Entries for September 2009

Students at more than 350 schools across the country will be working up quite a sweat tomorrow. They will be exercising for 10 hours straight.

But not all at once. In a unique attempt to fight childhood obesity and cuts being made to school physical education programs, elementary, middle, and high schools from New York to Hawaii and Alaska have signed on to a newfangled "fitness relay" event: Each school will have students exercise during a prearranged 15-minute time slot, beginning at 8 a.m. Standard Time. As each short exercise period ends, another school in a different location will pick up where the last school left off, and the pattern will continue for 10 hours, until 3 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. It's being called the first Exercise United States Day.

BusRadio, a controversial radio programming system for school buses that was investigated during the summer by the Federal Communications Commission, is ceasing operations, a company spokesman confirmed yesterday.

According to a report released by School Transportation News, an industry publication, the economy is largely responsible for the closure of the four-year-old media company, which broadcast music, contests, public service announcements, and commercials to approximately 10,000 school buses and 1 million students in 24 states.

In recent months, an alliance of the nation's governors and state education officials has led an initiative to develop common academic standards to which all public K-12 students would be held. In an early step toward that goal, experts convened by the group this week released a set of math and English skills they say students should master before high school graduation, the Washington Post reports.

The hefty standards envisioned in the proposal, which is posted at www.corestandards.org, leave little to be desired in terms of quantity. In math, they range from core practices such as constructing viable arguments and making sense of complex problems to modeling quantitative relationships and mastering probability and statistics. And the standards for English language arts focus on reading and writing skills as well as speaking and listening proficiencies, including presenting information and responding constructively to advance a discussion.

In an attempt to stem a brutal cycle of student shooting deaths, Chicago Public Schools officials have used a newfangled probability model to identify 1,200 high school students statistically at risk and will direct $30 million in support services and outreach initiatives to help protect them this school year.

District officials hope the new plan—which will assign personal advocates and social workers to the most at-risk students and also offer some of those students after-school jobs—will help "totally stop the youth violence problem" in the nation's third-largest school district, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.

Can you name this tune?

Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high,
Take a look, it's in a book—a reading rainbow....

If you guessed the theme song of Reading Rainbow—the PBS television show that has brought books to life for two generations of children—you would be right. But you might not hear it anymore. It recently was announced that the show is ending after a 26-year run. The show is the third-longest-running children's program in PBS history—behind only Sesame Street and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.

Media reports say Reading Rainbow is ending because no one is stepping forward to put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the broadcasting rights—not PBS, not the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, not the show's home station of WNED in Buffalo.

In an NPR interview, John Grant, who is in charge of WNED's content, said the funding crunch is partially to blame, but the decision to end Reading Rainbow also can be traced to a shift in the philosophy of educational television programming. That is, the Department of Education is now funding literacy programs that teach kids how to read, not why to read, as Reading Rainbow did.

The first streams of federal stimulus funds are flowing to schools, but administrators aren't exactly riding the gravy train. In a new national survey conducted by the American Association of School Administrators, many K-12 school district leaders said they appreciate the opportunities of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—designed to provide approximately $100 billion for school improvement programs, grants, special education, and other initiatives—but a lack of flexibility in the funding and a pressing need to fill state and local budget shortfalls are obstacles that stand in the way of saving jobs and promoting real change.

Survey respondents—who included 160 district administrators—said a heightened level of bureaucracy and reporting tied to the stimulus funds has "limited their time and ability to implement education reform and innovation." More than two thirds of respondents said the stimulus dollars are either filling funding gaps or represent only marginal growth in funding levels. Districts reported that they are investing the ARRA funds in one-time costs such as professional development, classroom technology, and classroom supplies. Administrators said that because the recovery funding is a one-time deal, they cannot justify hiring new staff.

The AASA is monitoring the recovery act and advocating the greatest flexibility possible in the use of its funding.