out charters as well. … Critics have maintained that charters, which get government funding, take resources away from traditional schools. While seven of the top 10 nonselective city high schools are charters, as measured by the ACT average, many charter schools perform no better than their neighborhood counterparts.”

Cleveland Residents Weigh In On Qualities Desired In Next Schools Chief.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer (2/11, Ott) reports, “The findings are scant and preliminary, but early indications are that people want the next leader of the Cleveland schools to come with classroom experience, a feel for the community and ability to bridge differences in students and families. A crowd of about 75 turned out Thursday for the first of three public meetings aimed at finding out what type of chief executive officer should succeed Eugene Sanders, who retired Feb. 1. … For many, the executive best suited to tackle the district’s academic and financial challenges contrasted with Sanders, who was heavy with administrative and university teaching experience and could come across as formal and determined to send every student to college.”

School Choice Advocates Rally In Virginia.
Fredrick Kunkle wrote in a blog for the Washington Post (2/10), “About 200 people met at the Bell Tower on Virginia’s Capitol Square on Thursday to rally support for a bill that would grant new tax breaks to corporations that gave scholarships for poor children to attend private school. The measure is modeled after similar programs in Florida and Pennsylvania” and it would “cap the state’s tax credits at $25 million and provide scholarships only to children whose family income makes them eligible to receive free or reduced-price lunches. … The Virginia Education Association, the Virginia PTA, the Virginia Association of School Superintendents and the Virginia School Boards Association oppose the measure, saying the state should focus on restoring funding to its public schools before giving tax breaks to corporations to help children attend private school.”

DC Schools To Use Data From Teacher Evaluation System In New Ways.
The Washington Post (2/14, McCrummen) reports, “Although the main purpose of [DCs] new teacher evaluation system is to rate teachers’ effectiveness, officials are beginning to use the fresh troves of data it generates for other purposes, such as assessing administrators and determining which universities produce the best- or least-prepared teachers.” According to the Post, “Across the country, education reformers have been pressing for more rigorous, quantifiable ways to evaluate teachers, and the District’s new system is in the vanguard of that movement, even as unions and education experts question its merits. Now in its second year, IMPACT uses five classroom observations to rate how effective a teacher is in nine standards – including explaining content clearly and engaging students – deemed essential to good teaching.”

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In the Classroom
Harvard’s Ronald Ferguson Shedding Light On Achievement Gap.
The New York Times (2/14, Winerip) reports profiles Ronald Ferguson, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education Government and “founder of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard,” noting “there is no one in America who knows more about the gap than Ronald Ferguson.” Ferguson “spends lots of time flying around the country visiting racially mixed public high schools” and part “of what he does is academic” and “part is serving as a de facto educational social worker, meeting with students, faculty members and parents to explain what steps their schools can take to narrow” the achievement gap.

On the Job
Georgia Districts Struggling To Avoid Furloughs, Shortened School Year.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (2/14, Salzer, Badertscher) reports that Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal “received the loudest applause from lawmakers last month in his first major address as governor when he promised his education budget proposal” would not lead to teacher furloughs and a shortened school year. According to the Journal-Constitution, “Deal said districts were told to save some of the federal stimulus money they received this year to tide them over in fiscal 2012, which begins July 1. … Some systems did save federal stimulus money,” yet “even districts that saved the money told the AJC they will struggle to avoid furloughs, and none had hope of moving back to a longer school year.”

DC Team Will Not Attend Labor-Management Conference In Denver.
Bill Turque wrote in a blog for the Washington Post (2/11) that DC Public Schools “and the Washington Teachers’ Union (WTU) were supposed to be big players at next week’s Department of Education conference on labor-management collaboration in Denver, which is expected to draw representatives from 150 school districts. They were listed as presenters, to discuss the 2010 collective bargaining agreement as an exemplar of, in Secretary Arne Duncan’s words, ‘what is possible when adults come together, particularly in tough times, to do the right thing for kids.’” However, “the District team dropped out a couple of weeks ago, because it seems that the adults are not all that together.”

Law & Policy
Tennessee Bills To Target Unions, Tenure.
The Murfreesboro (TN) Daily News Journal (2/13, Stockard) reported, “Murfreesboro and Rutherford County teachers are battling legislation they believe is designed to bust their unions and take away their voice. Teachers are most angry about legislation co-sponsored by state Sen. Bill Ketron, R-Murfreesboro, that would end collective bargaining for teacher associations.” According to the Daily News Journal, teachers “consider this bundle of bills an ‘attack’ on teachers and the Tennessee Education Association, including legislation to change tenure law, a move to prohibit them having payroll deductions to their teacher associations and a measure removing TEA-appointed representatives from the board of trustees for the Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System, to which teachers contribute 5 percent of their paycheck.”

Texas Governor In Dispute With Congressman Over Teacher Jobs Funding.
The New York Times (2/12, Smith) reported, “The latest chapter in the feud between [Texas] Gov. Rick Perry and Representative Lloyd Doggett over $830 million in federal money for education unfolded Tuesday, when, in his State of the State address, the governor called out a ‘certain Texas congressman’ for singling out Texas ‘for punishment in pursuit of his own agenda.’ The dispute between Mr. Perry and Mr. Doggett, Democrat of Austin, began in August, when Congress passed legislation to give $10 billion in aid to allow states to hire and retain teachers” which containing a measure “applicable only to Texas…that requires the governor to offer his assurance that the money will be used to ‘supplement and not supplant’ state education financing through 2013. Six months later, Texas is one of only two states that has not received money from the fund.”

Duncan Seeking New Round Of Race To The Top.
The Record and Herald News (NJ) (2/11, Brody) reported that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan “said Friday that he wants to make a new round of ‘Race to the Top’ education grants available – this time allowing school districts to compete for the funds instead of states. Duncan said President Obama would push for more money for the contest in his next budget proposal because Race to the Top spurred many states to innovate, adopt national curriculum standards and improve teacher evaluations.” The Herald News adds that “Duncan did not elaborate in an afternoon conference call with reporters on the size of the districts he hoped would participate, or how much money they could win. In the past, he has called for an additional $1.35 billion for a third round.”

Tennessee District Leaders File Lawsuit Over Charter Surrender.
The Commercial Appeal (TN) (2/12, Buser, Silence) reported, “Shelby County [TN] school leaders have taken their fight against consolidation to the courts, filing a federal lawsuit Friday alleging that the city school board’s ‘irrational’ charter surrender deprives Memphis students of their constitutional rights. In the lawsuit, suburban district leaders also blast the city of Memphis and the Memphis City Council for supporting ‘the (MCS) board’s unplanned and un-thoughtful effort to abandon its obligations to the children of Memphis.’” The Commercial Appeal added, “The suit names multiple defendants, including the MCS Board of Education, the City Council, the City of Memphis, the US Department of Education, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the US Department of Justice, US Atty. Gen. Eric Holder, the Tennessee Department of Education and Acting Education Commissioner Patrick Smith.”

WREG-TV Memphis, TN (2/11, Brown) reported on its Website, “Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam has signed a bill that would delay the merger of Memphis City Schools and Shelby County Schools. … The bill builds in a two and a half year period to allow for plans to be put in place.” WREG added, “The bill goes into effect if Memphis voters say yes to the surrender of the Memphis School charter.”

Safety & Security
School Anti-Cursing Movement Growing.
The New York Times (2/13, Severson) reported that “the anti-cursing movement has grown in fits and starts in recent years, particularly as school administrators, parents and students themselves have looked to new ways to stop bullying.” According to the Times, “Some experts say the notion that cursing leads to bullying is misguided” yet the “anti-cursing movement is not unlike antidrug efforts that work on the premise that marijuana is a gateway drug. The real issues are deeper than just saying no.”

Virginia District Chief Defends Discipline Policies.
The Washington Post (2/12, George) reported that Fairfax, VA “Superintendent Jack D. Dale defended his school system’s discipline policies Friday after an elected leader in Fairfax County linked two teen suicides to what she called a ‘zero tolerance’ policy toward infractions. Dale said that the Fairfax school district does not believe in zero-tolerance and never has,…reacting to a board matter introduced jointly Tuesday by Supervisors Catherine M. Hudgins (D-Hunter Mill) and Penelope A. Gross (D-Mason).” According to the Post, “The discussion came nearly three weeks after Nick Stuban, a 15-year-old football player at W.T. Woodson High School, took his life at his Fairfax home.”

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School Finance
Colorado Education Stakeholders Brace For Deep State Funding Cuts.
The Denver Post (2/14, Hoover) reports, “Shool districts and public colleges are bracing for what are expected to be deep cuts in K-12 and higher education to be announced Tuesday as [Colorado] Gov. John Hickenlooper unveils his first set of budget recommendations. Hickenlooper, a Democrat, will outline his recommendations for the 2011-12 budget at a meeting of the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee on Tuesday.” According to the Post, “Multiple sources in the education community expect as much as a $400 million net reduction for K-12 education, which would be the largest single cut to public schools since the start of the recession.”

Stimulus Package Report Card Mixed.
Education Week (2/12, McNeil) reported that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act “has prevented massive teacher layoffs, spurred states to devise sweeping education overhaul plans, and invigorated the national conversation about turning around the worst-performing schools,” however, “a critical question remains: Will the ARRA’s nearly $100 billion in education aid result in higher academic achievement, particularly for those students most at risk of academic failure? Or, in the words of US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, will the country’s education ‘moonshot’ hit its target?” Education Week added that “a far-ranging review of the stimulus program by reporters from 36 news outlets in 27 states, working in a collaboration overseen by the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media and the Education Writers Association, shows that” the stimulus package’s “lasting impact on public education is far from certain.”

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (2/14, Chute) reports, “Thanks in part to the economic stimulus money in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, most Pennsylvania school districts have weathered the recession with a lot of belt tightening but few drastic cuts…. For Pittsburgh Public Schools, which was already in the midst of developing and implementing a series of reforms when the economic stimulus was passed, the funding has saved about 200 teaching jobs each year.” The Post-Gazette adds, “In a phone news conference Friday,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan “credited Race to the Top with causing ‘pretty dramatic reform and innovation’ in states and said the president’s budget will seek a Race to the Top program for school districts.”

Pennsylvania Districts Struggling To Make Up Revenue Loss When Stimulus Ends. The State College (PA) Centre Daily Times (2/14, Mahon) reports, “More than $12.67 million in federal stimulus dollars has poured into Centre County classrooms during the past two years.” The Daily Times adds, “Lawmakers and educators agree that the stimulus saved jobs – for instance, Penns Valley paid its high school English teachers with the money. But whether the boost will improve education in the long run is less clear.”

Consultants In High Demand As Stimulus Clock Ticks. Education Week (2/12, Brownstein) reported, “The flood of federal economic-stimulus money into the nation’s public schools has dramatically increased the demand for education consultants, leaving some stimulus recipients struggling to find seasoned advisers and others uneasy about the pitches they are getting.” Education Week added, “Sandra Abrevaya, a spokeswoman for the US Department of Education, said the department is hopeful that its investment will help build expertise in turnarounds and other tricky areas, adding she is encouraged that states and districts are beginning to share their knowledge.”

Federal Watchdogs Tracking Stimulus Spending. Education Week (2/12, McNeil) reported, “It’s one thing to hand out billions of dollars in the hope of turning around the poorest-performing schools and sparking states to devise bold plans to improve their K-12 systems. And it’s another thing to make sure the money is well spent. That’s the job facing a pack of stimulus-funding watchdogs, who are charged with monitoring the spending of $97 billion the US Department of Education has awarded to states and districts as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.”

Also in the News
Protesters In North Carolina District Target School Diversity Policy.
The Raleigh News & Observer (2/12, Breen) reported that a “rally on Saturday where the main issue was the end of a busing-for-diversity policy in North Carolina’s largest school district…brought national NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous to Raleigh, who compared the contemporary dispute to the civil rights era.” The News & Observer added, “A majority of [Wake County, NC] school board members voted last year to scrap a decade-old plan that bused some students around the district to achieve socio-economic – and, as a result, racial – balance. The decision to end the policy has resulted in criticism from US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and with a complaint filed with the education department’s Office for Civil Rights.”

University Of Chicago Professor Named Chicago Schools Chief Education Officer.
The Chicago Tribune (2/12, Ahmed-Ullah) reported, “Chicago Public Schools Interim CEO Terry Mazany today announced the appointment of University of Chicago professor Charles Payne as the school system’s new chief education officer, but he won’t have the job long. … Mayor Richard Daley had said Mazany’s priority as interim schools chief would be to find a replacement for Eason-Watkins, but Mazany has had a difficult time finding someone willing to take the job for only a few months pending a new mayor and new CPS chief executive.” The Tribune adds that “Payne will be on loan from the U. of C. where he is the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor in the School of Social Service Administration.”

Schools Using Technology To Continue Instruction On Snow Days.
The Bowling Green (KY) Daily News (2/11, Mink) reported, “Some teachers across the” Warren County, KY “district are using websites, including Facebook, to communicate with their students and administer assignments during snow days. It’s a way to keep students on schedule, especially high-achieving students who are taking Advanced Placement classes.” The Daily news added that “Facebook and other websites are not only bringing classroom discussions into students’ homes, but they’re also” allowing different schools to collaborate on lesson plans.

Duncan Convenes Labor-Management Conference In Denver.
The New York Times (2/16, Dillon) reports, “Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, convening a two-day labor-management conference” in Denver “on Tuesday, argued that teachers’ unions can help solve many of the challenges facing public schools. … The conference…drew school authorities and teachers’ union leaders from 150 districts across the nation…to discuss ways of working together.” According to the Post, Duncan is quoted saying that education stakeholders “have to learn to problem-solve together,” which underscored Duncan’s “view that school systems can face challenges most effectively by working with the unions.”

The Washington Post (2/16, Anderson) adds that at the start of the two-day conference in Denver, Duncan “said schools and unions should rethink policies related to who gets laid off during budget crises, an issue in many places. Critics of unions say that ‘last-in, first-out’ rules too often force young teaching talent out of schools.” The Post adds that “Dennis Van Roekel, president of the 3.2 million-member National Education Association, said that test scores are a poor measure of teacher performance but that every teacher should be able to show evidence of student learning.”

The Denver Post (1/16, Robles) reports that aside from “remembering that education is about children, Duncan asked educators to change the misconceptions about the conflict between unions and districts. ‘We have to reject the idea that collaboration is a code-word for cowards,’ Duncan said.” According to the Post, “Through breakout sessions during the two days, 12 school districts from across the country will share their advances in working together on issues of teacher evaluations, merit-based compensation and teacher support.”

The AP (2/16, Wyatt) reports that Duncan “chastised teachers and their bosses in equal measure Tuesday as he launched what the Obama administration is touting as the first-ever national summit between union leaders and administrators. … The Obama administration hailed the summit as a fresh start to kick off education overhaul efforts looming in Washington, especially delicate negotiations over how teachers should be paid and evaluated.” The AP notes that the “nation’s largest school district – New York City – and the Washington D.C. district pulled out of the summit after teachers accused school administrators of going back on their word.”

Duncan Visits Denver High School. The AP (2/16) reports that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan “visited a Denver high school to learn how computers are helping students pay for college.” Duncan “toured Manual High’s computer lab where students get help filling out ” FAFSA “forms they’ll need to receive scholarships and loans for college. … Denver Public Schools is one of about 20 districts nationwide working to increase use of the FAFSA form through a pilot that allows students to complete the form online.”

KDVR-TV Denver, CO (2/15, Bowman) reported on its Website that during his Denver visit, he gave “students a hand in filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) before heading to the Colorado Convention Center for the summit meeting. Duncan met with the first graduating class of Manual High School since the school closed several years ago.” KMGH-TV Denver, CO (2/15, 7:02 p.m. ET) also covered this story.

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On the Job
Education Stakeholders In Media War Over Teacher Layoffs.
Sharon Otterman wrote in a blog for the New York Times (2/15) that when New York City schools chief Cathleen P. Black, “along with her boss, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, has been on a media blitz in recent weeks to urge the Legislature to end first-in-last-out firing for teachers. Ending seniority-based firing would permit the city to get rid of the worst teachers, not just the least experienced ones, when layoffs come, they argue.” Otterman noted that the United Federation of Teachers “is spending more than $1 million running an anti-Bloomberg advertisement this month in high-profile slots, like during ‘Saturday Night Live’ and the ‘Late Show with David Letterman.’”

New York City Schools Chief Makes Debut Appearance Before State Lawmakers. Thomas Kaplan wrote in a blog for the New York Times (2/15), “For the first time in her new job,” New York City schools chief Cathleen P. Black “testified before members of the Legislature. It was a test of sorts for Ms. Black, whose qualifications were criticized when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg selected her in November to run the city’s school system, the nation’s largest. But in nearly two hours in front of the lawmakers, Ms. Black held her own…and never seemed stumped by any of the topics that lawmakers asked her to address.”

Teachers Share Reform Ideas With Duncan.
The Battle Creek (MI) Enquirer (2/16, Hinkley) reports that Marshall (MI) Middle School eighth-grade language arts teacher Lesley Hagelgans “recently shared her ideas on education reform during a face-to-face meeting with” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan “and now is calling on more local teachers to join the conversation.” Hagelgans “was among six teachers from across the country who met with US Education Secretary Arne Duncan and his staff as part of the VIVA Project, a national online forum for teachers to share ideas on federal, state and local education policy. … From among the 150 online participants, Hagelgans and five other of the most active members were named to the VIVA National Task Force, which compiled months’ worth of ideas shared in the online forum into a 38-page report titled ‘Voices from the Classroom.’”

Law & Policy
Florida Lawmakers Tinkering With Class Size Restrictions.
The Tampa (FL) Tribune (2/16, Ackerman, Silvestrini) reports, “Spurned by voters who didn’t want to ease class-size requirements for Florida’s schools, state legislators are mulling changes to the law that would give districts more flexibility in counting students and also apply the limits to fewer classes. And this time, even proponents of class caps say the legislature’s effort to create flexibility makes sense as long as lawmakers don’t go too far and subvert the intent of the 2002 constitutional amendment that established the restrictions.” The Tribune adds, “The Constitution restricts each classroom where a core subject, such as English or math, is taught to a set number of students per teacher: 18 in prekindergarten through third grade, 22 in grades four through eight and 25 in high school.”

Teacher Merit Pay Bill Gets Second Favorable Vote In Florida Senate.
The Orlando Sentinel (2/15) reported in a blog, “A merit pay bill that would overhaul how teachers are evaluated and paid, largely using student test scores to judge teacher quality got a second favorable vote this morning in the Florida Senate. The Senate’s budget subcommittee on pre-K-12 education passed the bill on a 8 to 1 vote, though several voting ‘yes’ said they still had questions about how the state would pay for the new system, how it would develop new student tests and how it would fairly use test-score data to judge teachers.” According to the Sentinel, the bill would allow teachers to “get raises based on their performance.”

Virginia Senate Committee Votes Down School Voucher Bill.
The Washington Post (2/16, Kunkle) reports, “The Virginia Senate’s Finance Committee, after hearing emotional testimony from students and educators, voted along party lines Tuesday to kill a measure that would have given businesses tax credits for funding private-school tuition for needy students. The bill…would have given businesses that donated to nonprofits providing scholarships for private schools a tax credit worth 70 percent of the value of the donations.” According to the Post, “Each scholarship could have provided up to the equivalent of local school aid, which ranges between $1,300 to $6,700 across the state.”

Teach For America Summit Tackles Education Reform.
Teacher Magazine (2/15, Heitin) reported, “At the Teach For America 20th Anniversary Summit this weekend in Washington, a panel of some of the most recognizable names in the education reform movement discussed the need for a ‘revolution’ to close the nation’s achievement gap.” Secretary of Education “Arne Duncan-donning casual attire, with no tie or jacket-also gave a keynote address Saturday afternoon, praising TFA for ‘changing the face of public education in this nation.’ … TFA does more than just provide great teachers, said Duncan,” as Duncan noted that IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman is a Teach For America alum.

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School Finance
Los Angeles Board Of Education Approves Steep Budget Cuts.
The Los Angeles Times (2/16, Blume) reports, “Thousands of employees would lose jobs, children would face larger classes, and magnet and preschool programs would experience sharp reductions under a worst-case $5-billion budget plan approved Tuesday by the Los Angeles Board of Education. But 45 new and low-performing schools could be spared entirely from teacher layoffs as a result of a recent legal settlement to protect campuses from extreme teacher turnover, overriding traditional teacher seniority protections.” The Times adds, “In a related development, US Education Secretary Arne Duncan told a conference in Denver that school districts need to find ways to make sure poor children have access to highly effective teachers by rethinking their staffing and layoff measures.”

Obama’s Education Budget Faces Uphill Climb.
AP (2/16, Amario) reports, “President Barack Obama’s budget request for increased spending in education is likely to face a tough fight against Republicans – and even if ends up being approved, the extra money wouldn’t stave off another round of layoffs and classroom cuts expected this year as federal aid dries up and states struggle to recover from the recession. … ‘There’s no question these are some of the toughest budget times we’ve seen in decades,’” said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said. “‘We’ve called this the new normal.’”

New Proposal May Slash New Jersey Preschoolers’ Days In Half.
WPIX-TV New York (2/15, Alfarone) reported on its Website that New Jersey “is considering slashing full-day preschool in urban areas like at school 11 in Jersey City in half.” WPIX noted that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is “criticizing NJ Senate Republicans” over the proposal, yet “Senate Republicans are saying it’s it not their choice, but the state is broke. Plus, some senators are saying parents in suburban towns are paying lots of taxes to fund urban schools, while being shortchanged on funding for their own schools.”

Also in the News

DC Mayor Says Interim Schools Chief Seeks Permanent Post.
Bill Turque wrote in a blog for the Washington Post (2/15), “Since her appointment in October, interim schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson has expressed ambivalence when asked if she wants the job on a permanent basis. But Mayor Vincent C. Gray, the man who will make the appointment, said Tuesday he’s sure that she’s sure” she wants the job. According to Tuque, “Gray made the comment shortly after announcing that CityBridge Foundation president Katherine Bradley and UNCF president and CEO Michael Lomax, who co-chaired the mayor’s education transition team, will also lead the search panel for a permanent chancellor.”

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In the Classroom
Los Angeles Archdiocese May Be Backing Off Plans To Extend School Year.
The Los Angeles Times (2/2, Rivera) reported, “Los Angeles Archdiocese officials appear to have backed off of a controversial plan to extend the school year at all of its elementary schools by 20 days, saying that decision is being left up to individual campuses.” According to the Times, “Cardinal Roger Mahony and other officials announced last week that the extension of the school calendar would be adopted by most of the archdiocese’s 210 elementary schools. That plan drew swift opposition from some parents who complained that the extension would interfere with family schedules and summer activities,” yet school leaders “said the move would help boost student performance and attract new families.”

Salt Lake City, UT Schools To Drop Year-Round Schedule.
The Salt Lake Tribune (12/2) reported, “Salt Lake City [UT] School District is ditching the year-round calendar. Next year, the district’s six year-round elementaries – Bennion, Franklin, Meadowlark, Parkview, Rose Park and Whittier – will switch to a traditional school year.” According to the Tribune, the “change means all elementary and secondary schools will have a common calendar, sharing start and end dates and breaks” and “the district estimates it will save $128,000 a year in busing costs, consolidated teacher training and other expenses.” KPVI-TV Idaho Falls, ID (2/2) also covered this story on its Website.

On the Job
Teachers Submit Education Reform Ideas To Duncan Via VIVA Project.
Valerie Strauss wrote in a blog for the Washington Post (2/2), “More than 150 public school teachers from 27 states, seeking to get their voices heard by education policymakers in this let’s-bash-teachers era, collaborated to devise solutions to problems that most affect their profession. They wrote their conclusions in a paper called ‘Voices From the Classroom,’ and then, in a town where such reports are constantly released and then forgotten, they got to do something unusual: present them to Education Secretary Arne Duncan.” According to Strauss, “The effort is called the VIVA Project — Voices, Ideas, Vision, Action — which was created to give classroom teachers a chance to share ideas and take a role in making state and national policy decisions involving public schools.”

Knox County, TN School Officials Weigh Teacher Performance Pay Options.
The Knoxville News Sentinel (TN) (2/3, Alapo) reports that teacher performance-pay systems in Eagle County, CO and DC “are among the national models Knox County [TN] school officials are looking to as they develop a strategic compensation initiative, which officials expect to be in place this fall.” The News Sentinel notes that the Knox County “district has received $10.7 million for a performance-based compensation system — $6 million from federal Race to the Top education reform funds and $4.7 million in grants from the state — for use over the next four years.” Also, a teacher performance-pay plan in Hamilton County, TN through the Benwood Initiative “has dramatically increased student achievement that US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan touts it as an effective reform model.”

Incoming Los Angeles Schools Chief Lays Out Reform Vision.
The Los Angeles Daily Breeze (2/3, Pamer) reports, “In his first public speech on his vision for the nation’s second largest school district, Los Angeles Unified’s incoming superintendent on Wednesday pledged to work rapidly toward the ‘rebirth of L.A. public schools’ but warned that there would be some stumbling along the way. Speaking largely in generalities to a crowd of about 150 educators at Loyola Marymount University in Westchester, LAUSD Deputy Superintendent John Deasy referred to the sense of urgency contained in Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” adding that “improving instruction is a civil rights issue.” The Daily Breeze adds, “Though some union officials expressed disappointment that there was no nationwide search for Cortines’ replacement, Deasy’s appointment was largely welcomed by the education community locally; he even received praise from US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.”

Law & Policy
New Jersey State Assembly Panel Takes Up Pilot School Choice Bill.
The AP (2/3) reports that a New Jersey state “Assembly panel on Thursday is set to debate a startup school choice program that would allow some children in 166 failing public schools in New Jersey to transfer elsewhere. The Opportunity Scholarship Act grants tax credits to businesses that make contributions to education scholarships.” The proposal would allow students “in 13 failing districts” to “apply for scholarship vouchers to offset the costs of attending private or parochial school.”

Iowa Governor Calls For Education Reform.
KCRG-TV Cedar Rapids (2/2, Sutterman) reported on its Website that Iowa Governor Terry Branstad (R) “wants to see more innovation in Iowa schools and he’s reaching far and wide to get it. The governor called for an education summit this summer during his budget address to the Iowa Legislature Thursday, Jan. 27, 2010, involving national school reform experts to bring new ideas to Iowa’s K-12 education system.” Branstad “expressed admiration in some of the polices of the Obama Department of Education and said he hoped Secretary of Education Arne Duncan would be able to attend. ‘I think he’s really good and has some great ideas,’ Branstad said. ‘This is an area where I think we can work closely with the Obama administration.’”

CCSSO Says Absent ESEA Renewal, States Will Move On Their Own.
Alyson Klein wrote in a blog for Education Week (2/2), “If Congress doesn’t move on reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act this year, states are poised to get going on their own ideas on accountability and other areas. And they want Congress (and the administration) to have their backs, according to a letter sent to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, education lawmakers, and party leaders on Capitol Hill by the Council of Chief State School Officers.” According to Klein, “If reauthorization doesn’t happen soon, chiefs are planning to ‘propose new, innovative policy models in terms of accountability and other areas that move beyond [the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, the current version of the ESEA], and we urge the administration and Congress to encourage and support this strategy-so that the current law doesn’t become a further barrier to innovation and achievement,’ the letter says.”

House To Hold First ESEA Hearing Next Week.
Alyson Klein wrote in a blog for Education Week (2/2), “Next Thursday, the House Education and the Workforce Committee is planning to hold the very first hearing on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act since the House of Representatives flipped to GOP control and Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., became the committee chairman. … The hearing will give members a broad overview of the issues facing K-12 schools, including the federal role in education policy, a spokesman for the panel told me.” Klein added, “Kline told reporters last week that he’s working on outreach with the many new members of the panel, getting them up to speed on where ESEA renewal stands right now and also figuring out where they want to take the federal role in K-12.”

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Safety & Security
Principal Shot, Killed At California Elementary School.
The AP (2/3) reports, “A school janitor was arrested Wednesday in the killing of” Sam LaCara, “a Northern California elementary school principal who was hailed as a role model for other educators. No children were hurt in the late-morning shooting in the office at Louisiana Schnell Elementary School in Placerville, but one student may have witnessed the shooting, Police Chief George Nielson said.” The AP adds that Police “commended the school staff for quickly locking down the school and protecting the children. Students were taken to the county fairground, where they were released to their parents.”

Former Priest Charged With Sex Abuse Of Students.
The Washington Post (2/3, De Vise) reports that Montgomery Count, MD “police have charged a former priest with inappropriately touching students at Georgetown Preparatory School, the prestigious North Bethesda institution where he taught from 1989 to 2003. Police said Wednesday that Garrett Orr, 57, is charged with two counts of child abuse and one count of third-degree sexual offense in the case, which arose after a former student came forward in 2009 with a report of sexual abuse.” The Post adds, “This is not the first time that Orr has been investigated. An inquiry by his Jesuit overseers concluded in 2006 that he had inappropriately touched a student” at Georgetown Prep.

School Finance
Virginia District Facing Rising Student Enrollment Amid Stagnant Budget.
The Washington Post (2/3, Sieff) reports, “Prince William [VA] County Superintendent Steven L. Walts proposed Wednesday an $864 million budget that would freeze employee salaries for the fourth consecutive year but prevent layoffs in the district for the first time since 2007. Employees would get a one-time, 1 percent bonus next spring under Walts’s proposal.” Prince William County “faces a growing student population, but its budget is likely to remain nearly stagnant. … Still, a slight increase in county and state revenue allowed Walts to propose a $36 million increase over last year’s budget, enough to provide funding for ongoing construction projects” and the hire of “about 175 additional teachers.”

Governors Find Education Opportunities In Budget Woes.
Education Week (2/1, Cavanagh) reported, “Governors and other officeholders are arguing that their states have no choice but to re-examine assumptions about how schools are using the money they currently receive, given bleak budget conditions that may not improve substantially for at least a few years. Some are urging their states to demand more financial accountability from schools, while others have proposed redirecting at least some of the flow of funding to districts and programs, in the hope of either saving money or improving student performance.” Though the “call for schools to do more with less, or the same amount of money, is not new” the current push “appears to be gaining traction in a number of states, particularly those trying to climb out of financial troughs.”

Also in the News
Dozens Of Minnesota Charter Schools Could Close.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune (2/3, Lemagie) reports, “Dozens of Minnesota charter schools face an uncertain future — and some could be forced to close this summer — as they adapt to a 2009 law designed to tighten supervision of their innovative programs.” According to the Star Tribune, “State law requires every charter school to be paired with a school district, college or nonprofit that monitors its finances and student performance. … But some authorizers, unwilling or unable to take on the task, plan to cut ties with their schools. .. As a result, 64 charter schools, with perhaps 13,000 students, have yet to nail down an authorizer for the 2011-12 school year. Leaders at some schools — especially those with low test scores or other problems — worry they won’t be able to sign on a new authorizer in time to avert closure.” The AP (2/2) also covered this story.

North Carolina State Senators Debate Changes To Charters.
The Raleigh (NC) News & Observer (2/3, Bonner) reports that in North Carolina, a “state Senate proposal debated Wednesday would make sweeping changes to the way charter schools are funded and governed. Republicans had promised to raise the cap on the number of charter schools allowed in North Carolina, but the Senate bill goes much further while leaving out suggestions made by various education groups.” The News & Observer adds, “Charter supporters have focused on the schools’ need for construction money. ‘With no capital money, they’ve had to figure out how to get space,’ said Sen. Richard Stevens, a Cary Republican and the bill’s sponsor.” The AP (2/2) also covered this story.

WPost: “Weak” Maryland Charter Laws Hampering Education Progress.
The Washington Post (2/3) editorializes, “The Maryland State Board of Education could not have been more forceful in knocking down Montgomery County’s rejection of two charter school applications. Not only did it fault Montgomery school officials for not following proper procedures, but it accused them of bias against charters and ordered reconsideration of the rejections.” However, the board’s action is unlikely to lead to the approval of any charters, as “Maryland’s weak charter law stacks the deck against these independent public schools, and until there is real reform, the state will continue to lag behind the nation in the educational choices it affords parents and their children.”

New York City Residents Protest School Closings.
The New York Times (2/4, Otterman) reports on “the second day of what has become the New York City school system’s annual Lollapalooza of anti-[Mayor Michael] Bloomberg fury: the rowdy, ear-splitting, all-night, midwinter meetings at which failing schools get closed. On Tuesday, a city panel voted to close 10 schools, and on Thursday, at a meeting likely to last into early morning, the panel was expected to close 12 more. Among them were large high schools once considered stars, like Jamaica High School in Queens, and John F. Kennedy High School and Columbus High School in the Bronx, that have since run into difficulties.”

The New York Daily News (2/4, Chapman, Monahan, Goldsmith) adds, “More than half the 2,000 parents, teachers and students at Brooklyn Tech High School in Fort Greene chanted, booed and banged drums early in the explosive meeting, halting proceedings for 30 minutes. The rabble-rousers walked out and continued their demonstration outside. The meeting went on, and the Education Department’s Panel for Educational Policy ultimately voted to shutter the schools.”

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In the Classroom
Classroom-Tested Tech Tools Used To Boost Literacy.
Education Week (2/4, Ash) reports, “Instead of investing in prepackaged software programs, many teachers are harnessing the technology they already have-such as webcams, audio recorders, blogs, and other Web 2.0 tools-to boost literacy in students.” According to Education Week, Adina Sullivan, a 4th grade teacher at San Marcos (CA) Elementary School, “who is a lead technology teacher at her school, works with English-language learners to help build vocabulary and fluency.” Education Week adds, “in her classroom, Sullivan uses photos licensed under creative commons, an alternative to copyright that allows varying degrees of sharing, as a jumping-off point to start a conversation with her students. .. Sullivan also uses audio recorders to have student-teachers read sets of vocabulary words, then she creates matching PowerPoint presentations with the words and burns them onto DVDs for the students to take home and listen to.”

On the Job
Maryland School Experiments With Team Teaching.
The Baltimore Sun (2/4, Hare) reports, “St. Ambrose Academy in Park Heights [MD] is trying out a new education model developed at Harvard University that has two teachers sharing a classroom, students and lessons in the Catholic elementary school’s kindergarten and first-grade classes. The teaching team can offer more individualized instruction, break off to work with groups of students with similar skill levels and provide more hands-on learning.” According to the Sun, “The program is one of several that grew from recommendations of a committee of local education, business and community leaders appointed by Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien. Faced with declining enrollment and rising costs, the Archdiocese of Baltimore closed 13 of its 64 schools last year” which “led to innovations in several other schools, including St. Ambrose.”

Education Reform Factions Urged To Work Together.
Conor Williams writes in a column for the Washington Post (2/4), “Here’s the basic fault line dividing the education reform trenches: One side believes that the best way to improve the education system is to focus on improving instruction. The other believes that the best way to improve the education system is to focus on addressing the ways that poverty affects schools with high percentages of low-income students.” According to Williams, “Here’s some good news: Both sides are right. Teacher quality and poverty can both affect educational outcomes. Here’s the bad news: Both sides seem bent on disproving their opponents instead of improving education. … We could spend our time debating which is easier (or more urgent) to fix — poverty or school quality — or we could accept that both are worthy goals.”

Law & Policy
Union Officials Yet To Weigh In On New Florida Teacher Evaluation Bill.
The Hernando (FL) Today (2/4, Schmucker) reports, “A new teacher tenure bill has been filed at the state level, but Hernando County [FL] union officials and teachers aren’t getting riled up yet. According to SB 736, titled the Race To the Top for Student Success Act, it would revise the teacher evaluation system to include a four-level rating system — from ‘Unsatisfactory’ to ‘Highly Effective’ — eliminate tenure for new hires and establish pay incentives based on their ratings and other factors.” Hernando Today adds, “Similar to the federal Race to the Top grant requirements, the bill calls for having at least 50 percent of teachers’ evaluations based on state assessments or end-of-course exams.”

Compton, CA Parents Win A Round In Bid For Charter School.
The Los Angeles Times (2/4, Watanabe) reports, “Parents petitioning to convert their low-performing Compton [CA] elementary campus into a charter school won a temporary restraining order Thursday blocking district officials from requiring that they verify their signatures in person with photo identification. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Robert O’Brien issued the order in response to a class-action lawsuit filed against the Compton Unified School District by parents at McKinley Elementary School alleging that the verification process violated their constitutional rights to free speech and equal opportunity.” According to the Times, “The petition campaign was the first test of a new state ‘parent trigger’ law that allows parents to force sweeping change at low-performing schools, including shifting to independently run, publicly financed charters.”

Georgia Lawmakers To Study School Funding Issue.
The Augusta (GA) Chronicle (2/4) reports, “The head of the state House Education Committee said lawmakers plan to form a study commission that will address problems with how education is funded in Georgia. Rep. Brooks Coleman, a Republican from Duluth, said today the panel would suggest fixes for the outdated Quality Basic Education formula, created 25 years ago to determine how much money schools should get.” According to the Chronicle, “State lawmakers have been trying for years to update the QBE but have largely been unable to agree on changes.”

Facilities
New York City Parents Seek More Action On PCBs In Public Schools.
The New York Times (2/4, Navarro) reports on its front page that last months, “hundreds” of New York City parents “kept their children home from school for four days after tests showed that lighting ballasts – the devices that regulate electric current for fluorescent lights – were leaking the highly toxic chemical compounds known as PCBs onto the light fixtures and floor tiles. … Adding to the parental stress, the Bloomberg administration has disputed the urgency of replacing all of the T-12-style fluorescent lighting, estimating it would cost about $1 billion. Its negotiations with the Environmental Protection Agency continue.” According to the Times, “There is no immediate health risk from PCBs lingering in schools, all are told, yet with one important caveat: the longer the exposure, the higher the risk.”

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School Finance
Many School Districts Do Not Receive Federal Aid They Qualify For.
USA Today (2/4, Schweers) reports that school “districts suffer when they don’t get the full amount they’re entitled to under a 60-year-old federal program designed to ease the burden of having military bases or tribal reservations that pay no local property taxes within the districts’ borders, yet send hundreds of students to their schools. … The Lawton [OK] School District is among the more than 1,300 school systems nationwide eligible to receive Impact Aid, and among the majority that each year receives less aid than it qualifies for.” According to USA Today, the Impact Aid Program “has distributed $896 million in Federal Impact Aid for the 2010-11 school year, according to the Department of Education — $1 billion less than what those school districts were entitled to receive under the funding formula.”

Texas Schools Face Deep Cuts Amid Budget Crunch.
Education Week (2/3, Cavanagh) reported, “Texas is famous for its oversized economic booms and busts, but its schools are bracing for a potentially dramatic bust of their own as state lawmakers consider budget cuts for the coming year that some fear will result in thousands of job losses and the elimination of programs serving students of all ages.” According to Education Week, “As currently written, the House budget would eliminate or scale back a wide range of programs, in areas such as technology, prekindergarten, science laboratories, efforts to promote high school completion, financial aid for college, and merit pay for teachers. But the most severe cuts to schools are likely to come in the form of layoffs of teachers, administrators, and other personnel, said Dominic Giarratani, an assistant director for governmental relations at the Texas Association of School Boards.”

New Hampshire District Chief Lays Out Series Of Budget Cuts.
The Foster’s Daily Democrat (NH) (2/4, O’Donnell) reports that the Rochester, NH “School Board got its first look at the proposed fiscal year 2012 school budget Thursday night which includes more than $1 million in personnel cuts. The budget was presented by Superintendent Mike Hopkins and Business Administrator Linda Casey at the end of Thursday’s Finance Committee meeting.” According to the Daily Democrat, “In order to get within the tax cap, Hopkins said more than $1.3 million in cuts would be necessary to the proposed budget. While $51,000 of that would come from eliminating one school bus, and another $200,000 would come from returning students from out of district and cutting down on transportation and other costs, just over $1 million would come from cutting positions within the district.”

Also in the News
Los Angeles School District Suspends Reality TV Shoots.
The Los Angeles Times (2/4, Verrier) reports, “The Los Angeles Unified School District has suspended all filming of reality TV shows in district schools after a standoff with…celebrity chef [Jamie Oliver], who had been filming his ABC show ‘Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution’ at West Adams Preparatory High School in central Los Angeles for the last two weeks. This week the district denied Oliver’s license to film at Manual Arts Senior High School in South L.A., which, like West Adams, is operated by MLA Partner Schools under a contract with LAUSD.” According to the Times, “Officials with both the school district and the production said the dispute stemmed in part from concerns over how the district would be portrayed.”

Longtime Newark, NJ Educator To Become Interim Schools Chief.
The Star-Ledger (NJ) (2/4, Giambusso, Calefati) reports, “Deborah Terrell, a widely respected Newark educator, will assume the role of interim superintendent as part of an executive team that will lead Newark schools until a permanent superintendent is named. Her appointment, announced by acting state Commissioner of Education Chris Cerf, fulfills a legal requirement.” The Star-Ledger adds that Terrell “was principal of the Harriet Tubman School in Newark for more than a decade. In 2007, the K-6 school earned the coveted national Blue Ribbon award for excellence from the US Department of Education.”

NEA in the News
Indiana Education Leaders To Attend Conference Co-Sponsored By NEA.
The Evansville (IN) Courier & Press (2/4, Martin) reports, “Leaders of Evansville’s [IN] public school district and teachers association will travel to Denver this month to discuss their joint efforts to improve student achievement. Superintendent Vincent Bertram, School Board member Mike Duckworth and union President Keith Gambill will attend a conference Feb. 15-16 co-sponsored by the National Education Association, the US Department of Education and other organizations.” The Courier & Press adds, “The event will highlight labor-management collaboration, according to an National Education Association news release.”

Florida Lawmakers Pushing To Adopt Merit Pay Bill.
The Orlando Sentinel (2/4, Postal) reported that Florida lawmakers “are again pushing to adopt a merit-pay bill that would overhaul how teachers are evaluated and paid – relying heavily on tests to judge their quality – and end tenure for new instructors. It’s [an] effort similar to last year’s, which was widely criticized by teachers as unworkable and unfair.” According to the Sentinel, “As Florida’s economy continues to struggle, another round of state budget cuts loom, which could force school districts to again freeze salaries, reduce programs and even layoff employees. And many teachers say the message underlying Tallahassee’s reform drumbeat is that public education and the state’s more than 182,000 teachers are failing.”

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In the Classroom
Teachers Say Obama Education Policy Stymies Science Fairs.
The New York Times (2/5, Harmon) reported that though President Obama said last week “that America should celebrate its science fair winners like Sunday’s Super Bowl champions, or risk losing the nation’s competitive edge,” participation among high school students in such competitions “appears to be declining. And many science teachers say the problem is not a lack of celebration, but the Obama administration’s own education policy, which holds schools accountable for math and reading scores at the expense of the kind of creative, independent exploration that science fair projects require.”

On the Job
Montana District Teachers Facing Tougher Reviews.
The Missoulian (MT) (2/6, Kelly) reported that a 20-year teaching veteran within the Missoula County [MT] Public Schools district was the first MCPS teacher this year to resign in a district “where outright firings of tenured employees are nearly unheard of, and where serially underperforming employees are far more likely to be encouraged to resign than ordered to leave. … Whatever their differences, the two labor unions and the MCPS administration agree on one thing: Firing a teacher, or even nudging him or her to the door, should be an exceptional occurrence, the last resort after everything else has failed.” However, a “new evaluation system requires something that’s never been a policy in MCPS: annual reviews of every employee.”

Law & Policy
Duncan, Virginia Governor Discuss Education Policy On Radio Broadcast.
The AP (2/4) reported, “US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says a federal education accountability law has led to a dumbing-down of academic standards and a narrowing of curriculum. Duncan said Friday on an appearance on WRVA-AM with Gov. Bob McDonnell that the No Child Left Behind law has been punitive, too narrowly focused on testing, and very inflexible. He says fixing the law would include adopting a system that rewards educational success, raises educational standards, and allows school systems to be flexible in raising student achievement.”

The Washington (DC) Examiner (2/4, Sherfinski) reported, “Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell joined US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan Friday morning for a brief chat on ways to better provide educational access to youngsters. The Obama adminstration is currently working to overhaul the No Child Left Behind Act, a standards-based system that judges schools based on testing, and a law which Duncan called ‘far too punitive.’ ‘There are many, many ways to fail, but basically no [reward] for success,’ Duncan said on WRVA Richmond.”

WRIC-TV Richmond VA (2/4, 12:03 p.m. ET) broadcast that McDonnell outlined “his K-12 initiatives on a radio appearance this morning. … Appearing with the governor on the same radio program, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that No Child Left Behind is dumbing down academic standards and narrowing curriculum. McDonnell says a possible overhaul of the federal education law should respect states’ abilities to set their own academic standards.”

NCLB Reform Is Key Test Of Senate Bipartisanship.
The Los Angeles Times (2/6, Parsons, Mascaro) reported, “President Obama and Republican leaders are moving toward a possible compromise on education reform, spurred by widespread dissatisfaction with the George W. Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act. … ‘The conversations that we’ve had so far — Republican and Democrat, House and Senate — have been very congenial and productive,’ said Sen. Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming, the senior Republican on the Senate committee that deals with education.” However, according to the Times, “Finding a solution that can stand up to the extremes on both left and right will be an early test of bipartisanship, and of Obama’s well-advertised tack to the political center.” The Times adds that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan “has spent months in talks with lawmakers on the education committees, trying to figure out where all sides will budge.”

Florida School Districts May Get Relief On Class Size Fines.
The Miami Herald (2/7, McGrory) reports, “Help may be on the way for the 28 Florida school districts facing hefty fines for not meeting the state class size mandate. This week, state Sen. Miguel Diaz de la Portilla, a Miami Republican, filed a bill that would eliminate the penalties. And state Rep. Erik Fresen says he’s working on legislation that would give local school districts more flexibility in the future.” According to the Herald, “Overall, the state is looking to collect more than $31 million from the school districts that failed to meet the guidelines. That includes $6.6 million from Miami-Dade, $3 million from Broward and $15.8 million from Palm Beach.”

Wisconsin Legislator Wants System To Stress Teacher Quality Over Seniority.
The Milwaukee (WI) Journal Sentinel (2/5, Hetzner) reports, “After a hiatus from leadership in Madison, Republican legislators are gearing up to make their mark on the state’s educational system by taking on teacher quality. State Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon) said he expects that one of the first bills that he introduces as part of an overall reform initiative would de-emphasize the role that seniority plays in teacher layoffs so other factors, such as teacher effectiveness and student performance, could be considered.” Olsen “noted that the state Department of Public Instruction is currently coordinating an effort to identify the qualities that make an effective teacher as a way to help improve the profession. … Mary Bell, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s largest teachers union, pointed out that school districts have at least one other measure they consider in making layoffs – what specialties teachers are certified in.”

Safety & Security
Study: Lack Of Paternal Attention May Contribute To School Bullying.
The New York Times (2/4) reported in a “Freakonomics” blog, “Busy fathers, pay attention: a new study finds that if your kids think you’re not spending enough time with them, they’re more likely to exhibit bullying behavior at school. C. Andre Christie-Mizell, Jacqueline M. Keil, Mary Therese Laske and Jennifer Stewart examined both parents’ working hours and children’s perception of time spent with their parents (i.e. do your kids think you work too much?), finding that ‘it was children’s perception of how much time they spent with their fathers that had the most impact on bullying behavior.’ Interestingly, mothers’ working hours didn’t seem to have much of an effect on bullying behaviors.”

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School Finance
Colorado District Considers Cuts For Projected $25 Million Shortfall.
The Denver Post (2/4, Illescas) reported, “Aurora [CO] Public Schools is considering furlough days, pay cuts and larger class sizes to help offset a projected budget shortfall of at least $25 million for the 2011-12 school year. The funding provided to the district by the state is expected to decline by at least $10 million next year. At the same time, financial managers expect spending to swell by $15 million to cover increases in health care costs, labor and a hike in the district’s contribution to the Colorado Public Employees’ Retirement Association.”

New York Governor Criticizes High Superintendent Salaries.
The New York Times (2/7, Kaplan) reports, “Carole G. Hankin, the schools superintendent in Syosset on Long Island, made an unexpected cameo appearance in Albany last week: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo cast her salary as a prime example of wasteful spending by school districts.” Cuomo “did not mention Dr. Hankin by name in his budget address, but he did offer her salary: $386,868, more than the pay of any other superintendent in the state. … Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, said that school districts had enough means to withstand the decline in state financing, and pointedly suggested that they look at whether they are spending too much on their own bureaucracy.”

Donors Demand a Bigger Voice in Catholic Schools.
The New York Times (2/7, Vitello) reports, “Private philanthropists have changed the face of public education over the last decade, underwriting the rise of charter schools and promoting remedies that rely heavily on student testing and teacher evaluation. But with much less fanfare, wealthy donors have begun playing a parallel role in the country’s next-largest educational network: Roman Catholic schools.” According to the Times, “In New York – as in Boston, Baltimore and Chicago – shrinking enrollment and rising school deficits in recent years have deepened the church’s dependence on its cadres of longtime benefactors” and donors “have responded generously, but many who were once content to write checks and attend student pageants are now asking to see school budgets, student reading scores and principals’ job evaluations.”

Study Finds Funding Gap Between DC Specialty, Neighborhood Schools.
The Washington Post (2/7, Turque) reports, “Funding for nearly all of” DC’s “neighborhood high schools…lags behind that of” DC’s “application schools. That is the finding of an analysis of 2010-11 school budgets by the Senior High Alliance of Parents, Principals and Educators (SHAPPE), a group that advocates for the interests of the city’s public high schools and was often critical of Michelle A. Rhee during her tenure as D.C. schools chancellor, which ended in October.” According to the Post, “School funding is complex, and even those who contend that the system is unfair don’t maintain that equity requires dollar-for-dollar equality. Small high schools…are more expensive to operate. Large ones such as Wilson, with nearly 1,500 students, can achieve economies of scale that lower their per-pupil costs.”

Virginia District Coping With Soaring Expenses Relating To FOIA Requests.
The Washington Post (2/7, Sieff) reports, “In her fight to keep her daughter’s Fairfax County [VA] school from closing, Elizabeth Schultz found a new tool in an old law, filing more than a dozen Freedom of Information Act requests to bolster the case for Clifton Elementary. Schultz knows that the filings can be costly” as her “last request for a trove of school officials’ e-mails came with a shocking price tag: $624,000.” According to the Post, Fairfax district “officials say the soaring expenses associated with information requests from parents are rarely recouped,” pointing “to Schultz’s sweeping requests as part of an unprecedented surge that stretches resources and creates tension between parents and the schools.”

Also in the News
School Put Girls On Wrong Bus, Yet Father Nearly Arrested.
The Washington Post (2/4, Ruane) reported, “A Laurel [MD] minister whose two young daughters were placed on the wrong bus and left unaccompanied at a stop on Thursday says their elementary school called the police on him after he went to the school and became agitated. Pastor C.J. Blair, 38, said he went to Brock Bridge Elementary School in Laurel after his children, 7-year-old Tatianna, a first-grader, and 5-year-old Gabrianna, who is in kindergarten, were not dropped off at their bus stop at the usual time.” According to the Post, “Bob Mosier, a spokesman for the Anne Arundel County school system, confirmed much of Blair’s account but said that he had been told police were called both to help look for the children and because Blair was very agitated.” However, Blair “said the officers threatened to arrest him and told him that they had been summoned because he was upset:”

New Report Pans Methodology In Los Angeles Teacher Evaluation Analysis.
The Washington Post (2/8, Anderson) reports, “University of Colorado researchers reported Monday there were potential weaknesses in methods the Los Angeles Times used last year to rate elementary teachers,” though the Times “said it stood by its investigation.” The new report questions the Times’ “evaluation techniques that estimate through analysis of standardized test scores how much a given teacher helps or hinders the academic growth of students. Such methods are generally supported by the Obama administration” and DC public schools, “but controversial in the education world. … The Times series broke ground in part because it was based on an unusually detailed set of testing data obtained from the Los Angeles Unified School District through a public records request. … The Colorado researchers, who were funded by a policy center with some backing from teachers unions [including the NEA]…concluded that the Times relied on a methodology that omitted factors that might have changed many teacher ratings. These included the influence of peers in a classroom, the history of a student’s test performance and the overall school demographics.”

Conflicting Los Angeles Value-Added Reports Called Distraction. Valerie Strauss writes at a Washington Post (2/8) education blog about “a new study that finds big flaws with last year’s Los Angeles Times project in which it used ‘value added’ methods to rate the effectiveness of more than 6,000 teachers. But feel free to be annoyed: not at the results of the study’s findings, but rather that the people making important policy decisions – our education secretary, legislators, governors – keep ignoring experts who warn that such evaluation methods are invalid and unreliable.” Strauss complains about the methodology used by the Times and blasts if for adhering to its conclusions. She concludes that both reports and the focus on teacher evaluation they illustrate are “a sad detour from real reform.”

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In the Classroom
Central New Jersey Middle Schools’ Challenges Contrasted.
The Courier News (NJ) (2/8) reports on the various challenges facing Maxson Middle School in Plainfield, New Jersey, and Green Brook Middle School in Green Brook, New Jersey. Maxson’s enrollment has plummeted in recent years, “its enrollment decimated by an influx of local charter schools and expanding public elementary schools. In 2000, Green Brook barely had 200 students, but it currently has nearly 570, recently having expanded to cover fourth through eighth grades. … Maxson scored lowest among the Courier News coverage area’s more than 100 public schools as rated by the state Department of Education’s annual report card data, while Green Brook scored highest. Administrators, teachers and parents from both schools during the past week have shared their opinions about what it will take to remedy one school’s failures and to continue another’s successes.”

Colorado Legislators Move Toward Increasing PE In Elementary Schools.
The AP (2/8, Moreno) reports, “Colorado lawmakers gave initial approval Monday to requiring 30 minutes a day of physical activity at elementary schools.” The AP characterizes the change as popular among students, noting that “if approved, Colorado would be joining a growing number of states calling for increased physical activity and physical education in schools to address childhood obesity. The District of Columbia and nine states, including Arizona, Mississippi and Delaware, enacted legislation relating to physical activity in schools in 2010 alone. Supporters of such measures also say children perform better academically in school when they exercise.”

On the Job
Teacher College Group Balks At Ranking Effort’s Methodology.
The Chronicle of Higher Education (2/8, Rae) reports that the Association of American Universities “is raising concerns about an ambitious effort, announced last month by the National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. News & World Report, to rank the nation’s nearly 1,400 teacher-preparation programs.” The Group wrote last week to US News editor Brian Kelly expressing “‘concerns about the reliability and accuracy of the data collected’ by the council as part of the project. Areas the deans cited as particularly troublesome included a lack of transparency in the methodology and standards the council is using, along with a provision to ‘fail’ programs in measurement areas that they opted out of or did not provide information for. That ‘implied coercion,’ the letter said, ‘will cast doubt on the results of the entire evaluation.’”

Law & Policy
Duncan Plan Reportedly Faltering Due To Shortage Of Qualified Principals.
The New York Times (2/8, A1, Dillon, 1.01M) reports in a front page story that the “aggressive $4 billion program begun by the Obama administration in 2009 to radically transform the country’s worst schools included, as its centerpiece, a plan to install new principals to overhaul most of the failing schools.” However, the plan “ran into a difficult reality: there simply were not enough qualified principals-in-waiting to take over.” Although the program “created an expectation that most schools would get new leadership, new data from eight large states show that many principals’ offices in failing schools still bear the same nameplates. About 44 percent of schools receiving federal turnaround money in these states still have the same principals who were leading them last year.” Some experts “said allowing so many schools to keep the same principal threatened to make one of Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s signature policy initiatives similar to previous failed turnaround efforts at many of the same schools.”

ED Approves RTTT Plans For 26 Georgia Districts.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (2/8, Badertscher) reports that ED “has signed off on detailed plans by 26 Georgia school districts, including DeKalb and Gwinnett in metro Atlanta, for using Federal Race to the Top money to improve their local schools, officials announced Monday.” The approval clears the way for the districts to receive RTTT funds. “Teresa MacCartney, Georgia’s Race to the Top implementation director, said the State Board of Education should vote in March to release about $32 million to the 26 districts for Year 1 of the four-year program. Much of that money will go to teacher training, MacCartney said.”

Georgia Legislators Eye RTTT Funds For Classroom Technology. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (2/8, Quinn) reports that Georgia state senate President Pro Tem Tommie Williams “said Monday that he has talked to state School Superintendent John Barge about the idea of equipping some underperforming schools with iPads or other devices that would allow students to store information, read electronic books and connect to the Internet. Teachers could use the devices to make sure information they are teaching is up to date, and they could bring learning into the 21st century, he said.” However, Maureen Downey writes at an Atlanta Journal-Constitution (2/8) education blog that the “Legislature is starting to see the $400 million Race to the Top Grant as a yummy pie. And they want a slice or two for their ideas.”

Safety & Security
Parents, Administrators Help To End Boy’s Bullying.
The CBS Evening News (2/7, story 9, 3:45, Couric) ran a report last night on a victim of school bullying and “the boy who bullied him,” reporting that “Zachary Jamison had an impressive façade,” but felt “tortured by just about all the kids in his class at the American Heritage Academy outside Atlanta. Jacob Cordero was one of them.” Jacob Cordero, school bully: “Very sad because I had been part of the…making fun of him and leaving him out.” Reporter: “Jacob says the kids began picking on Zach after he got juvenile arthritis. He says they started by mocking his limp and it snowballed from there.” Cordero: “People would, like, take his lunch, take sweatshirts.” CBS reports that Jamison “considered killing himself,” but is now “13, alive, and happy thanks to a lot of good people who made some very smart decisions. First, his parents sought counseling for Zach, but they also encouraged him to get involved with the youth group at church to meet kids outside of school.” Moreover, “Thanks to school administrators who forced the issue, Jacob and Zach had a long heart-to-heart in the principal’s office.”

North Dakota Senate Approves Anti-Bullying Measure.
The AP (2/8) reports, “North Dakota lawmakers are reviewing four bills intended to deter bullying at school. On Monday the state Senate voted 34-11 to approve the first anti-bullying measure. It says North Dakota’s school superintendent has to develop a model anti-bullying policy by the end of this year. Schools have to adopt a policy by July 2012.”

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Facilities
Illinois District Facing Construction Shortfall.
TribLocal.com (IL) (2/8, Stoffel) reports that the school board in District 25 in Arlington Heights, Illinois, just outside Chicago, “has to prioritize school construction projects to do as much as possible with limited funds. The district budgets about $600,000 for capital improvements each year. Its wish list, however, has $2.5 million in suggested projects – including more than $1 million in roofing and $304,000 in exterior building work. So the school board must set priorities. The board is scheduled to look at the needs again at its Feb. 24 meeting.”

Oregon Legislature Considering Governor’s Green Schools Refit Plan.
The AP (2/8, Cooperthe) reports that the Oregon House Education Committee is was set to hold a hearing yesterday on a “top environmental and economic priority” for Gov. John Kitzhaber (D), evaluating his “plan to put people to work by retrofitting schools and other public buildings with modern energy-efficient technology. Supporters of his plan hope to protect the environment while helping schools save money on their energy costs. House Bill 2888 would authorize the state to sell bonds that would pay for loans and matching grants for school districts that want money to improve their facilities.” However, the bill’s sponsor “cautioned that the measure is merely a ‘placeholder bill’ intended to begin work on the concept,” with the ultimate goal “to retrofit every public school in Oregon along with other government buildings.”

School Finance
Paige Lends Weight To Texas Initiative For Local Control Of Teacher Salaries.
The Austin American Statesman (2/8, Kaspar) reports, “Joined by former US Secretary of Education Rod Paige, an education reform group rolled out a proposal Monday to overhaul the teacher salary structure of Texas public schools. The crux of the Texas Institute for Education Reform’s plan centers on more district-level control of teacher pay.” The “nonpartisan coalition of community and business leaders” is calling for “teachers’ salary schedules based on ‘strategic compensation,’ a policy the group said differs from more narrowly defined ‘pay for performance’ initiatives. … At a time when current budget proposals leave public education more than $9 billion short of what is needed to maintain services and pay for enrollment growth, the reformers insisted money could be redirected from ineffective programs and bolstered by federal funds.”

The Houston Chronicle (2/8, Scharrer) reports that Paige and other members of the coalition “called for more flexibility for local school districts to base teacher pay on performance, professional development and educator career paths. The state’s severe budget shortfall creates an opportunity to dramatically reform public education by deregulating it from state control, they said. ‘Let’s get a compensation system that makes sense. Let’s get rid of the 60-year structure and relegate it to the Smithsonian where it belongs,’ said Paige, the former superintendent of the Houston Independent School system.”

NEA in the News
NEA Set To Fight States’ Efforts To Limit Teachers’ Collective Bargaining Rights.
Education Week (2/8) reports that “Republican leaders” in Idaho and Indiana “are proposing bills that would limit collective bargaining” for teachers. “And in Tennessee, a recently introduced bill would abolish altogether teachers’ ability to bargain collectively.” The piece suggests that the current political climate may favor such bills, adding that “Teachers’ unions are already defending many hard-won policies, such as due process procedures granted to teachers who earn tenure.” Education Week notes that though the National School Boards Association praised the measures, “teachers’ unions in those three states…view the legislative proposals as thinly veiled attacks on their very existence. They have vowed to mobilize to prevent the proposals from becoming law-and will have help to that end from the National Education Association, the parent of affiliates in all three states. ‘For us, it’s really shortsighted,’ said Bill J. Raabe, the director of collective bargaining and member advocacy for the 3.2 million-member NEA.”

Blogger: “Waiting For Superman” Conflicts Don’t Happen In Wyoming.
Jackie Borchardt writes at the Casper (WY) Tribune (2/8) “Report Card” blog about an upcoming screening of the “celebrated education documentary ‘Waiting for Superman’” in the cities of Casper and Cheyenne “smack in the middle of a legislative session focused on demanding more education accountability. … The film focuses on five children entering charter school lotteries in urban areas. Director Davis Guggenheim sets their stories against myriad data about poor student achievement and reform movements around the country.” Borchard notes that the conflicts between reformers and “tough teacher unions” in the film do not take place in Wyoming because “Wyoming’s teacher union, a branch of the National Education Association, doesn’t have collective bargaining rights, so teacher strikes and ‘rubber rooms’ full of ineffective teachers don’t exist.”

South Carolina Schools Chief Calls For Pay-For-Performance System.
The AP (2/8, Adcoxthe) reports that Republican South Carolina schools superintendent Mick Zais says “teachers’ salaries should be based on their effectiveness in the classroom, not their seniority or post-graduate credentials.” Zais “wants to move teacher and principal salaries into a mandatory pay-for-performance system. A proposal moving through the House, and backed by GOP legislative leaders, could direct Zais to develop such a plan by Dec. 1, for implementation beginning in 2012-13.” Deep in the article, the AP notes that the state’s NEA affiliate operates under a state law prohibiting “them from having any collective bargaining rights.”

Arbitrator Orders Reinstatement Of 75 Fired DC Teachers.
The Washington Post (2/9, Turque) reports, “An independent arbitrator says that [DC] must reinstate 75 new teachers fired by then-D.C. schools chancellor Michelle A. Rhee during their probationary period in 2008, ruling that the dismissals were improper because they were not told the reasons why.” According to the Post, “The 75 teachers were part of the approximately 1,000 educators fired during Rhee’s 3 1/2-year tenure, which ended with her resignation in October. Of the total, 266 were laid off in October 2009 for budgetary reasons, about 200 were dismissed because of poor performance, and the rest were on probation or did not have licensing required by the No Child Left Behind law.”

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In the Classroom
Michigan Testing Standards May Be Raised.
The Detroit News (2/9, Schultz) reports that the Michigan Board of Education “will consider a plan…to raise the passing scores on state standardized tests, a move that could mean thousands more students and hundreds more schools won’t meet proficiency levels. The board also is expected to recommend to Gov. Rick Snyder broader education reform that calls for revamping the teacher tenure system to award tenure based on proficiency level rather than longevity, requiring teachers to demonstrate proficiency based at least 40 percent on student achievement growth and streamlining the tenure process to discharge ineffective teachers, according to the draft plan.”

On the Job
Survey: Most Indiana Residents Back Tying Teacher Pay To Student Achievement.
The AP (2/9) reports, “A new survey measuring Indiana attitudes toward public education found some support for [Indiana] Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels’ proposal to tie teacher salary to student achievement. The survey from Indiana University’s Center for Evaluation & Education Policy found that about 58 percent think teacher compensation should be based on students’ improvement on standardized tests. About 75 percent say student achievement in the classroom should be a factor, and about 57 percent said a teacher’s years of experience should also count.”

Wisconsin Teacher’s Union Backs Teacher Evaluation, Merit Pay.
The State Journal (WI) (2/9, DeFour) reports that the Wisconsin Education Association Council, Wisconsin’s “state’s largest teachers union,” yesterday “endorsed a statewide teacher evaluation system, performance pay and breaking up Milwaukee Public Schools – school reforms it had long resisted. … WEAC President Mary Bell said union officials have discussed the proposals with members ‘for some time’ and finally came to a consensus on specifics.” The State Journal adds, “US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called Bell on Tuesday to commend her on the union’s announcement. ‘It takes a lot of leadership to really drive a consensus around education reform,’ Duncan spokeswoman Liz Utrup said, adding that Duncan will likely speak about WEAC’s announcement during an appearance on a Wisconsin Public Radio program Wednesday morning with Walker.” The AP (2/9, Bauer) also covers this story.

Law & Policy
Indiana Teachers Rally At Statehouse To Protest Governor’s Education Proposals.
The AP (2/9) reports, “Hundreds of Indiana teachers are swarming the Indiana Statehouse to denounce sweeping education proposals backed by Republicans who control the House and Senate. Teachers carried signs Tuesday saying ‘Save Our Schools’ and wore stickers reading ‘Respect Educators’ as they gathered for the ‘Rally for Public Education’ organized by teacher unions.” According to the AP, “Many teachers object to proposals from GOP Gov. Mitch Daniels, including restrictions on collective bargaining, merit pay for teachers and vouchers that would direct taxpayer money to private schools.”

Virginia Lawmakers Weighing Merits Of Year-Round Schooling.
The Washington (DC) Examiner (2/8, Mitchell) reported, “In Virginia, the possibility of year-round schools just took a step closer to reality. House Joint Resolution 646, sponsored by Del. Steve Landes (R-25th House), vice chairman of the Education Committee, unanimously passed the Virginia House of Delegates, and must now go to the State Senate for passage. The study directs the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission to conduct a two-year study on the efficiency of year-round schools by reviewing educational systems locally, nationally, and abroad that have already implemented them.” The Examiner added, “Some educators want to see American children on par with those in other countries and feel the year-round school year would make them more competitive.”

School Board Conferees Get Tough With Duncan.
Valerie Strauss wrote in a blog for the Washington Post (2/8), “Education Secretary Arne Duncan got an earful from some attendees of a National School Boards Association conference. According to Michele McNeil of Education Week, Duncan on Monday appeared at the association’s 38th annual Federal Relations Network Conference to give a speech and answer questions from the crowd. That’s when, as McNeil wrote, it became clear just ‘how fed up’ some association members are with federal reform policies.” Strauss added, “When Duncan was asked whether he would give waivers to school districts to avoid sanctions under No Child Left Behind if Congress fails to remove some of the more punitive aspects of the law in time, he dodged the question.”

Minnesota Lawmakers Urged To Pass Alternative Teacher Certification Legislation.
Daniel Sellers, executive director of Teach For America’s Twin Cities region, writes in an op-ed for the Minneapolis Star Tribune (2/9) that in order to answer President Obama’s call to “recruit more teachers for high-need subjects” and encourage “more young Americans to consider careers in the classrooms that need them most,…we need to open the doors of the teaching profession to talented people from diverse walks of life. … Programs such as Teach For America — where I serve as executive director for the Twin Cities — have succeeded in attracting talented, dynamic teachers to help close the achievement gap.” Sellers adds, “When US Education Secretary Arne Duncan visited Minneapolis on Jan. 21, he expressed that it ‘doesn’t make sense’ that our state has no alternative certification legislation on the books. … By passing alternative teacher certification legislation, we can improve our chances and make history for the kids of Minnesota.”

Safety & Security
Los Angeles School Devotes A Day To The Battle Against Bullying.
The Los Angeles Times (2/9, Rivera) reports that Hale Middle School “is one of the first schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District to focus on the” bullying “issue with a comprehensive, daylong program that officials hope can be used as a model.” The program, dubbed “Stand Tall Day,” “is part of a nationwide drive to stem bullying on campuses and in cyberspace after a spate of suicides of gay and straight teenagers who had been harassed.” The Times adds that ED “announced recently that it may withhold federal funds from schools that fail to stop bullying of gay and other students. Although many states have anti-bullying laws, several, including New Jersey, have moved recently to make them tougher.”

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School Finance
Education Stimulus Funds Dwindling.
The National Journal (2/9, Edwards) reports, “When Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced the slice of the economic-stimulus package to be served to each state’s school system in 2009, he said, ‘The single best way to stimulate the economy – short-term and long-term – is to keep teachers teaching and keep kids learning.’ But many of the states with the toughest budgets to balance this fiscal year have already depleted most of that federal lifeline, making cutbacks in education spending all the more painful.” According to the National Journal, the US Department of Education “recapped the state of the stimulus money periodically until September 30, 2010, but it has since stopped updating its tables and has no plans to add to the draining sums. Despite two rounds of federal money to prevent teachers from being laid off, many states have used up most of their money and have begun to cut school spending, raise tuitions at state universities, and scale back on school employment and salaries.”

Also in the News
Snow Days Virtually Eliminated With Web Tools.
USA Today (2/9, Marklein) reports, “Despite winter storms that forced schools and colleges across the nation to cancel classes, tech-savvy educators are turning to Facebook, podcasts and other Web tools to keep students on track.” USA Today notes that “an Ohio pilot study that allows Cincinnati’s McAuley High School to hold virtual classes on what the state calls a ‘calamity day’ was put to the test for the first time Jan. 20. In St. Louis, where blizzards have closed public schools for six days already this year, math, English, Chinese and history classes met via the Internet as usual Wednesday at the Mary Institute Country Day School.”

Teachers’ Colleges Protest Planned US News Rankings.
The New York Times (2/9, Gabriel) reports, “US News & World Report is planning to give A through F grades to more than 1,000 teachers’ colleges, and many of the schools are unhappy, marching to the principal’s office to complain the system is unfair. … In a letter last week, officials from 35 leading education colleges and graduate schools – including Columbia, Harvard, Michigan State and Vanderbilt – denounced an ‘implied coercion’ if they do not cooperate with the ratings.” The Times adds, “But in response to the criticism and to many schools’ refusal so far to cooperate,” US News Editor Brian Kelly “rescinded the plan to flunk schools for which data could not be obtained. … The federal education secretary, Arne Duncan, has said that many, if not most, teacher-training programs are mediocre. ‘It is time to start holding teacher-preparation programs more accountable for the impact of their graduates on student learning,’ Mr. Duncan said in a speech in November.”

New York City Schools Facing Cuts if Lunches Aren’t Paid For.
The New York Times (2/9, Santos) reports on its front page, “Since 2004,” New York City “has absorbed at least $42 million in unpaid lunch fees,” yet amid a budget crunch, the city Education Department “has been telling principals to collect overdue lunch money or risk having it docked from their school budgets.” According to the Times, “The economy has school administrators all over the country scratching for savings even as more parents are falling behind in lunch fees. A September survey by the School Nutrition Association, a professional organization, showed that in 2009-10, 34 percent of school districts saw an increase from the previous school year in the number of meals not paid for.”

Maryland Teacher Charged With Abusing Students.
The Washington Post (2/9, Morse) reports, “A first-grade teacher at” Greencastle Elementary School in Silver Spring, MD “was charged with several counts of assault Tuesday, when authorities accused her of choking and, in some cases, punching half the 16 students in her class. The incidents happened in December, in her class full of 6- and 7-year-old students, Montgomery County police said. .. It is uncommon for teachers to be charged criminally over actions in their classrooms, particularly physical encounters against multiple children.”

NEA in the News
Laura Bush To Announce 2nd Bush Institute Education Initiative.
The AP (2/9) reports, “The George W. Bush Institute’s second big education initiative will seek to improve graduation rates by focusing on middle school as a foundation for future success. Former first lady Laura Bush is set to announce the initiative, called ‘Middle School Matters,’ Wednesday in Houston at Stovall Middle School in the Aldine school district. … The program focuses on 11 elements for success, including school leadership, reading interventions, effective teachers, dropout prevention and school, student, family and community support.” The AP adds, “Andrea Prejean, deputy director of education policy and practice for the National Education Association, a teachers’ union with 3 million members, notes that there are many ‘outside fixer’ groups focusing on education that incorporate research. She said there is a lot of good research out there and that the key to interventions is making sure educators are part of the process.”

New National Parent Group To Push For ESEA Change.
Anna Phillips wrote in a blog for Gotham Schools (2/8), “One of New York City’s most vocal parent activists is launching a national organization, enlisting parents in cities across the country in a fight against the Obama administration’s proposed changes to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Called Parents Across America, the group was developed jointly by Leonie Haimson, the executive director of Class Size Matters in New York, and Julie Woestehoff, of Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE) in Chicago.” Phillips added that the organization’s “formal launch was at a forum last night in a public school in Tribeca” and “Haimson said the organization has plans to travel to D.C. to lobby for changes to ESEA and is also focusing on building local chapters around the country. For financial support, it is relying on contributions from its membership and from the country’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, which helped pay for the forum.”