Entries for October 2008

Child safety concerns could prompt some school districts across the nation to cancel classes and keep students away from voters on Election Day.

The measures schools use to monitor visitors might be difficult to enforce November 4 when thousands of voters descend upon polls located at their community schools.

The Chicago School Board will vote this month on whether to create a high school for gay youth, many of whom experience abuse in their current schools.

If approved, the School for Social Justice-Pride Campus would become the nation's third gay-friendly high school (joining New York's Harvey Milk and Milwaukee's Alliance). Proposed Pride Campus Principal Chad Weiden says the school will be open to all genders and orientations and will not ask students to identify either at the door. He says statistics show a need for such a school. The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network found that 86.2 percent of gay youth were verbally harassed in the past year and 22.1 percent were victims of physical assaults at school.

GLSEN Director and Founder Kevin Jennings says gay high schools are necessary to ensure gay students get the diplomas they deserve. "The fact is these kids are not making it through school, and we have to make sure they do while also making sure that every school is safe for every kid," Jennings says.

College Board, the owner of the SAT, is introducing a new standardized test next fall for students in the eighth grade. Like the PSAT for 10th graders, the new test, known as ReadiStep, will gauge the skills of eighth graders in mathematics, critical reading, and writing. The College Board says the scores won't be used for admissions or merit aid decisions. Only students and their schools will receive the results. The goal, officials say, is to provide feedback to school districts that want to prepare more students for college before they reach high school. "What makes this assessment valuable and not just another test is its instructional relevance," Lee Jones, a vice president of College Board, said this week in announcing the new test.

The National Center for Fair & Opening Testing, which is generally opposed to standardized testing, released a statement calling the new test "a cynical marketing ploy designed to enhance test-maker revenues, not improve access to higher education." Eighth graders already take statewide assessments that determine how well they have mastered math, reading, and writing skills. Robert Schaeffer, the center's public education director, questioned the value of another test. "The new exam will only accelerate the college admissions 'arms race' and push it down onto even younger children," he said.

College Board officials emphasized that school districts asked for the assessment. They also said the test is tied to rigorous national standards, so the results would offer a more reliable picture of students' abilities than state tests. "We feel confident enough from talking to College Board member institutions that they are excited about the test," Jones said, although he would not name or identify how many school districts asked the agency to develop such a test. College Board says it expects school districts, not students, to pay for the exams, although the exam fee has not been set yet. The two-hour, multiple-choice tests will be offered to students during a two-week window in the fall or the spring. Teachers, who will proctor the exams, will receive the results in four weeks.

Higher costs have forced school districts nationwide to raise meal prices and cut field trips. Now teachers are falling victim to the weak economy. Some 375 public school teachers lost their jobs in Dallas last week. District leaders argued that they had no choice but to lay off teachers, along with hundreds of other school employees—more than 1,000 in all—to help stave off a projected $84 million budget shortfall.

The Dallas Morning News has video of elementary school students crying uncontrollably over teachers who were fired. The layoffs, which most people in the district knew were coming, still caught some teachers by surprise. One high school teacher says he was summoned out of class, fired, and then sent back to pack his belongings as his students watched. In addition to initiating layoffs, the district is shifting some 475 teachers among the different schools.

It's not yet clear how the massive reorganization will affect students. For now, the focus is on the teachers; the district has hastily organized a job fair to help its laid-off employees find work. One school district in the greater Las Vegas area has expressed interest; it needs nearly 400 teachers. "Simply stated, hallelujah," the head of the largest teacher association in Dallas told the paper when asked about the prospect of work in Las Vegas.

When high school teacher Sarah Roach takes attendance, she routinely notices that she has more students in her classroom than the number who are technically enrolled in Latin courses she teaches. They're not lost or sneaking into her classroom to visit friends. The extra half-dozen students are coming for the Latin.

Roach, 54, has taught Latin at Highland School in Warrenton, Va., for 25 years and has seen interest in the ancient language grow steadily throughout her tenure. When she first began, Roach taught a few students in a single class. Now she teaches 80 students, in classes geared toward a range of skill levels.

New Orleans students who were forced to switch schools in the wake of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina performed poorly the first year in their new schools but quickly recovered and made significant improvement in the second and third years, according to a new study. The research, conducted by Bruce Sacerdote, a researcher at Dartmouth College, also found that more evacuees eventually enrolled in college than past waves of students who graduated from their former high schools in New Orleans.

These findings suggest that the costs associated with relocating children to different schools are offset by apparent long-term academic benefits. Many families who fled New Orleans and surrounding areas in the wake of the two powerful storms enrolled their children in schools in Houston; Mobile, Ala.; and Baton Rouge, La. Not surprisingly, the evacuees who made the most gains on state tests in the second and third years at their new schools had attended low-performing schools in New Orleans, the study found. Four-year college enrollment for evacuees from the graduating classes of 2006 and 2007 went up 4 percentage points, the study says. These findings could give fodder to proponents of shutting down failing schools in other parts of the country—a decision that local and state officials are often afraid to make for fear that relocating students is too disruptive. The full study appears here.

During the 2000-2001 school year, more than 160,000 students attended Detroit public schools. This fall just 96,000 students are enrolled. The school district has lost about 10,000 students a year for the past five years. While the struggling economy in the Motor City has driven some families out of the region, the district can no longer afford to dismiss the declining enrollment, says Detroit Board of Education President Carla Scott. As enrollment drops, so does the amount of money the school district receives from the state.

Cue a 200-page report released last week that tackles the questions of what the Detroit school system needs to do to improve. "When you clean out your closet, you see the mess and the disorganization. You see the worst first," Scott says. "But now that we have this report, we know what we're dealing with, and we can start putting the pieces of our school system back together in a more efficient way."

Several public school systems in Wisconsin are considering doing away with high school class ranking—emboldened by the claim that high schools that have discarded rankings are seeing more of their students get into competitive colleges and universities. District administrators in the state say that too many excellent students are overlooked when schools report class rankings to colleges. "We've got a high-achieving district with very bright students, but you can only have so many in the top 10 percent," one district assistant superintendent told the Associated Press. She cited as an example one senior with a 3.88 grade-point-average who organized a fundraiser for displaced Ugandan citizens and is active on other fronts, but who isn't ranked in the top 25 percent of her class. A high school principal reported that the number of seniors admitted to the University of Wisconsin-Madison jumped from 18 to 46 in the two years since his district abandoned class rankings.

Other public and private schools in the country have also stopped publicizing class rankings and eliminated naming a valedictorian in favor of recognizing more top students. But many schools—including high schools in Pittsburgh and Hartford, Conn.—still give parents and students the choice of releasing their class rank to colleges that require it or in instances when it would benefit the student.

Although the politically popular goal of financial aid simplification is getting more and more lip service lately, the reality is that financial aid applications and programs are likely to get only more complicated and frustrating, at least in the near future.

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings made headlines this week by saying she would cut down the 10-page, 145-question Free Application for Federal Student Aid to a quick two-page, 27-question form. But she didn't say when. It won't be anytime soon. The Department of Education has already drafted the FAFSA parents and students will have to fill out starting next January, and—surprise, surprise—it is seven questions longer than this year's form. What's more, while Congress earlier this year ordered Spellings to simplify the application, Education Department officials say Congress also added requirements for new information that will probably mean even more FAFSA questions in the future about things like a student's foster care status, cooperative education earnings, and risk of homelessness.