ASCD Inservice

Measuring ARRA’s Impact on Education

Late last week Vice President Joe Biden hosted an event to highlight jobs saved or created with money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Two ASCD members were featured at the event: Jill Neustadt, a math content coach at Brown Station Elementary School in Gaithersburg, Md., and Crystal Turner, a reading interventionist also in Montgomery County, Md.

Neustadt works with both teachers and students to help make math instruction more effective. She supports her colleagues through collaboration, joint planning, and by observing their lessons and providing feedback. She also team-teaches in a 3rd grade math classroom and is the sole instructor for a 5th grade math class. In addition, she supports struggling students and more advanced students needing acceleration.

Previously, Neustadt was an academic intervention teacher, but her job security was never stable because these positions were typically funded through grants. ARRA helped Brown Station maintain the valuable services that Neustadt provides to both students and staff.

Do the Draft Standards Measure Up?

Wednesday, October 21 the comment period closes on the proposed Career and College Readiness Standards for English / Language Arts and Mathematics. This is your last chance to let the NGA and CCSSO know whether they achieved their objectives of fewer, clearer, higher standards, and whether content and cognitive skills are well matched.

Then at the end of the month, Scroll down after the jump, or check next week's issue of ASCD Express (free to all members) to read the full analysis of the proposed E/LA standards by our guest teacher-blogger, Dina Strasser.

Strasser gives the proposed standards credit for being fewer and clearer, but questions a definition of college and career readiness shaped primarily by corporate sources, with very little use of peer-reviewed education research sources, not to mention the exclusion of stakeholders like the National Council of Teachers of English. Her biggest criticism of the proposed ELA standards goes like this:

" . . . the primary aim of education is holistic. We are supposed to be helping our young people become both aware and expressive of their individuality, their general well-being, their talents and joys, their ethical code, their desire for life-long learning, their sense of place, their local and global communities, and their responsibilities as members of the human race. These are what ensure that students are healthy, functioning members of our society. They are certainly my ultimate goals as a teacher, with language—particularly aesthetic, creative, and reflective language—as the vehicle. Yet beyond cursory mentions of citizenship, no sentiments like these—not a drop—are in the current draft of the standards. Narrative, reflective, and creative communication receive related short-shrift in these standards, if they are included at all. All these things are included, notably, in other international standards of language, such as those of Finland—one of the highest performing nations on the planet." (Full article after the jump)

If you've read them, what's your impression of the draft standards?

H1N1 and Continuity of Learning

It’s clear the H1N1 flu pandemic will pose significant challenges for educators this school year. In this month’s “Is It Good for the Kids?” column, ASCD Executive Director Gene Carter emphasizes that in addition to prevention and monitoring efforts, schools must consider how they plan to support continuous learning, both for individual students who are home for extended periods of time with the flu and for the whole student body if the virus spreads widely and forces school closures.

“Some estimates indicate H1N1 could infect half the U.S. population this fall and winter, which translates into considerable classroom disruption and absenteeism,” Carter writes. “Students in the same class could end up in wildly different places in the curriculum. Meanwhile, entire classes could fall behind if their teachers are out sick for several days.”

He suggests educators form professional learning communities to help them work together to assess knowledge and skills when students return to school and develop plans for instructional next steps.

Along these lines, ASCD is conducting a live, one-hour Web seminar on H1N1 and continuity of learning. On Wednesday, September 30, at 4:00 p.m. EST, Ann Cunningham Morris, ASCD’s director of professional development, and John Brown, ASCD author and faculty member, will provide educators with tools and resources to address the varied learning needs and gaps students may have after their time away from school due to H1N1-related illnesses or school closures. Register for the seminar today.

The session is free and will address questions such as:

• What role does formative assessment play in determining returning students' learning needs?

• How will classroom instruction need to change to address varying student needs?

• How should teachers manage classroom instructional changes in a collaborative way so that they are supporting each other as professionals?

Do you have questions about H1N1 and continuity of learning that you'd like addressed during the Web seminar? Share them here.

Common Core Standards Update

Today at ASCD's LEAP Legislative Institute, Gene Wilhoit, executive director of CCSSO and leader of the Common Core Standards Initiative, spoke with ASCD members about the Initiative's work to develop K-12 reading and math standards. He emphasized that the standards will be internationally benchmarked and backed by evidence that shows student mastery of them leads to preparedness for higher education and the workforce.

Wilhoit's other key points:

• Fewer, clearer, higher. According to Wilhoit, the standards will be useful to classroom teachers and accessible to students, parents, and the general public. They also will prepare students for life after K-12, which he said means focusing on key learnings, concepts, and cognitive skills instead of introducing more content.
• Content + cognitive. In addition to outlining key content that students must understand, the standards will incorporate an emphasis on cognitive skills so that students are able to apply what they learn and creatively problem solve.
• Assessment. Wilhoit referenced the U.S. Department of Education's $350 million collaborative grant that, next June, will go to states that decide to take on the work of designing assessments aligned with the common core standards. Wilhoit raised questions about how many states would have the capacity to do this work, whether the states would design one or more assessments, and which vendors the states would choose to support the work. Wilhoit also expressed an interest in turning the current assessment system upside down by beginning with local assessments that could feed into state accountability systems.

Wilhoit said the Initiative's target release date for the draft English and math college- and career-readiness standards is later this week. They'll be posted on www.corestandards.org, and there will likely be a 30-day public comment period. The reading and math K-12 standards should be issued by the end of the year.

In the meantime, ASCD formed a committee in March to help recommend an organizational position on national standards. The group's report is expected in the spring, if not earlier.

What do you think about common standards? As an educator, what will it take for the standards to be useful for you, which Wilhoit indicated is a key goal?

Staying On Message

Obama's address to U.S. schoolchildren dominated education news last week, and likewise, it was a big topic at last night's kickoff of ASCD's LEAP Legislative Institute.

Author and journalist Gwen Ifill fielded questions from educators concerned that, in the past week, a universal message about the importance of hard work and staying in school was drowned out by political ideology. The big education story quickly became the hype surrounding the speech, not the speech's message itself. Ifill shared her frustration, urging not only media to be responsible in covering important education stories but also educators to help students parse between opinion and fact.

LEAP participants are charged with bringing important education issues, like the dropout crisis, ensuring ESEA will be reauthorized with full funding, and closing the achievement gap, to their representatives during this week's scheduled Capitol Hill visits.

What are the big education stories in your district, and how do you make sure they are heard?

ASCD Comments on Race to the Top Criteria

In an open letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan last week, ASCD submitted comments on the proposed Race to the Top priorities, requirements, definitions, and selection criteria and offered several key recommendations.

Among them are several opportunities to use priorities and selection criteria to drive accountability for education that supports the whole child. For example, selection criteria calling for data systems that support instruction could go beyond reporting student performance data and include annual state assessments of the health, safety, and education of children and families.

And while ASCD is a big fan of the overall ambition of Race to the Top, we've also got a couple concerns about the requirements in the current proposal. In particular, ASCD asks the Education Department to rethink requiring states to adopt common core standards sight unseen and disagrees with prioritizing alternative certification programs over improving current teacher preparation programs and supports.

Our full comments on Race to the Top are available online and summarized as below.

What do you think of the Race to the Top priorities? What selection criteria pose the biggest challenge in your state?

Senator Edward Kennedy, 1932-2009

ASCD has issued a statement on the passing of Senator Kennedy, remembering him as "a powerful spokesman who used his bully pulpit to expose the gross inequities in both our education and health care systems, reaching across the political divide to forge solutions and effect change for the benefit of innumerable youngsters." A summary of Kennedy's decades-long work on education policy is available on his Senate Web site, detailing his work on countless efforts ranging from early childhood to adult education.

Speaking from Martha's Vineyard, President Obama said that "his ideas and ideals are stamped on scores of laws and reflected on millions of lives...on children who know education's promise," and Education Secretary Arne Duncan stated that he "drew inspiration from Senator Kennedy throughout my career, and will miss his voice as a champion of education reform."

Please share your thoughts on Kennedy’s life, legacy, and impact on education, the lives of children, and beyond.

Learning Doesn't Stop for the Flu

Yesterday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius presented new recommendations for continuity of learning in cases of students of school closure or student absences due to H1N1 flu. Sebelius stressed that "everyone’s goal should be to keep children healthy and in school. But if they get sick -- and some will -- we have to make sure that they don’t fall behind.”

The recommendations detail steps school leaders can take to ensure learning continues, such as creating and distributing take-home assignments and using the internet to post homework and other school communications. 

For those looking to keep up with H1N1 developments from a wider angle, we recommend the Washington Post Special Section on the flu, full of the latest breaking news updates, detailed infographics, and even how-to videos.

Find these resources and more at ASCD's H1N1 Web page. We'll be regularly updating the site with new resources as they become available.

We'd also like to hear from you: How is your school preparing for the flu—both in terms of preventing its spread and facilitating continuous learning in the case of an outbreak? Share your strategies in the comments; select stories might be highlighted on ASCD's H1N1 Web page.

Highly Effective Teachers: Defining, Rewarding, Supporting, and Expanding Roles

This week, D.C. Schools Chancellor Rhee unveiled the 200-page framework for teaching and learning that will define and guide effective teaching practices in the district.

Rhee's document guides at the granular level, but what are the bones of sound policies for highly effective teaching?

Free, online, and less than eight pages long, the latest ASCD Infobrief covers Highly Effective Teachers: Defining, Rewarding, Supporting, and Expanding Their Roles.

We survey advocacy, research, and policies that drive teacher effectiveness—including which states are building the legislative momentum to align incentives for growing effective teachers (go to the Infobrief site to see a full-screen version of this state-by-state graphic).

What policies (federal, local, or school-based) support highly effective teachers at your school? What policies undermine support?

What Incentives Work for New Teachers in Urban Districts?

Working conditions, in particular principal support, showed a significant influence on job choice in simulations conducted by the researchers and authors of "Recruiting New Teachers to Urban School Districts: What Incentives Will Work?"

The article suggests that instead of offering higher beginning salaries to teachers, urban districts struggling to recruit and retain teachers might be better served by investing in attracting, retaining, and training highly effective principals.

While compensation influences working conditions and the decision to stay at a school, especially over the long run, study participants were, at least initially, more concerned with supports other than salary.

What's your first priority in a teaching placement?

Education Policy's Perfect Storm

"A variety of circumstances have amounted to what could be called education policy's perfect storm," writes ASCD Executive Director Gene Carter in this month's "Is It Good for the Kids?" column. He cites the new president and administration being poised to revise NCLB, schools' and districts' use of stimulus dollars to advance education programs, state competition for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's Race to the Top funds, and a coalition of governors and chief state school officers who are working to establish common standards that could influence what we teach.

In an open letter to educators, Carter makes the case that teachers, principals, superintendents, and other school and district personnel must become active participants in education policy debates, proactively shaping the policies that affect their daily lives. He writes that federal lawmakers "recognize the grave mistake that was made seven years ago in not getting more input from educators" and are eager to hear about what is and isn't working.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education announced that 13 teachers, including ASCD OYEA winner and columnist Deirdra Grode, were selected as Teaching Ambassador Fellows for 2009–2010. The fellows contribute to policy discussions and encourage other educators to share their input to improve education policies at all levels of government.

"Enlisting the support of teachers and other educators is crucial to the success of the national movement to reform American education," U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said. "I look forward to working with this year's fellows as partners as we discuss how to recognize and reward teachers, professional advancement, high standards, and other key issues."

The good news is that you don't have to be a Teaching Ambassador Fellow to influence policy. Consider attending ASCD’s LEAP Legislative Institute and becoming an ASCD Educator Advocate to make sure policy happens with you, not to you.

What to Do About the Flu

Districts and schools across the country are bracing for H1N1 as the new school year begins. The virus took hold in dozens of camps this summer, prompting concerns among school officials that kids will be bringing more than new backpacks and notebooks with them at the start of the school year.

From Nashville to New York, schools seem to be taking to heart new guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention designed to curb the spread of the flu while minimizing disruptions to learning. They're educating students about proper hygiene, communicating to parents the importance of keeping their sick children at home at least 24 hours after they no longer have a fever, and making preparations to separate ill students and staff or selectively close schools with high-risk populations should the need arise.

What's less apparent from news accounts is how schools are planning to ensure learning continues in the event the virus spreads widely, forcing closures.

Get Clarity on Common Core Standards at LEAP

The work of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association (NGA) on their Common Core Standards Initiative has generated a lot of conversation in education circles. The groups' draft English and math college- and career-readiness standards were leaked a couple of weeks ago, and the initial reaction has been mixed.

Some parents and education experts, like ASCD author Yong Zhao, have expressed concerns that the standards drafting process isn't inclusive or transparent enough. CCSSO and NGA seem to be responding to some of these concerns, recently announcing that the next iteration of the standards will be delayed until mid-September to accommodate "a thoughtful and thorough review" of the copious feedback they've received. At that point, the revised public draft of the college- and career-readiness standards will be posted, and a 30-day comment period will begin.

Gene Wilhoit, executive director of CCSSO and a leader of the Common Core project, will talk about the standards work at ASCD's LEAP Legislative Institute, September 13–15. He'll describe what is meant by the goal for "fewer, higher, clearer" standards; outline future steps, including state adoption; discuss the advantages of new assessments aligned with the common core standards; comment on the need for modifications to professional development; and generally talk about what it all means for educators.

Register today for LEAP to learn more about the most significant progress toward developing a common set of academic standards in more than two decades and what it means for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's reform priorities, Race to the Top funding, and the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. View the full conference program.

What would you ask Gene Wilhoit about the Common Core project if you had the opportunity? As educators, what hopes or concerns do you have about the standards?

$350 Million Test Makeover

Recently, Secretary Duncan announced $350 million of the $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund will be set aside to improve assessments of student achievement. Standardized, multiple choice tests are cost-effective and mathematically reliable but largely criticized for not drawing a detailed picture of student learning.

Advancements in testing technology, along with an injection of federal funds, could mitigate the high cost of developing and scoring richer, performance-based assessments, Ed Week notes. Experts said better tests would improve students' critical thinking and give teachers informative feedback on how students learn.

These improvements could be hamstrung, though, if assessments are marginally improved within a federal education agenda that also needs an overhaul. NCLB is criticized for focusing exclusively on accountability, without giving educators much useful information other than who's meeting AYP and who isn't.

Can this $350 million infusion help create assessments that are informative not just about the "who" of student achievement, but the how and why?

Content and Context Moving Math Forward

Why does the United States do well on TIMSS but so poorly on PISA?

Uri Treisman (Executive Director, Charles A. Dana Center, and Professor of Mathematics and Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin) gives the answer as part of his presentation on how to restructure the content and practices of high school mathematics to build a better "on ramp" to college.

TIMSS tests on the traditional course subjects, the focus of American education reform, notes Treisman. PISA, however, asks if 15-year-olds can actually use what they learn in school to solve unfamiliar problems. Moving forward with common core standards, we need to balance between knowing massive amounts of content and giving students opportunities to practice that knowledge in unfamiliar contexts, Treisman advises.

To Treisman, high school algebra is the burial ground for the aspirations of many students in part because "almost no one uses the content of these courses in their subsequent university courses." So why are these gatekeeper courses determining who goes to college? Kids who drop out of these math classes are the same kids who drop out of school, says Treisman. At the other end of the spectrum, students who need more challenges aren't finding them in high school math.

Bold Opportunities for District–Union Collaboration on Teacher Quality

Teachers unions are often cast as at odds with education reform and innovation. But frequently, behind a conservative national agenda, there's a union local working with districts on reforms like performance compensation and better, fairer educator evaluation systems. Even charter schools, where flexibility in staffing decisions is a hallmark, are seeking union support.

 "Bold Opportunities for District–Union Collaboration on Teacher Quality" in the July '09 issue of Education Update (members log in for full access; nonmembers can access an index of links to reports and resources related to this article) looks at some established and potential common ground for union and district leaders: better use of single salary scales, more meaningful use of tenure, voluntary performance pay, and peer-evaluations with a strong mentoring component. Union–district partnerships might not always work, but they're far from the polarities often presented in the media.

Connecting the Classroom to the Capitol

Educators, bring your message to Capitol Hill!

ASCD's annual advocacy event, the LEAP Legislative Institute, September 13–15, 2009, in Arlington, Va, will bring you up to speed on the status of stimulus funding, pending changes to the No Child Left Behind Act, and other federal initiatives that affect students and schools.

Engaging speakers, including White House education policy advisor Roberto Rodriguez and author and journalist Gwen Ifill will explain today's political scene and the opportunities you have to frame the debate on education issues. Then, ASCD staff will prepare you to take your message to lawmakers on Capitol Hill and continue your policy discussions at the local and state levels.

Don't miss this opportunity to speak out in support of the education policies that are best for kids. Register today!

Tony Miller Takes Your ARRA Questions

This afternoon, Deputy Secretary of Education Tony Miller presented a brief, informative webinar on the K–12 funding programs in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act programs. The presentation, which will be available on the DOE site, covered mostly familiar territory regarding Race to the Top and other components of the ARRA. Check our live tweeting for the abridged play-by-play.

It was evident during the Q & A that a lot of local educational agencies (LEAs) are still really grappling with understanding eligibility and compliance criteria for the competitive grants in the ARRA. Miller fielded several questions—from the eligibility of faith-based groups working to establish virtual schools for at-risk students, to whether wind energy developers could see any of this funding from the DOE. (To the first question, they are most likely eligible under the investment for innovation grant. For the second question, most likely the Department of Energy is their best bet.)

Miller explained that education service providers—small or big, working across multiple districts or just one—are eligible for ARRA funding, but the DOE does not have the infrastructure to provide application support (aside from guidelines, forthcoming criteria, and webinars like this one). Miller suggested that small organizations turn to private foundations for support. 

Although Miller acknowledged the considerable work required to apply for any of these grants, he also emphasized that the DOE had set up planning time lines and application criteria in a model that requires considerable state and district collaboration. (Miller said 95 percent of the K–12 grants in the ARRA required this type of collaboration.) We're still a little confused though about how information will flow between states and districts before and after application: will districts give all the data up-front, or report on follow-through on the four assurances after the state submits its application?

Race to the Top Guidelines Announced

In a press conference today, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made clear that if states and school districts want a slice of the $4.3 billion Race to the Top, they need to take four major grant criteria to heart.

Race to the Top applicants must demonstrate they're actively pursuing Duncan's "four assurances":

• Increase teacher effectiveness and address inequities in the distribution of highly qualified teachers.
• Establish and use preK-through-college and career data systems to track progress and foster continuous improvement.
• Make progress toward rigorous college- and career-ready standards and quality assessments.
• Support targeted, intensive support and effective interventions to turn around schools identified for corrective action and restructuring.   

To make these points clearer, Duncan brought out a group of speakers who laid the groundwork for the model Duncan wants schools to follow.

Race to the Top Grants Announcement Tomorrow

At noon tomorrow, U.S. Department of Education (DOE) Secretary Arne Duncan will make a high-profile announcement about the Race to the Top grant applications and guidelines to measure the effectiveness of State Fiscal Stabilization Funds. Information and the draft guidelines will be posted on the DOE's Web site. Interested parties will have 30 days to provide feedback on the drafts before they are finalized.

ASCD will be following the announcements as they develop. Please check our Twitter feed and the blog for more information as it becomes available.