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Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:09:20 +0000

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Obama defends education policies to critics (AP)

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 08:19:17 +0000

WASHINGTON – Challenging civil rights organizations and teachers’ unions that have criticized his education policies, President Barack Obama said Thursday that minority students have the most to gain from overhauling the nation’s schools.

“We have an obligation to lift up every child in every school in this country, especially those who are starting out furthest behind,” Obama told the centennial convention of the National Urban League.

The Urban League has been a vocal critic of Obama’s education policies, most notably the $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” program that awards grants to states based on their plans for innovative education reforms. A report released earlier this week by eight civil rights groups, including the Urban League, says federal data shows that just 3 percent of the nation’s black students and less than 1 percent of Latino students are affected by the first round of the administration’s “Race to the Top” competition.

Obama pushed back Thursday, arguing that minority students are the ones who have been hurt the most by the status quo.

Obama’s reforms have also drawn criticism from education advocates, including prominent teachers’ unions like the American Federation of Teachers, who have argued that the reforms set unfair standards for teacher performance.

Obama said the goal isn’t to fire or admonish teachers, but to create a culture of accountability. He pinned some of the criticism on a resistance to change.

“We get comfortable with the status quo even when the status quo isn’t good,” he said. “When you try to shake things up, sometimes people aren’t happy.”

Seeking to ease his strained relationship with the powerful teacher’s unions, Obama hailed teachers as “the single most important factor in a classroom,” calling for higher pay, better training and additional resources to help teachers succeed.

“Instead of a culture where we’re always idolizing sports stars or celebrities, I want us to build a culture where we idolize the people who shape our children’s future,” Obama said.

The president laid the groundwork for what he called “an honest conversation” about education with comments on several recent developments that were designed as sweeteners for his mostly minority audience.

For instance, he said his goal with his domestic agenda, including the economy, health care and other priorities, is to create “an economy that lifts all Americans — not just some, but all.” That comment earned him significant applause and pleased murmurs in the room.

The president also said he very much looks forward to signing a bill recently passed by Congress to reduce the disparities between mandatory crack and powder cocaine sentences. The matter has been a longtime thorn for the black community, as the quarter-century-old law that Congress changed has subjected tens of thousands of blacks to long prison terms for crack cocaine convictions while giving far more lenient treatment to those, mainly whites, caught with the powder form of the drug.

“We got it done,” Obama said. “It’s the right thing to do.”

And he forthrightly addressed the racial firestorm over the recent ouster of a black Agriculture Department official. He said the forced resignation of Shirley Sherrod “marked both the challenges we face and the progress we’ve made.”

“She deserves better than what happened last week,” Obama said.

___

Associated Press White House Correspondent Jennifer Loven contributed to this report.

Obama defends education policies to critics (AP)

Obama Defends Education Program

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 06:50:02 +0000

WASHINGTON — Saying that reforming education is perhaps “the economic issue of our time,” President Obama went before a major civil rights organization on Thursday to defend his main education program against criticisms from some minority and teachers groups.

“It’s an economic issue when the unemployment rate for folks who’ve never gone to college is almost double what it is for those who have,” Mr. Obama said, according to prepared remarks. “It’s an economic issue when eight in 10 new jobs will require workforce training or a higher education by the end of this decade. It’s an economic issue when we know countries that outeducate us today will outcompete us tomorrow.”

Mr. Obama, in his speech before the 100th anniversary convention of the National Urban League, acknowledged “some controversy” about his education initiative, which he attributed partly to “a general resistance to change, a comfort with the status quo.” But he chose the civil rights organization as his audience to address specifically the complaints of minority groups that schools and teachers in impoverished communities and inner cities will be unfairly neglected in the competition to meet higher standards and the drive to impose accountability for students’ standardized test results.

“Our goal isn’t to fire or admonish teachers,” Mr. Obama said.

Rather, he said the “Race to the Top” program, which provides additional federal funds to local schools that meet administration standards — and a companion effort to overhaul the nation’s 5,000 worst schools — were ultimately aimed at giving good teachers higher salaries, more support, from supplies to smaller classes, and more training to provide them with career opportunities and financial rewards. About $4 billion is being invested in each initiative.

“All I’m asking in return, as a president and as a parent,” Mr. Obama continued, “is a measure of accountability. Surely we can agree that even as we applaud teachers for their hard work, we need to make sure they’re delivering results in the classroom. If they’re not, let’s work with them to help them be more effective. And if that fails, let’s find the right teacher for that classroom.”

Referring to the signature education program of his predecessor, George W. Bush, Mr. Obama said, “Unlike ‘No Child Left Behind,’ this isn’t about labeling a troubled school a failure one day, and throwing up our hands the next.” Instead, he said the federal government will work with “the whole community” to turn its local schools around.

“Sometimes a school’s problems run so deep that better assessments, higher standards, and a more challenging curriculum aren’t enough. If a school isn’t producing graduates with even the most basic skills — year after year after year — something needs to be done differently,” Mr. Obama said. “If we want success for our country, we can’t accept failure in our schools.”

Obama Defends Education Program

18 states, D.C. named Race to the Top education grant finalists

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 21:55:51 +0000

ATLANTA (AP) — Eighteen states and the District of Columbia were named finalists Tuesday in the second round of the federal “Race to the Top” school reform grant competition, giving them a chance to receive a share of $3 billion.

Education Department officials provided The Associated Press with a list of the finalists ahead of a speech by Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

The states are: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and South Carolina.

Duncan was expected to officially announce the finalists at a speech at the National Press Club.

The competition rewards ambitious reforms aimed at improving struggling schools and closing the achievement gap. Applications were screened by a panel of peer reviewers, and finalists will travel to Washington in coming weeks to present their proposals.

In all, 35 states and the District of Columbia applied for the second round of the application. The 19 finalists have asked for $6.2 billion, though only $3.4 billion is available.

Dozens of states passed new education policies to make themselves more attractive to the judges.

New York, which was a finalist in the first round but did not win money, lifted its cap on the number of charter schools that can open annually from 200 to 460. Colorado passed laws that would pay teachers based on student performance and can strip tenure from low performing instructors.

Two states, Tennessee and Delaware, were awarded a total of $600 million in the first round.

Their applications were praised for merit pay policies that link teacher pay to student performance and for garnering the support of teachers’ unions. Tennessee and Delaware also have laws that are welcoming to charter schools.

In the first round of the race, some stakeholders were reluctant to support applications tying teacher evaluations to student test scores.

Armario reported from Miami. AP Writer Michael Gormley in Albany, N.Y., contributed to this report.

18 states, D.C. named Race to the Top education grant finalists

Zynga Confirms Softbank Investment. They’ll Confirm Google Investment Later: Zynga issued a press…

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:14:42 +0000

Zynga Confirms Softbank Investment. They’ll Confirm Google Investment Later: Zynga issued a press release tonight … http://bit.ly/deTMQp

Zynga Confirms Softbank Investment. They’ll Confirm Google Investment Later: Zynga issued a press…

Obama to defend education policies to critics (AP)

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:09:29 +0000

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is defending his administration’s education policies, responding to criticism that so far they have not substantially helped minority students.

The president blames some of the criticism of his plan on teachers and others resistant to change.

Obama was to speak Thursday at the centennial convention of the National Urban League, one of eight civil rights organizations that released a report this week calling the president’s $4.35 billion education initiative an ineffective approach for failing schools.

In excerpts released ahead of the president’s speech, Obama says his program’s goal is to spur innovate education reform in states and turn around failing schools, many in minority communities, not just label them as troubled and then walk away.

“It’s about investing in that school’s future, recruiting the whole community to help turn it around, and identifying some viable options for how to move forward,” Obama says.

The National Urban League report, written in conjunction with seven other civil rights groups, says federal data shows that just 3 percent of the nation’s black students and less than 1 percent of Latino students are affected by the first round of the administration’s “Race to the Top” competition.

The program earlier this year awarded about $600 million to Tennessee and Delaware to undertake reforms.

Eighteen states and the District of Columbia were named finalists Tuesday for the second round of the funding.

Obama’s education reforms have also drawn criticism from education advocates, including prominent teachers’ unions like the American Federation of Teachers.

Obama will tell the civil rights group’s convention that some of the criticism of the program comes from those resistant to change and a “comfort with the status quo.” The goal of the initiative, he says, isn’t to fire or admonish teachers, but to hold them accountable and help “create a better environment for teachers and students alike.”

The president will call for schools to provide teachers higher pay and a fulfilling, supportive workplace.

“Instead of a culture where we’re always idolizing sports stars or celebrities, I want us to build a culture where we idolize the people who shape our children’s future,” he will tell the group.

Obama to defend education policies to critics (AP)

New York Students’ Passing Rate Plummets

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 06:50:01 +0000

Applying new, tougher standards, state education officials said Wednesday that more than half of public school students in New York City failed their English exams this year, and 54 percent of them passed in math.

Enlarge This Image

Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times

Chancellor Joel I. Klein, with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, left, addressed the test results.

The results were in stark contrast to successes that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had heralded in recent years. When he ran for re-election in 2009, he boasted of state test scores that showed two-thirds of city students were passing English and 82 percent were passing math.

But state education officials said that performance was misleading because those scores were inflated by tests that had become easier to pass. The scores released on Wednesday were the first attempt to establish what the officials considered a more trustworthy measure of students’ abilities.

Merryl H. Tisch, the chancellor of the State Board of Regents, said she had encouraged teachers and parents to greet the news “not with disappointment and not with anger.”

“Now that we are facing the hard truth that not all of the gains were as advertised, we have to take a look at what we can do differently,” she said. “These results will finally provide real, unimpeachable evidence to be used for accountability.”

The falloff in passing rates occurred statewide. This year, 61 percent of state students were deemed passing, or at grade level, in math, compared with 86 percent last year. Students also performed dismally on the English tests, with 53 percent passing, down from 77 percent.

The scoring adjustment could raise questions about the precision of educational testing, even as policy makers across the country, including President Obama, are relying on tests to determine teachers’ pay and whether a school should be shut. In New York City, scores on state tests have been used to assign grades A through F to each school, as well as to determine principal and teacher bonuses.

And the results could cast doubts on the city’s improvements over the past several years; both the mayor and the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, have used increases in state test scores as evidence that schools have improved.

“It certainly complicates the Bloomberg administration message, because the state test is completely unreliable,” said Michael J. Petrilli, a researcher with the Fordham Institute, a Washington-based research group.

New York State said the tests had become too easy, with some questions varying little from year to year, making it simple for teachers to prepare students because each test is made publicly available after it is given. So this year, the state made the questions less predictable and raised the number of correct answers needed to pass the tests, which are given to every student from the third through the eighth grades.

Last year, for example, a fourth grader had to get 37 out of 70 possible points on the math test to reach Level 3 (out of 4), or grade level. This year, a fourth grader needed to earn 51 out of 70 points to reach that level.

New York City officials said that if previous scores were adjusted to the new standards, the city would still show substantial progress over the past decade, and they noted that students had improved somewhat on federal tests in recent years.

“This doesn’t mean the kids did any worse — quite the contrary,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference Wednesday afternoon. “What this is simply saying is that we’ve redefined what our objectives are for the kids.”

“Whether the new expectations will instigate all of us to try harder,” he added, “one can only hope.”

By last year’s standard of proficiency, students in New York City did improve slightly in math this year, but dropped a bit in English.

The mayor’s explanation is likely to offer little consolation to teachers and parents of students who once were considered proficient and now are deemed behind. Scores for districts and schools were released on Wednesday, with student scores available for parents next month.

The Bloomberg administration has relied on the exams to carry out one of its most contentious policies: requiring every student who scores at Level 1, the lowest, to attend summer school and pass a retest or repeat the grade.

This year, anticipating a drop in passing rates, the city sent more struggling students, about 27,000, to summer school. But the test results indicated that about 8,500 more should have been enrolled, the mayor said.

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Robert Gebeloff and Sharon Otterman contributed reporting.

New York Students’ Passing Rate Plummets

Report: Colleges don’t do enough to stop student drinking

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 01:55:20 +0000

U.S. colleges aren’t doing enough to limit student access to alcohol, a new study contends.

College administrators do recognize that student drinking is a major problem, but they focus on individual interventions and campus-based alcohol restrictions. They need to do more work with communities to develop policies to reduce excess drinking by students, such as monitoring of illegal sales of alcohol and limiting the number of retail alcohol outlets, according to study author Toben Nelson.

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Nelson, an assistant professor in the epidemiology and community health division at the University of Minnesota, and colleagues analyzed the answers given by 351 college administrators who responded to an online survey in 2008. The respondents were asked if they were following recommendations from the U.S. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s college drinking task force 2002 report on the best strategies for reducing student drinking.

The 2008 survey showed there was “very little action on the task force recommendations and very little implementation,” Nelson said in a news release from the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. “Very few had even had conversations in the communities.”

Many of the college administrators knew about the task force recommendations, but more than 22% did not know about them, according to the survey.

Previous studies had shown that community-based alcohol control is effective in reducing college student drinking through policies such as monitoring of illegal sales of alcohol, limiting the number of alcohol outlets, increasing prices, and mandatory training for servers.

But Nelson and colleagues found that only one-third of college communities performed compliance checks for illegal alcohol sales, only 15% mandated server training, only 7% restricted the number of alcohol outlets, and only 2% raised alcohol prices.

Among the study’s other findings:

• Education about the consequences of excessive drinking was given to students at 98% of the colleges. The methods included lectures, meetings or workshops, poster campaigns and computer-based programs.

• Two-thirds of colleges provided interventions for problem drinkers or those at high risk, either on campus or by paying for off-campus services.

The study findings were released online in advance of publication in the October print issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

Report: Colleges don’t do enough to stop student drinking

Programs, $650M fund help entrepreneurs in education market

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 20:55:38 +0000

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A movement is underway to make it easier for entrepreneurs to navigate the lucrative and sometimes-tricky education market and introduce new technology and products into classrooms.

An educator at the University of Pennsylvania wants to create one of the nation’s only business incubators dedicated to education entrepreneurs. The U.S. Department of Education is also getting into the act with a $650 million fund to boost education innovation.

“Here’s this (market) that is huge, that is really important, that needs innovation, and there’s just nothing out there to sort of foster it,” said Doug Lynch, vice dean of Penn’s Graduate School of Education. “Let’s create a Silicon Valley around education.”

K-12 schools and degree-granting institutions spend more than $1 trillion on education annually, federal statistics show. That represents immense potential for entrepreneurs — if they can resist the lure of more established tech firms and trendier ventures like social networks.

There are other roadblocks.

Despite constant talk of making U.S. students more competitive, Lynch said it can be nearly impossible to introduce a new product in the fractured K-12 market because of frequent changes in superintendents, policy and curricula. Each of the nation’s 15,000 school districts has its own needs and often cumbersome purchasing process.

“It’s worse than trying to sell to the U.S. Army, in terms of the hoops you have to jump through,” Lynch said.

The incubator he envisions at Penn — called NEST, for Networking Ed entrepreneurs for Social Transformation — would identify promising businesses and give them financial and logistical support, such as access to capital, work space and university expertise.

Linking educational researchers, who tend to be theoretical, with entrepreneurs, who are more practical and action-oriented, could help unlock the market, said Kim Smith, co-founder of the NewSchools Venture Fund, which invests in education businesses.

“If they can figure out a way to bridge those two communities, it could be a real contribution,” said Smith, now CEO of Bellwether Education Partners.

Penn, an Ivy League university in Philadelphia, has already held two summits on education entrepreneurship and hosted its first business plan competition, sponsored by the school and the Milken Family Foundation.

The top prize went to Digital Proctor, which creators say can identify typists through keystroke biometrics and thereby make it easier for teachers to root out test fraud. Digital Proctor beat out competitors from 27 states and three countries to win $25,000.

In an interview, Digital Proctor CEO Shaun Sims said investors’ lack of familiarity with the education industry means entrepreneurs must make a double pitch: first on the market overall, then on the actual product they’ve developed.

An incubator would “create an ecosystem for education” that attracts entrepreneurs who might otherwise venture into more investment-friendly efforts, he said.

“You’re going to get the country’s best talent working in this market instead of going to Silicon Valley working on the next social network,” Sims said.

The U.S. Department of Education hopes to bolster entrepreneurship with its Investing in Innovation fund.

Jim Shelton, assistant deputy secretary for the Office of Innovation and Improvement, said it is easier than ever for schools to use new ideas and products because of increasing Internet connectivity, cheaper technology and the growing use of hard data to measure outcomes.

“The shift toward evidence as the currency for education … will make it a much more rational market,” Shelton said. “It will be much easier for entrepreneurs to prove that what they have is what people should be spending time and money on.”

Arizona State University is also embracing the emerging field. It held its first education entrepreneur summit last spring and has started discussions with Penn for some kind of partnership, said Julia Rosen, associate vice president for innovation and entrepreneurship.

Arizona State’s business incubator, SkySong, has all types of companies but is intensifying its focus on education businesses because of the “incredible market potential,” Rosen said.

“Individual consumers are increasingly willing to pay for education, whether it’s lifelong learning, private schools, tutoring (or) test prep,” she said. “We think education is going to be the next health care.”

Programs, $650M fund help entrepreneurs in education market

Requiem for the G1: Today saw T-Mobile finally retiring the venerable G1, forerunner to the ongoing…

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 20:44:23 +0000

Requiem for the G1: Today saw T-Mobile finally retiring the venerable G1, forerunner to the ongoing Android revolu… http://bit.ly/bjluDo

Requiem for the G1: Today saw T-Mobile finally retiring the venerable G1, forerunner to the ongoing…