The Echo

http://kilroysdelaware.wordpress.com/2009/08/30/finanical-judgement-for-delaware-schools-09012009/

From the UDaily:

Former Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell will give a public lecture on the University of Delaware's Newark campus on Tuesday, Nov. 3.

Powell served as the first African-American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was appointed Secretary of State by President George W. Bush, becoming, at that time, the most powerful African-American ever to hold office.

A four-star general, Powell's numerous awards include two Presidential Medals of Freedom. He is the author of the best-selling autobiography, My American Journey.

UD Speaks is dedicated to bringing world-class leaders to the Delaware campus to educate, enlighten and engage the University community.

The event will begin at 8:30 p.m. at the Bob Carpenter Center. The speech will be followed by a question and answer session.
Tickets will go on sale at UD box offices at the Trabant University Center and at the Bob Carpenter Center, and via Ticketmaster, on Tuesday, Sept. 15. Prices are $5 for students, $10 for faculty and staff, $15 for military personnel (active duty and retired) and $25 for the public. All seating is general admission.'

(As Dear Abby would have said it!)

Porter Road Elementary is still very much a work in progress; however,

Your concerns were noted and a response has been generated from district administration:

On Bookcases:
When originally designed and laid out, the classrooms were feeling crowded with material and furniture ... Knowing that teachers often bring much stuff of their own, we waited on adding bookcases. There just weren't obvious places to put them. Now that we are moved in, a list of additional furniture that would be desirable has been generated. Chairs, tables, upright storage cabinets, some shelving and bookcases. We will be ordering this furnature as soon as the list is finalized.

On Maps:
We don't usually order physical pulldown maps anymore. They seem to be outdated the instant we hang them. The overheard projectors are wired to be used from the teacher's computer, so displays of the lastest maps and other materials like that can be brought up on the screen.

To my teachers: If you would like a laminated map to hang on the wall, please contact me directly at montagnebeau@aol.com

On Transparency Projectors:
We have the old style overhead projectors in storage for schools that want them. We are working with Ms. Talbert on whether we move them to Porter and how many. When talking with Mrs. Talbert, the staff was working out a plan where they scan many of the head documents on the large scale scanners/copiers that in the building then use these documents in electronic format on the overhead projectors installed in each classroom. Technology will be working with the staff so that all are well-versed on using the permanent projector in each classroom.


As always, please feel free to contact me at montagnebeau@aol.com
Subject line: CSD

Sincerely,
Elizabeth Scheinberg

Charter schools aren't the cure-all
Diane Ravitch • August 14, 2009

http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090814/OPINION16/90813041

The board of the Los Angeles Unified School District is opening 50 schools over the next few years and considering a proposal to allow some or all to be privately managed. Before taking this step, the board should take a hard look at the evidence about charter schools and privately managed schools.

Because of a brilliant media campaign by charter school organizations, there is a widespread impression that any charter school is better than any public school. This is not true. Charter schools vary in quality from excellent to abysmal. On the authoritative federal tests called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, students in charter schools perform about the same as those in traditional public schools. A recent Stanford University study, which compared half the nation’s charter schools with a neighboring public school, concluded that 46 percent were no better, 37 percent were significantly worse and only 17 percent were significantly better than the public school.

Philadelphia launched an effort last year to compare its district-run schools with its charter schools and privately managed schools. Researchers from Rand Corp. concluded that charter students did no better than those who attended public schools. Performance in the privately managed schools did not, on average, exceed the performance of the public schools. A few months ago, Philadelphia officials — looking at their own achievement data — said that six privately managed elementary and middle schools outperformed the public schools, but 10 were worse than district-run schools.

One of the major arguments for turning schools over to private managers is that the resulting competition will spur improvements in public schools.

This did not happen in Philadelphia, nor is there evidence that it has happened elsewhere. Many charter and privately managed schools get extra resources and smaller classes with the help of corporate sponsors, but public schools typically do not. What the public schools do get are the low-performing and disruptive students who are ejected by or eased out of the charter and privately managed schools.

The Los Angeles proposal for 50 new schools has been likened to New York City’s approach. But Los Angeles should be aware of two points. First, under New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, spending on education has increased from $12.5 billion annually to $21 billion, or nearly $20,000 per child. Is Los Angeles willing to match that?

Second, New York City’s new high schools started small and were allowed to limit the admission of special-education students and students with limited English proficiency for the first two years. The remaining high schools were left with a disproportionate share of the neediest students. A study this year of the new schools found that, over time, when their enrollment became similar to traditional public schools, their attendance rates and graduation rates declined. Also, the attrition rate of teachers and principals was consistently high.

If we are ever going to get serious about improving education in the United States, we have to face up to basic facts. We can’t solve our problems by handing them off to businesses and community groups. Some schools will claim success by excluding the students who are hardest to educate; others will claim success by drilling children endlessly on test-taking skills. And although California law requires that public schools — charters included — accept all students, charters tend to draw the most motivated students and families away from the traditional public schools because of the application process.

Further, charters and privately managed schools often pay unusually high executive compensation. The leader of a small charter network in New York City that has 1,000 students received $370,000 in 2007, about triple the salary of a principal. The organizer of charter schools in a Pennsylvania suburb is also the primary vendor of goods and services to his schools and earns more than $1 million annually.

What should we do? We must strengthen — not abandon — public education. Our schools should have well-rounded curricula that include the arts, history, science, geography, literature and foreign languages, as well as basic skills. Teachers should be well-educated and treated with dignity. Principals should be head teachers, who can capably evaluate and assist their teachers. School buildings should be well-maintained. Class sizes should be reasonable, making it possible for teachers to give extra attention to students who need it. Schools should have a firm and fair disciplinary code.

Are these common-sense policies beyond the reach of the citizens of Los Angeles?

We evade our responsibility to improve public education by privatizing public schools. In doing so, we undermine the egalitarian promise of public education, thus guaranteeing that many children will continue to be left behind.

Diane Ravitch is a historian of education at New York University; her new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” will be published in March.

What do you think?


Indian River schools to begin cell phone ban
By MOLLY MURRAY • The News Journal • August 12, 2009

When students in the Indian River School District head back to school next month, they’ll need to leave their cell phones at home.

The school board has banned cell phones, pagers and all other communication devices in the schools during the school day and on district buses.

“They are a distraction,” said Indian River School Board President Charles Bireley. “These devices have no place in the classroom.”

Bireley said parents who worry that students won’t be able to call for help in an emergency need not worry. Every classroom at the district’s two high schools has a telephone, and there are phones in every district office that students can use. Each bus driver also has a cell phone, he said.

But parents can request a waiver from the new rule if there are extenuating circumstances, he said.

Last year, students in the district could have cell phones in their backpacks or lockers but they were not allowed to use them during the school day.

Bireley said there were still problems with text messaging and students taking pictures. Although the district has had no indication the devices have been used to cheat or copy tests, that is also a concern, he said.

“The board of education believes these new regulations will create a more orderly and productive learning environment.”

As promised, I'm blogging my take on the last night's CSD Board Meeting at Bancroft Elementary School:

For the most part, it was a smooth ride. The Board heard an update on the Porter Road School and the new Delaware School for the Deaf campus. Both project received survived Dover's budget crunch, were fully funded at the close the recent legislative session and immediately loaded (meaning the money promised was made available for work to continue/commence.)

Porter is now a finished product, a stunning new school ready to serve its students. Porter's open house is scheduled for August 26, from 4- 7 pm.

After a brief hiatus, The Delaware School for Deaf (DSD) is now ready to proceed into the next phase of construction. During the meeting several contracts were approved by the board to move this project along. Ground breaking is expected in early October, the onset of a 16 month construction schedule that will be completed in December 2010.

We did have an unusual bump in the flow last night concerning contracts for Produce/Seasonal items and Cafeteria Paper Products when these items were tabled after an unhappy vendor addressed the board during public comment. The board reconvened in Executive Session to discuss the concern. Though I am a new Board Member, I am confident with the information provided to the board that these contracts were awarded within the scope of the Request for Proposal(RFP)(the process by which we solicit venders to bid on contracts) fairly and appropriately. The Board reconvened in public session and voted to accept the district's recommendation. Thanks go to our patient superintendent who gracefully yielded to what some may term micro-managing vs policy making, the latter being the purpose of school boards.

Questions? Comments? Hit me at the bottom of this post!

When the State of Delaware launched it's online checkbook earlier this week, all school districts entered into a new era of transparency, as checks written by districts are actually cut by the state and therefore a part of the state's online checkbook.

Access the checkbook via http://checkbook.delaware.gov/

Date of Payments for CSD go back to 7/7/08.

Happy reading!

(Thanks, Kilroy)

Feds to issue new swine flu advice to schools
Associated Press, via www.delawareonline.com • August 7, 2009

WASHINGTON — Swine flu is expected to return when kids go back to school, and the government is hoping its new advice on when to shut down schools during an outbreak will prevent the panic and confusion that led to hundreds of school closures last spring.

The government was to issue new guidance today for schools to follow when swine flu strikes. Unlike regular seasonal flu, this virus has not retreated during the hot and humid summer months and so far has infected more than 1 million Americans.

"We hope no schools have to close, but realistically, some schools will close this fall," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said this week during a forum with administration officials that was broadcast online.

The decision to close actually rests with local school officials. But those officials are looking to the federal government for advice about the new flu strain that has caused a global epidemic, or pandemic.

"I'm dealing first and foremost as a parent," Duncan said Friday on a nationally broadcast news show. "I want to keep my children safe and keep them learning." He said officials are asking parents to "use common sense" and encourage their children to vigorously wash their hands several times a day and take other safety precautions.

"We want to provide as much facts as we can" to local officials, he said. "Basically, this will be a tiered response. If there's a handful of children at a school who might be sick, we want the parents to keep them home. If the numbers escalate dramatically, then we might have to close the schools."

Duncan said officials anticipate the vaccine will be available by mid-October and that they want schools to be principal sites for getting the shots.

The administration wants to avoid the chaos of last spring, when more than 700 schools in half the states closed their doors. There are about 132,000 public and private schools in the U.S.

Students got an unexpected vacation, but many parents wound up scrambling to find child care.

School officials had been acting on advice from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which at first said schools should shut down for about two weeks if there were suspected cases of swine flu.

Then the CDC changed course, saying schools did not need to close because the virus was milder than feared. Instead, parents were told to keep sick kids home for at least a week.

Duncan said at a swine flu summit last month that closing school should be "a last resort, not a first resort."

He said earlier this week that school districts should use common sense. "If you have one child sick, that's one thing. If you have a whole host of children getting sick, that's another," Duncan said.

While this particular flu virus is new, the matter of school closings is not. Every winter, regular flu outbreaks prompt a relatively small number of schools to close for a few days because of high absenteeism among students or staff.

In addition to new guidance for when to close, the CDC and Education Department said this week they have set up a new monitoring system to track school closures across the country.

Still up in the air is whether schools will be turned into vaccine clinics, though Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has said that seems logical.
"We're seeing schools as potential partners," she said at the forum with Duncan.

Children are on the priority list for the first doses of swine flu vaccine, but because of time needed for testing and manufacturing, inoculations can't begin until school has been in session for more than a month; the government is aiming for Oct. 15. Many questions remain, including whether people will need one shot or two for protection. That is in addition to the regular winter flu vaccine that is also recommended for children.

States and school districts should be preparing for the possibility of mass vaccinations, federal officials have said.

They also should make plans to keep kids Learning when schools do close, Duncan said.

Duncan was interviewed Friday on CBS's "The Early Show."

An absolutely genuine soliloquy with universal applications!

Published: July 29, 2009

Are Schools Wounding Kids?
By Kathie Marshall
Premium article access courtesy of TeacherMagazine.org.

When I returned to the classroom this year after six years as a literacy coach, I chose to teach a reading intervention class other teachers actively avoided—a mix of 6th and 7th graders reading at a mid-2nd to early 4th grade level.

It was a year of change for me as a teacher. I was returning to the classroom for the first time since No Child Left Behind prompted my district to introduce mandatory instructional programs. These included a scripted reading curriculum for our intervention students.

Teaching struggling readers wasn’t new to me. In the late 1990s I had created a language arts intervention course using service learning as the primary vehicle for motivation. Now, however, I found myself pushing students through a massive workbook each day. Their general response was, “It’s boooooring!”

Pretty quickly I found myself “cheating”—changing up the curriculum on Fridays. We read plays from Action Magazine, wrote and illustrated poems, did word games, and sent letters to pen pals and authors. I began letting my more creative side breathe a bit. When the theme included a story about wacky inventions, we had a contest in which students devised their own. When author Elisa Kleven’s scrap art was introduced, students invented their own scrap-art figures and wrote character sketches. Throughout the year, there was this constant tension between what I was supposed to be doing with students and what I was actually doing.

And what was I supposed to be doing? To me, hand-in-hand with the goal of improving reading was the equally important goal of providing my at-risk students with positive learning experiences. Many were already beaten down and convinced they were losers. Bringing some fun and win-win into the classroom equation would help them, however cautiously, to try once more. Was this not important, too?

Teacher-consultant Bill Page defines at-risk students as “Children who are expected to fail because teachers cannot motivate, control, teach, or interest them using traditional methods and prescribed curriculum.” This is precisely what I observed in the early months with my intervention students.

To shine a light on these issues, one day I had my kids sit in a large circle. One child at a time answered the question, “When did you turn off to school?” In my years as literacy coach, I met privately with intervention students who had the lowest grade point averages, and they always had an answer to this question. Most often they turned off in 3rd or 6th grade, when they realized they were struggling and others around them seemingly were not.

Interestingly, seven of my 7th graders this year had turned off to school in the 2nd grade, when they were part of a district experiment that retained the lowest performers. They still had not forgotten what it felt like to be left behind as their friends moved on. At least now I was able to tell them how sorry I was this happened to them. Surely these students deserve a chance to heal the hurt and rethink their identities as learners, something no scripted curriculum I’m aware of can address.

‘Teachers’ Little Comments’

Recently, I came across Kirsten Olson’s new book, Wounded by School. I immediately devoured it and found more insights into the world of at-risk students. See Also Help Wanted: Leader to Promote a Culture of Learning By Kirsten Olson.

Olson explains that her book began “with a desire to understand the experiences of highly capable learners, virtuoso explorers who showed unusual vitality in learning.” But she was “quickly diverted by the repeated and powerful descriptions among my research subjects of educational wounding and laceration in school.”

As I read this, I immediately saw an image of myself as a 6th grader. I was walking back to class after recess, and for perhaps the fifth day in a row I asked my teacher, “Can I go to the nurse? I have a headache.” “What’s wrong with you?” shouted Mr. Wright. “Why do you always have a headache?!” It was another 15 years before my migraines were diagnosed. I warily hid my headaches from others after my teacher taught me to believe something was wrong with me as a person.

Wounded by School delineates a dozen different types of school wounding and their effects, including:

• Feeling you aren’t smart and your ideas lack value.
• Feeling you don’t have what it takes to be successful in school.
• Feeling ashamed of your efforts.
• Suffering a loss of ambition, self-discipline, and persistence when faced with obstacles.


In a section called “wounds of rebellion,” I found my intervention kids and their defensive symptoms:

• The only way to protect yourself is to rebel.
• In response to being unsuccessful or told we are unworthy, we become hostile.
• We are unwilling to see another point of view.
• We act out, as an adaptive response and it becomes fixed, maladaptive, and self-destructive.


Olson quotes one student, who remembers a crushing moment in 7th grade that led him to declare, “I quit! I just really quit!”

The student saw himself as a screw-up: “Basically I became motivated to not do well—like what I could do well was not to do well. ... Kids that struggle are so much more sensitive to moments—especially bad ones. These moments shape their whole lives, their sense of themselves. Teachers’ little comments had a huge effect on me.”

These lines could have been spoken by any one of my intervention students. In an essay about three strengths of his, one of my students wrote: “I am good at three things. I can draw (graffiti), I like to be bad, and I get in trouble a lot.”

Olson’s book is not directed only at struggling students. Her research clearly shows that all students are vulnerable to school wounds. She nails what I observed this year among the most capable 6th graders in my English and history classes. She writes:

“Rather than making them more dutiful, more competent, and more disciplined, they grew weary of school and learning … risk averse, overly intimidated by authority, or likely to underestimate themselves … simply deadened—less enlivened by the world and its possibilities than they might be.”

I wonder if this was why some of my most successful classroom projects from past years seemed less engaging this time around. Although these students were strong oral readers and tested well, they didn’t enjoy reading, were often highly apathetic toward learning, and resisted staying on-task if the work was challenging. As a result, I was disappointed at times by their response to assignments that had once excited and engaged my students before I became a literacy coach.

On our last day of school this June, as I dismissed the class with the cheery words “have a great summer,” one of my best students turned back and said, “We’ve been waiting for this day since September.”

What is within our control to do differently?

After eight years as a literacy coach, Kathie Marshall returned to her Los Angeles classroom in the fall of 2008 to teach middle grades language arts. She writes frequently about instructional practice and the teaching life.