Public Education Network Weekly NewsBlast

PEN Weekly NewsBlast for February 9, 2007

******************************************************************

RICH SCHOOL, POOR SCHOOL: SUBURBS FACE GREAT SCHOOL SPENDING DIVIDE
In an education world of haves and have-nots, Chicago's suburbs have some of the most glaring disparities in school spending in Illinois, reports Diane Rado in the Chicago Tribune. Affluent Rondout School District 72 in Lake Forest spent $22,508 per student, compared with $8,675 in Zion Elementary School District 6, where property values are dramatically lower. Family wealth also correlates with school spending. The Tribune found that about 80 percent of grade school districts with large low-income populations spent less than the state average of $8,765 per pupil for elementary districts in 2005. Educators widely agree that disadvantaged students need more resources than their affluent peers to perform at the same level, though money doesn't always guarantee higher performance. And some districts that don't spend a lot are performing well, complicating the debate over education funding. The differences between districts with high property values and poorer districts in the region are profound and show up vividly in spending per pupil. While some schools struggle to make ends meet, children at West Northfield have programs such as forensic testing, flight simulation and fingerprinting techniques in a state-of-the-art applied technology lab. Shiny guitars line the back of a music room, and all middle school students have the chance to play. They also can learn violin. All kindergarten classrooms have teacher aides, and 1st-grade classrooms have a teacher aide for reading. Parents have raised money for programs including a performing artist-in-residence, and they bought a portable, inflatable planetarium where elementary students can view constellations. "They want for nothing," said Maria Kalant, principal of the district's elementary school, as she opened the door of a well-stocked supply room.

PRESIDENT’S 2008 BUDGET LOOKS BACK, NOT FORWARD
Wendy D. Puriefoy, president and CEO of Public Education Network, issued the following statement in response to President Bush’s proposed FY2008 budget: "The new federal education budget is full of enthusiasm but lacks powerful ideas and transformative levels of funding. By eliminating 44 programs and allocating $600 million to school vouchers rather than to public schools, President Bush demonstrates the great distance between his views and the budget priorities of the American people who consistently rank education as their most important public concern. At odds in the new budget proposal are new funding for No Child Left Behind and cuts to key services to special education students and other programs that nurture young children. Education in the United States will not improve dramatically unless Americans fulfill their civic responsibility to ensure quality public education for all. Unfortunately, the President's proposed budget sends the message -- by essentially freezing FY2008 funding at FY2007 levels -- that schools can be wholly transformed without new investments and a major realignment of federal education priorities. By raising the accountability stakes but maintaining current funding, the President undermines his reform agenda, and dashes the hopes of citizens and educators eager to roll up their sleeves and begin the serious work of improving American public education."

IT WILL TAKE MORE MONEY TO SUPPORT STUDENT SUCCESS
An employee is asked to help his boss prepare for an office celebration. He is given a list of things to buy and the money to buy them. He cheerfully sets out to purchase everything on the boss' list. Soon, he realizes there is not enough money. When he tells this to his boss, he is told to try harder. He continues searching for the best prices and even uses experienced shoppers to identify creative ways to get everything on the list. Unfortunately, the items and quantities on the list simply cannot be obtained with the resources supplied. When the employee reports this, he expects the boss to allocate more resources or reduce the number of items on the list. The boss instead calls his efforts into question and labels him "failing." He sends him out with an even longer list of things to buy with the same money. Our schools do not receive funding adequate to meet what is required of them, but like the boss in the parable, we have decided to label them as failing and to demand more. Critics of public education say money won't solve the problem: "No matter how much they get, schools always want more." We have no choice but to want more because, for many years now, our state and federal governments have kept adding to our list of mandates without providing the resources to accomplish what they have mandated, writes Superintendent Jay Haugen in the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

STOP PANDERING ON EDUCATION: NO MORE EXCUSES FOR BAD TEACHERS
The crazy thing about the education debate in the United States is that anyone with an ounce of brains knows what must be done. Each political party is about half right, writes Jonathan Alter in Newsweek. Republicans are right about the need for strict performance standards and wrong in believing that enduring change is possible without lots more money from Washington. Democrats are right about the need to pay teachers more but wrong to kiss up to teachers unions bent on preventing accountability. A big accountability problem nationwide is teacher tenure, which is almost automatically awarded whether a teacher is good or not. If he's not, he gets to commit educational malpractice for the next 40 years. Above all, a principal must have control of who teaches in his or her building. All other reforms depend on it. It's time to move from identifying failing schools to identifying failing teachers. That sounds obvious, but until now it hasn't happened in American education.

EXPERIENCE THE RICHNESS OF BLACK HISTORY MONTH
Black History Month is an annual observance, in February, of the past achievements and current status of African Americans. It coincides with the birthdays of the great black leader Frederick Douglass (February 14) and of Abraham Lincoln (February 12). The idea for an observance honoring the accomplishments of African Americans led to the establishment of Negro History Week in 1926. It was proposed by Carter G. Woodson, a black historian known as the Father of Black History, and others. The observance became known as Black History Week during the early 1970's and was established as Black History Month in 1976. The celebration is sponsored by the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History in Washington, D.C., which Woodson founded in 1915.

READING, WRITING & A ROOF OVERHEAD
A Missouri school district is providing housing for four homeless high school boys in a first-of-its-kind endeavor, reports Stacy A. Teicher in the Christian Science Monitor. About 14 percent of shelter requests go unmet, according to the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. That group also reports that 48 percent of homeless families have children under 18; an additional 1 percent of the homeless population consists of unaccompanied youths. Nearly half of students who are homeless are not able to attend school for the full year. Superintendent Linda Henke wasn't content to wait for the government to create more shelters. Out of her school district’s 1,100 students, about 30 each year are in situations that count as "homeless" under federal law that spells out their educational rights. Ms. Henke's concern had been growing as she saw the challenges for teen boys in particular. Many places where women seek refuge from abuse don't allow boys over a certain age, while men's shelters aren't nearby and can be intimidating, she says. She knows a boy who lived in a car and another who rents a couch. While experts say many teens hide their homeless status, Henke believes the community conversation about the new shelter is encouraging more students to come forward and seek help. The school board put up the money to buy the house last summer and plans to spend about $34,000 a year on the mortgage, insurance, and utilities. To keep four students in school each year, it seemed a reasonable cost, Henke says; it costs at least that much to house just one person in prison -- a place where young men are much more likely to end up if they drop out of school.

EVIDENCE-BASED SCHOOL REFORM & NCLB: NEXT TIME USE WHAT WORKS
No Child Left Behind appeared to be a major victory for evidence-based reform in education, but it has instead been a major setback, writes Robert E. Slavin in Teachers College Record. Despite language throughout NCLB calling for the use of scientifically evaluated programs, such programs have in fact been largely shut out of Reading First and ignored in parts of the law such as supplemental educational services and turnaround programs for schools not meeting standards. This article recommends strategies to make evidence central to the reauthorization of NCLB. These include adding clarity about which programs have strong evidence of effectiveness and providing competitive preference points for proposals to implement proven programs.

CONSUMER GROUP FAULTS CONDITIONS IN SCHOOL CAFETERIAS
Conditions in the nation’s school cafeterias could trigger outbreaks of food poisoning at any time, the Center for Science in the Public Interest warned in a new report. The Washington-based consumer-advocacy group analyzed inspection reports from high school cafeterias in 20 jurisdictions and rated them on the rigor and frequency of their food-safety inspections and the ease of access to the results of the inspections. Most of the 29 million meals served in school cafeterias each day are nutritious and safe, but some school districts and local governments aren't conducting frequent enough inspections or using up-to-date food-safety standards, leaving students at risk of food poisoning, the report says. Young children in particular face a higher risk of complications from infections caused by E. coli, salmonella, and other potentially deadly food-borne pathogens, it says. Federal food-safety standards call for cafeterias to be inspected twice a year, reports Ann Bradley in Education Week. District of Columbia school cafeterias ranked among the worst, with a "failing" score. Schools in Fort Worth, Texas, had the highest score in the study.

SCHOOL BOARDS ARE HARD TO CONTACT
A Cincinnati Enquirer examination late last month of 63 public school websites in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky shows that 73 percent don't list direct phone numbers for school board members; 40 percent don't offer direct e-mail addresses. And 33 percent of school systems offer neither. Public school boards make decisions that affect thousands of families. They control the spending of millions of tax dollars, reports Michael D. Clark. They decide sweeping policy issues -- be it reassigning students among buildings, proposing tax increases or deciding whether to require drug tests to participate in student activities. Yet in many cases, people who want to be heard on such important issues get no help when it comes to using school district websites. And those who take the time to show up at a board meeting often run into strict time limits of five minutes or less. "Those results are surprising," says Ohio School Boards Association spokesman Scott Ebright of the newspaper's findings. "In some districts it may be an oversight and in some it may be intentional. School websites are still an emerging technology and I'm not sure some districts know how to use it yet."

TEACHER COMPENSATION IN PRIVATE & CHARTER SCHOOLS
Across the country, states and districts are struggling to attract, support, and retain high-quality teachers in the classroom. The limitations of the traditional salary schedule in attracting and keeping good teachers have prompted many policymakers to search for alternative methods of compensation. In this paper, Julie Kowal, Emily Ayscue Hassel, and Bryan C. Hassel examine teacher compensation policies in charter and private schools for lessons to help traditional public schools more effectively draw and keep high-quality teachers. Charter and private schools make much greater use of pay innovations than traditional public schools, and there is some recent evidence that they have been more successful at recruiting teachers with higher academic credentials. The experience of leading charter and private school networks with teacher compensation suggests a potential "two-track" strategy for public policymakers committed to compensation reform. On one track, in recognition of the longstanding nature of current formula-based systems, policymakers could work to make teacher pay more performance- and market-driven, but still within the context of a formulaic, schedule-based approach. On the other track, policymakers could allow select schools to enter a more flexible compensation regime, perhaps based on their past performance or willingness to accept stricter forms of accountability.

PLAYGROUND HEROES: HOW CAN WE TEACH KIDS TO STICK UP FOR PEERS WHO ARE BULLIED?
In "Playground Heroes" in the latest issue of Greater Good magazine, researchers Ken Rigby and Bruce Johnson make clear that research has not only documented the great prevalence of bullying at schools; it's also shown that quite often, children serve as passive bystanders to bullying. They neither join in the bullying nor try to stop it, but just watch it from the sidelines. Yet when these observers do intervene, more often than not they're successful in stopping the bullying. So why don't they intervene -- and perhaps more importantly, how can parents and teachers effectively encourage them to intervene when it's appropriate for them to do so? Drawing on the results from a six-country study that they ran, called the International Bystander Project, Rigby and Johnson offer concrete strategies for helping children act on their best intentions.

SCHOOL DISTRICT MANDATES PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE IN ENGLISH ONLY
After days of public debate over the appropriateness of a North Carolina student saying the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Superintendent Peter Gorman has decided it will be recited only in English at graduations and other districtwide events. "Upon further reflection, we believe that as a symbol of American democracy and as a pledge of loyalty to our nation, the pledge should be recited in English only from here on out," Gorman said in a statement. The decision was based in part on his opinion that the controversy was distracting attention from the goal of teaching children, reports Mark Price in The Charlotte Observer. Gorman said he will clarify his stance in a meeting with principals later this month, and will assure them that Spanish and other languages remain welcome in their classrooms. "I'm not telling individual classrooms, dual-language programs and foreign language schools that they can't use certain tools for instruction," Gorman said. Instead, the guideline -- which does not need school board approval -- will apply to events such as graduations, board meetings, student achievement celebrations and teacher award programs.

CONFRONTING ABLEISM
Negative cultural attitudes toward disability can undermine opportunities for all students to participate fully in school and society, writes Thomas Hehir in the new issue of Educational Leadership. An ableist perspective asserts that it is preferable for a child to read print rather than Braille, walk rather than use a wheelchair and spell independently rather than use a spell-checker. The latest Educational Leadership examines when ableist assumptions become dysfunctional and the purpose of special education.

NO CHILD LEFT BORED: HOW TO CHALLENGE GIFTED & TALENTED STUDENTS
A highly targeted array of learning opportunities for students is not common practice in schools and districts across the country. A few states have created separate schools for academically talented students in math and science. Some large districts have established magnet schools to serve the needs of academically talented students. Some communities offer theme schools for gifted learners, including schools with full-time programs for academically gifted and talented students with a focus on critical and creative thinking skills. Districts and states also have developed innovative programs that include mentorships, Saturday programs, after-school enrichment activities and summer internships. However, recent experiences suggest strongly that this attention has decreased in the years following the implementation of No Child Left Behind, writes Sally M. Reis in The School Administrator. In a recent study that her colleagues conducted, across 92 observation days in all subject areas, gifted students experienced only minimal instructional or curricular differentiation. The goal for each superintendent and administrator is to work with teachers and parents to develop a program and a continuum of services that is appropriate for each individual school, taking into account the unique learning needs of the students, the programs and services already in place and what is needed to challenge every child. For every child deserves the opportunity to make continuous progress in learning.

SMALL CLASSROOMS MOST IMPORTANT IN EARLY GRADES
Research shows that small classrooms are beneficial during a child's earliest school years, reports Clarke Canfield for the Associated Press. But there is little evidence that shows a correlation between class size and student achievement beyond the third grade, education researchers say. Deciding where to spend limited education resources can be tricky, said Brian Stecher, a senior social scientist at the nonprofit Rand Corp. in Santa Monica, Calif. There aren't any studies comparing the benefits of a dollar spent on teachers to a dollar spent on computers or a dollar spent on scholarships. Still, nobody wants to see their children's classrooms get bigger, he said. "Parents and teachers are almost universally in support of reducing class size if possible," he said.

|---------------GRANT AND FUNDING INFORMATION--------------|

"Grants for Public Beautification and Horticultural Education"
Fiskars Project Orange Thumb grants award Fiskars Garden Tools and materials such as plants, seeds, mulch, etc. to eligible gardening groups. Maximum Award: $1,500 in implements and materials. Eligibility: gardens and/or gardening projects geared toward community involvement, neighborhood beautification, horticultural education and/or sustainable agriculture. Deadline: February 28, 2007.

"Recruiting Bright and Ambitious People into the World of Education Policy"
Fordham Fellows is a program designed to initiate talented, serious education reformers into the world of national education policy. Our goal is to bring together a cadre of the sharpest minds in American education and put them to work immediately in some of the nation's top policy shops. They'll be surrounded by intelligent, goal-oriented, hard-working veterans of the education policy arena. Primary deadline is March 15, 2007.

"Recognizing Excellence in Teaching History"
The American Historical Association Beveridge Family Teaching Prize recognizes excellence and innovation in elementary, middle school, and secondary history teaching, including career contributions and specific initiatives. Maximum Award: $1,500. Eligibility: K-12 teachers in groups. Deadline: March 15, 2007.

"Student Documentary Competition"
C-SPAN StudentCam is an annual documentary competition that invites students to identify a current political topic of interest and produce a short (up to ten minute) video documentary that creatively explores an issue while integrating C-SPAN programming. Maximum Award: $3,000 in digital equipment for school. Eligibility: individual or teams of students grades 6-8 or grades 9- 12; Deadline: March 30, 2007.

"Awards for Excellence in Educating Students About Math, Science, Technology & Engineering"
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Foundation Classroom Grants are awarded to encourage excellence in educating students about math, science, technology, and engineering. Eligibility: current AIAA Educator Associate or AIAA Professional members actively engaged as K-12 classroom educators. Maximum Award: $200. Deadline: N/A.

For a detailed listing of EXISTING GRANT OPPORTUNITIES (updated each week), visit:
http://www.publiceducation.org/newsblast_grants.asp

QUOTES OF THE WEEK
"Are we thinking that physical punishment is a learning experience? Are we thinking that physical punishment develops moral character? Are we thinking that physical punishment engenders respect for -- and a desire to live up to the expectations of -- the wielder of the paddle? Are we thinking that physical punishment teaches children to solve problems? Are we thinking that fear of being hit clears children’s minds and allows them to learn better? Are we thinking that children troubled enough to require physical punishment to control their in-school behavior will become less troubled after being hit by an all-powerful adult? Are we thinking that hitting a child is educational? Are we thinking that by hitting children we are behaving as professional educators who are in any way fit to be in charge of the development of young bodies and minds? These are not rhetorical questions. Twenty three states in their collective wisdom allow corporal punishment in their schools. Can anyone tell me why?"

 - Linda Starr (educator/columnist)

"What a wonderful combination; eating delicious, world-famous chicken wings and providing for kids in the community at the same time."

 - Sal Melilli (chief operating office for Hooters Restaurants)
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/02-06-2007/0004521623&EDATE=

|---------------PEN NewsBlast--------------|

The PEN Weekly NewsBlast is a free e-mail newsletter featuring school reform and school fundraising resources. The PEN NewsBlast is the property of the Public Education Network, a national association of 86 local education funds working to improve public school quality in low-income communities nationwide.

There are currently 45,095 subscribers to the PEN Weekly NewsBlast. Please forward this e-mail to anyone who enjoys free updates on education news and grant alerts. Some links in the PEN Weekly NewsBlast change or expire on a daily or weekly basis. Some links may also require local website registration.