Community Colleges: Educate More With Less

Community colleges are the Rodney Dangerfields of American higher education: They get little respect – even though they educate about half of the nation's college students.

Now community colleges are being asked to play a bigger role in retraining the workforce, educating low-income students and preparing students for four-year institutions. But they're being asked to do it with fewer resources and rising competition from for-profit colleges.

Gail Mellow, the president of New York's LaGuardia Community College, Rick Mattoon, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and Cassius Johnson, education policy director for the nonprofit Jobs of the Future, participated in Friday's EWA seminar panel looking at the challenges facing community colleges and what they need to help the country meet its educational goals.

Mellow said the recession has created record demand for classes at community colleges like LaGuardia, where two-thirds of the school's 50,000 students are from other countries. But the college in Queens doesn't have the resources to meet that demand.

“For the first time in 40 years, we closed our doors,” she said. “We simply could not put more people in.”

Meanwhile, for-profit colleges such as DeVry University and the University of Phoenix are siphoning off federal money that could go to bolster public colleges like LaGuardia. For-profits educate 10 percent of the nation's college students but receive 20 percent of federal student aid and report the highest default rates on student loans, Mellow said.

The panelists agreed the federal government rethink its approach to funding community colleges and measuring their progress. Right now, there isn't a good system for tracking students' academic careers or judging how well community colleges – as well as other institutions of higher education - are doing their jobs.

Mattoon, the Federal Reserve economist, said that community colleges' biggest strength is that they're closely tied to the regional economy and can quickly respond to the needs of local employers. He's suspicious of the federal government getting too involved in regulating the schools.

Johnson said the federal government should be careful not to create policies that cause community colleges to turn away low-income, underprepared or part-time students because they may drag down an institution's numbers.

Notes from the Future: Joan Walsh

For the full Joan Walsh experience, you might want to check out this You Tube clip before reading on. It was included in the introduction of the keynote speaker (“One of the more surreal experiences I’ve had,” quipped Walsh.)

Walsh is editor in chief of Salon.com and spoke as an emissary from the (possible) “great future of journalism.” Her talk hit on a theme that ran throughout this year’s conference—the future of education reporting.

Over the past 15 years, online-only Salon has tried lots of things, some of which have worked and some of which haven’t, says Walsh. Her message: trial and error is your future. There’s no one thing, one business model, one Web idea that will take care of us, says Walsh. “Nothing will work, but everything might work.”

Walsh pointed out the irony many education reporters find themselves in these days— we work at organizations wracked by budget cuts and massive reorganizations, and we’re covering school systems wracked by budget cuts and massive reorganizations. “We are struggling to hold onto two institutions that make democracy work,” she said.

Hand-wringing. Still, Walsh doesn’t want to be one of the hand-wringers bemoaning the decline of journalism. The Golden Age of Journalism wasn’t that golden, she points out. It was never as if ad revenues streamed directly into investigative units at newspapers, after all. But in the future, reporters may have to piece together work as freelancers, book authors, teachers, and consultants. It was the Journalism-Isn’t-Dying-It’s-The-Business-Model-That’s-Dying argument.

Some Walsh advice for the future:

• trust your audience and let them have a voice on your site
• non profits aren’t going to save journalism, but build partnerships
• use academia in creative ways, including as cheap reporters
• social media is a must (“Is anyone tweeting this?”)
• get people to voluntarily pay for your content (the NPR totebag saves us after all!)

We used to know what’s good for you. EWAers brought up good questions about whether Web hits and search engine optimizations are influencing what journalists write. Walsh admits working in the online environment has shaped her publication as it seeks to maximize hits. “Salon has always had sexy, silly headlines,” Walsh offered in one example. “We don’t have as many anymore. Because you really need Sarah Palin in the headline.”

Since it began, Salon’s stories have gotten shorter and newsier. Walsh, a self-avowed Twitterholic, says there are no more 11,000-word stories, and gone is the original vision of an online literary magazine. The site covered the passage of health care reform in part with a “text slide show” that made it “all over Google.” Walsh says the old newspaper mindset of “We know what is good for you” has to end. She insisted Salon is giving the public a lot of what it wants, but also inserting content “they didn’t know they want to know” (example: Salon’s investigative series on Arlington National Cemetery).

And the winner is…. Walsh’s talk came just before the presentation of the National Awards for Education Reporting. “I believe awards really matter,” said Walsh. She won a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism years ago, at a time when she was thinking about giving up the profession. “It really kept me going at a time when freelancing was just …kicking my butt. That award carried me for years—not the money, but the honor.”

While new media was the topic of Walsh’s talk, the judges looking for this year’s best education stories liked what old media turned out. Finalists came from the Washington Post, USA Today, The Oregonian, and The Washingtonian. And speaking of news organizations wracked by cuts…the grand prize winner is from the Boston Globe. Bob Hohler wrote his series even as the Globe was undergoing massive layoffs and a near-death experience. Despite that, Hohler got an assignment any journalist could envy, whether they’re in new media or old: nine months to report his prize-winning stories, on the state of athletics in the Boston Public Schools.

Too many Claras

She was valedictorian of her class, a nearly straight-A student, a gifted poet. Researchers at the University of Chicago called her Clara. A student at a predominantly Puerto Rican high school, Clara could have gone to any number of colleges. But when it came to reaching a decision that would alter the course of her life, Clara didn't spend hours talking to high-school counselors or poring over college rankings. She and her mother were running errands one day, drove past a Catholic college in the suburbs with a nice campus, and decided that was the place.

Jenny Nagaoka of the University of Chicago was part of a team that followed the girl and 99 others like her in a study of how low-income, high-achieving kids make their college choices. "You can't just hope someone drives by the perfect college for them," Nagaoka said at a Saturday morning EWA session. "That's not the policy solution we're looking for."

Bottom line: there are too many Claras. Almost 40 percent of students of similar backgrounds and qualifications are "undermatched," which basically means that they settled. It matters because students who attend more selective schools have a much better chance at graduating. If a student like Clara enrolls at a college like Northeastern Illinois, she'd have a 40 percent chance of earning a degree within six years. If the school were Northwestern, it'd be 90 percent.

Nagaoka said the students in the study were motivated, worked hard and generally had supportive parents - though the parents knew little about the college selection process. Surprisingly, given the students were among the best at their schools, they were not getting much support from their counselors or teachers, Nagaoka said. Clara described the counselors at her school as "grouchy."

You might think it'd be easier to earn a degree at a less selective school, but that's not the case, said panelist Matt Chingos of Harvard University, co-author of the 2009 book "Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Public Universities." Part of it is the campus culture, he said - at more selective schools, everyone does well and success breeds success. Dropouts are more common, and so also more acceptable, at schools that aren't as picky.

The quality and quantity of college counselors are factors in students landing in the right place, but there is "no silver bullet" for the undermatching problem, Chingos said. A reporter in the audience suggested that cost could be holding students back, too, especially in these hard times. She described interviewing a student who chose a lesser Cal State campus over her dream University of California school because of a $2,000 cost difference.

The panel moderator, Katherine Unmuth of the Dallas Morning News, talked about her experience writing about these students, their struggles and their dreams. The subject of one piece, Luis, agonized over leaving his family in Texas for Harvard. At home he'd been depended on to keep the family's immigration papers in order. He mowed lawns and worked alongside his parents and 13-year-old brother cleaning office buildings. After Katherine's story ran, Luis's Facebook page was indundated with messages from other students who wanted to be like him - and learn how he did it.

Humanities: Wanted, Dead or Alive

Friend 1: "I earned a degree in Western Civ?"
Friend 2: "Congratulations, but what are you going to do with that?"
Friend 1: "Ummm..."

Many fields, like health care and business, have jobs that logically follow completion of a college program. A physical therapy major, for instance, becomes a physical therapist. A business management major heads into, you guessed it, business. What about an English major? A gender studies major? That's no so cut and dry.

The future of humanities -- philosophy, literature, history, religion and cultural studies, among others -- is iffy. Dorothy Hale, English professor at the University of California-Berkeley, explained in today's higher education forum that budget constraints are spelling the demise of humanities. Case in point: her department has lost senior faculty, no longer has a receptionist and had its telephones removed. That's right, you can't call your professor anymore.

As a result, the English department is in triage mode, bandaging up its wounds while hoping the bleeding stops. Faculty, what's left of them, continue to teach and research their disciplines, but Hale says they've also taken on the role of fundraisers. They blog in an attempt to justify their positions and prove humanities still have some value.

Not so fast, says Debra Humphries, vice president for communications and public affairs with the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Humanities aren't dying, or even contracting. In 1987, humanities majors represented 9.98 percent of all college graduates. By 2007, that had risen to 12.12 percent. Employers continually plead for college graduates that can communicate effectively and think critically, in addition to being masters of their discipline.

Humanities can provide a broad base of knowledge and skills that can be applied to any field. And as long as colleges continue requiring underclassmen to take English 101 and Western Civilization classes, the humanities will persevere, just maybe not as majors.

Now for my thoughts... Who hasn't read a horribly written memo or e-mail from someone with a Ph.D.? People have to write. Who hasn't been intrigued by a scientist's invention, but the interview was a bust because the so-called expert couldn't convey his or her thoughts? People have to talk. Who hasn't interviewed a teenage scholar bound for an elite university, but the simplest of questions stumped the student? People have to think.

And a final thought... Thanks to EWA, the Lumina Foundation and all of the other sponsors that made this conference inspirational and educational. We wouldn't be here without their financial support. New Orleans in 2011!!!

Nationwide standards: the future?

Were the US to achieve a set of national standards for K-12 education, it would be a “game changing event,” according to Michael Cohen, president of Achieve, one of the first organizations to push for nationwide education standards. It's something administrations have been trying to achieve since the first President Bush was in office, and the current effort – in which states are collaborating to come up with standards that they can voluntarily adopt – is the closest we've ever been.

But will support for such an effort dry up after the next election cycle? What does the Obama administration's clear embrace of such an effort – tying it to federal funding in its Race to the Top goals – mean for the political fate of national standards? And how will these standards, if put into place, play out at the classroom level?

Cohen, together with Center on Education Policy President Jack Jennings and Massachusetts education Commissioner Mitchell Chester came together for a discussion on the national standards movement at one of EWA's Saturday morning sessions. The session was moderated by the Washington Post's Nick Anderson.

The panelists agreed: there are a host of reasons why nationwide education standards would be a good thing. At the moment, educational expectations vary wildly from state to state; a student who might be considered proficient in Kentucky or Mississippi might not be considered so in Massachusetts, for example. Chester said the current administration sees national standards as both a global competitiveness issue – they want to make sure students across the country graduate with the knowledge they need to function in a modern economy – and an equity issue: in the current system, there are big disparities in education quality between states.

But America has always embraced local control of schools, and national standards are a politically touchy subject. The current effort has been savvy, Jennings said, because instead of having the standards come down from the federal government, they're being developed by states together, and can be adopted on a voluntary basis. The revised set of standards, dubbed “The Common Core” is scheduled to be released in June.

How widespread will their adoption be? It's not clear. The Obama administration's efforts to promote the Common Core by tying Race to the Top money to a commitment to the standards has not necessarily been helpful, as it gives off the same top-down vibe those developing the standards have been trying to avoid this time around. Also, some states, including Massachusetts, which are considered to have relatively high standards, are taking a wait-and-see approach before deciding whether the Common Core will be a good fit for them.

Another crucial point: standards are one thing. Implementation is another, and it will require a lot of additional support in the form of curriculum development, textbooks, professional development, etc to translate these new standards into the classroom. New standards can't succeed without this backup, and these will all have price tags attached to them – something worth remembering in coverage.

What are some future of the implications of common standards? Could it lead to something along the lines of a common curriculum, perhaps? “That's radioactive in some circles,” Anderson said.

Chester said in his experience, teachers and principals want help with curriculum development, wherever it comes from.

“People are hungry for assistance,” he said. “Whether you want to call it common curriculum or whether you want to call it sharing what's working.”

Author, Author II

Three journalists who recently published books described the demands and rewards of book writing today at the final session of the National Education Writers Association national seminar in San Francisco.

Helen Thorpe -- a freelance journalist who has published in national magazines such as The New Yorker, a contributor to the This American Life radio show and wife of Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper --- described how she spent five years tracking four undocumented Mexican girls from high school into college for her recent book,"Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America."

The young women she wrote about faced rejection and problems with the legal system , such as being barred from getting a driver's license or a checking account, at at time when they were coming of age, getting boyfriends and moving into a critical stage of life.

"It is the worst moment in life to tell young people you don't belong," she said.

Ben Wildavsky, former education editor of U.S. News & World Report, credited the Kauffman Foundation that he now works for for enabling him to write his recently published book, "The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World." He set out to write a different book profiling universities around the world, but realized after attending a conference in China that the more compelling story was an emerging global race to the top for universities. He took advice of other innovators, he said, and decided to risk changing course.

Beth Fertig, an education reporter for WNYC public radio in New York City , took a year off to write about the struggles special education students face learning to read. Her recently published book is called "Why cant u teach me 2 read? Three Students and a Mayor Put Our Schools to the Test."

She said she was fortunate to find a publisher willing to let her devote part of her book to the policies that were hurting children.

"I ended up putting policy in the book," she said. "That's probably why it didn't sell so well, but teachers loved it."

The authors said they all wrote proposals to agents that involved some meaty reporting with an outline of key themes they wanted to address.

"My proposal was a sample chapter," Fertig said.

The meat is important, probably more so than ever, because agents and editors are turning down a greater percentage of proposals, Thorpe said.

All three reported they made it a point to write every day. Fertig worked in the New York City Library. Wildavsky had a daily quota of words, which he kept to himself. "Just write. Just sit down and write," he advised. "I stuck to that religiously for months."

Thorpe set a limit of 500 words a day, but later expanded that to 1,000 words. "That is a chapter a week," she said.

The authors said they all ended up doing their own publicity, which included solicting book jacket quotes, setting up their own web pages and urging newspapers and magazines to review their work.

All the effort and sacrifice was worth the production of a published book, the authors said. Fertig said her work is getting the attention of principals and making a difference in New York City.

"It is totally worth it," she said. "I feel like I got a master's degree. I visited more schools than in 10 years of daily reporting."

Pre-K: Who Are These Small Children and Why Should I Care?

Believe it or not, all those squirmy kiddos who show up in kindergarten may have been in school before they get there. It's a strange land called preschool -- and you really ought to be writing about it. And K-12 school districts ought to be paying more attention to it.

That's what the advocates at the Bridging Gaps panel wanted to pass along today. Lisa Guernsey of the New America Foundation said there's an obvious gap, even in policy and government, between preschool and elementary schools. But reporters can play an important role in linking the two.

Why bother? Marci Young, project director for Pre-K Now, said that investing early can help school districts ensure that kids come to school prepared. It pays off, she said. And if school districts want any chance of closing their achievement gaps, they need to get involved before kindergarten.

"The evidence is clear that we really should not be talking about a K-12 system anymore," Young said. "We really have to move beyond that."

If you weren't convinced, Linda Sullivan-Dudzic from the Bremerton schools in Washington State served up some proof. Her school district, which she described as "a little pocket of poverty in a very affluent county," linked up with preschools to help ensure that they were preparing children for what kindergarten needs.

It wasn't happening before: Only 4 percent of children there came into kindergarten knowing their letters before the district kicked off its efforts, Sullivan-Dudzic said.

So the Bremerton schools helped provide training for preschool teachers, evaluated how well different preschools were doing in preparing children, and put together a curriculum that preschools had to use in order to get their seal of approval. And it worked: The percent of kindergartners who met Washington standards in reading went from 56 percent in 2002 to 94.4 percent in 2009. Yowza.

That's the reason that the Annie E. Casey Foundation is paying attention, said Ralph Smith, its executive vice president. It sees preschool as "a pivot point" where it can make a difference. If kids aren't reading on grade level by third grade, Smith said, they're unlikely to graduate from high school.

"You can intervene," Smith said. "But it's incredibly more difficult, incredibly more challenging and dramatically more expensive."

I posed a question about untold stories in the preschool world. Guernsey recommended digging into remediation: How many kids come to kindergarten already behind and what is your school district doing about it? Young said we should be looking at how intervening with reading problems early -- or not doing so -- can impact the number of children who are labeled with a disability.

And Sullivan-Dudzic said it's worth asking what rules are preventing school districts from making closer alliances with preschools and seeing where resources are duplicated between pre-K and school districts.

We also gabbed about the flustering complexity of preschool funding and how to navigate it. Consultant Hedy Chang offered a pointer for California reporters: Every county here has a childcare planning council that should have analyses of the need for childcare in your area. Got pointers for reporters in other states to track down your pre-K funding? Tweet it under the hashtags #ewa2010 or #ewa10.

Author, Author

Got a story that needs more space?

Three journalists turned authors shared their experiences writing books during the Author, Author forum Saturday.

“If you’ve done feature articles or magazine articles, you can write a book,” said Ben Wildavsky, author of “The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World.”

Wildavsky said writers must be flexible as they grow a story idea into a book.

“If you are willing to be open to rethinking where you started,” he said. “You’ve got to believe in what you’re doing … if you care about the ideas, that’s really what’s going to make it work.”

Helen Thorpe, author of “Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America,” has worked as a freelance magazine writer for more than a decade.

Inspired by her own family’s immigration to the U.S. when she was a child, Thorpe followed four undocumented immigrants for five years, as they grew from 17-year-olds into young women. She watched them as they struggled with everyday tasks like getting driver’s licenses and renting movies.

“I grew up with a green card,” she said. “I was interested in what their lives were like.”

Beth Fertig’s book, “Why cant u teach me 2 read? Three students and a Mayor Put Our Schools to the Test,” started as a 2006 radio story on WNYC.

Startled by the low four-year graduation rate for special education students in New York City, Fertig found a student to make the story personal. The student graduated high school at 21 knowing eight letters of the alphabet, and her family didn’t know about her right to an education until it was too late.

“When I met this girl, it was like there was a light inside of her that nobody ever turned on,” Fertig said.

After the story was broadcast, the young woman wanted to help more students succeed. Fertig asked her if she could write a book about her story – she agreed.

“We interview people, we walk away and we’re done,” she said. “I wasn’t done, and I’m still not done.”

Fertig says she still meets with the students she profiled in her book, and takes them to the movies.

“That’s something that you can’t do in daily journalism,” she said.

But she admits she didn’t know anything about book publishing. She found an agent and got an advance for financial support. Her radio station gave her a year off – with health insurance, but no pay – to write.

She treated the book as a job, sitting at a desk and getting the words out every day. She just knew she had more time to go back and refine it.

“I had to think of myself as a working journalist,” she said.

Wildavsky and Thorpe set daily word quotas to keep things going.

Thorpe wrote 500 words a day, and no more. She said it made her excited to get back to the book the next day, and helped maintain the quality of her work. She later expanded her quota to 1,000 words.

“You can’t wait to get back, and your writing is really crisp and clear,” she said. “When you write 1,000 words a day, you write a chapter a week.”

Wildavsky published his book through Princeton University Press. Writers should be open to working with small publishers, he said. It doesn’t pay as much, but Wildavsky said his proposal was accepted within a week.

“Rule number one is to go work for a wealthy foundation,” he said, with a smile. Wildavsky is a fellow with the Kauffman Foundation, which encouraged him to write a book and financially supported his work.

Thorpe had the financial support of her husband during the years she spent working on her book.

“You can’t make a living spending five years writing a book,” she said.

Overwhelmed by five years of notes, she turned to “The New, New Journalism” to learn the systems other journalists have used to organize their notes.

“When I read what other people did, I realized what a disorganized journalist I was,” she said.

She recommended two other books as good examples of the kind of journalism she wanted to do: “Random Family” by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” by Anne Fadiman.

Turning around failing schools

Elementary school principal Nancy Guzman is credited with turning around not one, but three high-poverty public schools in Greenville, S.C., and Charlotte, N.C.
“Can she be cloned?” asked a panel at the Education Writers Association’s Saturday morning session titled “Turning Around Failing Schools.”
And more specifically, can her results, and the work of principals doing some of the same things at troubled schools across the country, be duplicated with a $4 billion of federal Race to the Top funds that local districts will get to try to turnaround their schools?
Justin Cohen, president of the School Turnaround Group for Mass Insight, said the concept of turning around schools is nothing new. He said many schools do turn around, sometimes by accident.
True turnaround, he said, is when a school experiences a dramatic change in performance in a short amount of time that sets the stage for long-term improvement.
Schools that turn around have three things in common, he said: Teachers are ready to teach. Students are ready to learn. (Schools have “systems of care” in place to help mitigate the effects of poverty). And staff is willing to act, with its hands not tied by too much district and state interference.
He encouraged reporters to ask some tough questions about how the districts they cover spend this federal money. Challenge them if it seems that they’re using the money to implement the same programs they’ve already been doing.
Cohen said there’s “no way” the federal government can pass specific policies about how to turn around a school that would work at all local schools. He said there needs to be some type of measure to show whether a school has really turned around.
Andy Smarick, visiting senior scholar at the Fordham Institute, said turnaround isn’t always the best option for failing schools. Some schools just need to be closed.
“No school has a right to go on 30 years if it’s killing kids,” Smarick said. “If that school isn’t working, I’m sorry, that school has to go away.”
Start new schools with a “DNA for success” and expand the efforts of schools that have turned around, he said.
He said the concept of turning around schools is nothing new; districts were already allowed to do so under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
“What we don’t have are high performing, high poverty districts. Why is it we can get the school right, but not the district right?” he asked.
Smarick cautioned folks from crediting some variables for turning around a school if those variables are also in place at schools that are not succeeding. For example, you wouldn’t say that because all of the teams that won Super Bowls had coaches who were males over the age of 30, that must be why they won. Teams that lost the Super Bowl and that didn’t even make it to the big game also had male coaches over the age of 30.
Guzman said there’s no “silver bullet,” or single solution to turning around a school. Holding up a book, “It’s Being Done,” she asked why principals who have had success are not being asked to help the federal government come up with solutions.
For Guzman, turning around her three schools – Bakers Chapel Elementary in Greenville, and in Charlotte, Pinewood Elementary and Sterling Elementary, where she still works - meant sometimes breaking the rules. When central office administrators required her teachers to spend 15 minutes a day doing mini-lessons that she didn’t find effective, she told them they didn’t have to. (She fibbed and told the district folks they were).
Most importantly, she said principals need to be able to get rid of ineffective teachers and they must set high expectations, above the state’s core standards.
“I got good teachers to come in. Some teachers left. They said, ‘This woman’s crazy. I’m not going to work for her,’” Guzman said. “That was the best thing that happened. I got some teachers who wanted to do the work.”

Speed Sourcing With Researchers

No panel, no prepared speeches. Friday's session on Speed Sources with Researchers was a series of quick introductions to experts in a variety of topics in education. Here's a snapshot of whom I got to meet.

Rick Hess, Resident Scholar and Director of Education Policy Studies, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research

Rick Hess is the author of "Education Unbound," and the Education Week blog Rick Hess Straight Up. He's a former political science high school teacher. He specializes in philantropy, accountability and school choice. Among the topics he and I talked about was charter schools, a particular interest for me because I work in a state that doesn't allow public charter schools. Hess said generally what works are "no excuses schools," which hold extended daily hours and Saturday classes, uniforms, young energetic teachers and strong disciplinary codes --- which are solutions that would not necessarily work in a public setting. I asked him what kind of research there has been in what elements in charter schools make the effective ones effective, he said that while there is much writing on the topic and effectiveness of charter schools, there is very little research on what elements make a charter school effective. When I asked him what topics are undercovered in the media, he offered advice about writing about school budgets, which he believes might be under duress until 2015. "The coverage tends to be hysterical about layoffs," he said. Reporters should be looking critically about what step increases, and COLAs really mean.

"There's not a lot of scrutiny about how much teachers get paid."

Laura Horn, Program Director, Postsecondary Education and Transition to College, MPR Associates, Inc.

MPR Associates, Inc., is a research and consulting firm. I asked her specifically about what I can find out about private colleges, in terms of financial aid numbers, and she referred to me the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, which contains information from the federal offices of Postsecondary Education and Federal Aid. When looking at data that might be collected and provided by nonprofits and other organizations, Horn gave some advice on analyzing data: data from the U.S. Census Bureau and other statistical agencies tend to be reliable. department of the Department of Education tends to be reliable. However, before using the data, know the context and rules for collecting that “impartial” data, which can have notable limitations. For example, graduation rates don’t count graduation rates for students who transfer in. However, the college you are covering definitely know what their transfer graduation rates are. It was interesting also to find out that MPR Associates is working on a report on the expansion of private loans.

Steven A. Schneider, Senior Program Director, Mathematics, Science and Technology, WestEd

West Ed is a research firm that has existed for more than 30 years that assists with curriculum development and assessment development, etc. Schneider has worked on helping publishers and researchers on projects having to do with what works when it comes to teaching math and science. One project, “Aim for Algebra,” has been used as a supplementary text for high school students who need to augment their learning, and for middle school students who are advanced in math. We chatted about the “math wars,” the debate over whether to stick to the traditional methods of teaching math, which focuses on learning math facts, or whether new methods, which have more of a focus on problem solving. This debate comes up when districts choose a curriculum. First, he said the debate is overstated -- researchers say that learning math requires both knowing facts and the conceptual understanding that leads to problem solving ability. He said when reporters write about this debate, one thing to consider is that the traditional tests weren’t measuring what some of these math books are teaching -- inquiry, laboratory skills and problem solving. Some of suggested sources are the National Math Panel (aka, National Mathematics Advisory Panel), within the Department of Education, and Focal Points, offered by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Thomas Parrish, Managing Director, Education and Human Development Program Manager, Palo Alto Office, American Institutes for Research

Thomas Parrish was a witness against Washington State in a lawsuit that claimed that the state was not adequately funding special education (the plaintiffs lost). This is interesting to me, as a reporter in that state, because parents of special education students in districts that I cover have made this argument --- that not enough resources are being spent on their children because districts get two sources of funding for children in special education, the federal special education funding and the state basic education funding per FTE. “In my mind, is your biggest concern whether your kid is getting every dollar they generate, or do you want your child to thrive?” Parrish said. He said that when reporters cover special education and trying to analyze whether a district is doing a good job, there are several overlooked places --- 1) look at test scores, 2) look for lawsuits --- how often has the district been sued over their special education program, 3) look at budget line items and see how much is being spent where, including litigation.

What is innovation? And are the feds getting it right?

Even within the “reform” camp there are differences over what ought to top the federal government’s policy agenda.

That was the takeaway Friday morning from a panel about the Obama administration’s education policy priorities. The Race to the Top competition has built momentum behind the administration’s “innovation agenda,” said moderator Virginia Edwards of Education Week, but questions persist about whether the education department is pushing the right changes.

A major question is whether the federal government is trying to push change too quickly.

“The mechanism of something like Race to the Top may not be the best model for the federal government sponsoring innovation because it’s too big and it’s too fast,” said Ed Haertel, a testing expert who advised the Obama administration on the competition.

Race to the Top gives political cover to people who want to lift charter caps and tie teacher evaluations to student test scores, said Rick Hess, education policy director at the American Enterprise Institute. But much of what the competition rewards is whether states push “conventional best practices — or what our friends think is hot and current at the moment,” he said.

Instead of telling states exactly what to do, Hess said, the federal government should use its clout to create conditions where changes can be made.

That’s exactly what the Obama administration is doing, argued Charlie Barone, federal policy director for the lobbying group Democrats for Education Reform. The only thing absolutely required for a state to win Race to the Top funds is the elimination of a “firewall” preventing test scores from being used in teacher evaluations, he said. Everything else is left up to state officials, and Race to the Top is just there to help.

Education Department spokesman Peter Cunningham also challenged the idea that Race to the Top is telling states exactly what to do.

“The role of the federal government is to have money set aside to try things that otherwise wouldn’t be tried,” he said, and state and local officials get to decide what exactly those things are.

But with school districts across the country slashing their teaching forces, asked Maisie McAdoo, a spokeswoman for New York City’s teachers union, is the brand of “innovation” Race to the Top encourages the best way to spend money?

Cunningham defended the administration’s priorities, saying that preserving jobs without also trying to improve schools would be negligent.

Some innovations don’t fall neatly into the federal government’s policy agenda, Hess said. He encouraged reporters to look for stories in state budgets that are only going to get thinner over the next half-decade and in the technologies that could reshape how teaching and learning happen.

“Cost-effective models are going to be much more important,” he said, pointing as an example to schools that use the Rosetta Stone computer program instead of live teachers to run foreign language classes at low cost.

So how should reporters cover Race to the Top-sized innovations?

Writing about the potential impact of prospective reforms could help bring high-level policy conversations down to the ground, Cunningham said.

“The real story is not the policy debates that happen inside the beltway,” he said. “It’s what happens in the field and in the classroom.”

Judging Assessments

When testing data lands on reporters’ desks, it typically winds up in the paper broken down by who is doing well and who isn’t. But at a panel on Friday, two testing experts asked reporters to begin testing the tests themselves.

Before the next battery of test results comes out, there are a handful of questions Tom Van Essen (Education Testing Service) and Stanley Rabinowitz (WestEd researcher) would like reporters to ask:

What is being measured?
Why is it being measured?
How is what’s being measured measured?
How are the results reported?
What are the intended or unintended consequences? What behaviors are these tests encouraging in our classrooms?

Tests are not cheap to make or tailor to a specific set of standards. As a result, states and districts will sometimes pay for one test and use it to measure things it wasn’t designed to measure. A test meant to gauge whether students can pass a certain proficiency bar will also end up being used to measure how well teachers teach. Rabinowitz called this “mission creep” and said it’s important for reporters to determine whether a state is trying to answer too many questions with one test as a way of saving money.

Another thing to look out for is whether a state purchased an “off the shelf” test and didn’t pay for any alterations that would make it higher quality, but also more expensive. Also, once the new testing program is in place, its normal to see a drop in students’ scores at least in the first year. If there’s no dip, reporters need to find out why that is.

Asked which test they would get rid of if they could choose, Van Essen and Rabinowitz both picked interim benchmark assessments — tests given several times a year to judge how well students will do when the final summative test rolls around. The problem (with some of them, not all) is sometimes the tests are essentially copies of the state exam so teachers could gleam the same information just by looking at last year’s test results. The tests can end up pushing teachers to focus on details, like whether students understand alliteration, for weeks at a time and at the expense of other material.

Rabinowitz divulged what he called one of his greatest professional discoveries: “Any teacher who could use the very sophisticated tools that are being developed for formative diagnostic testing doesn’t need it because she’s already doing it in the classroom. If the teacher needs these complex tools, she probably can’t use them without a lot of professional development.”

Speed Sourcing: Experts on Call

Reporters pinched for time welcome quick, reliable connections to experts in specific fields who are available to either respond to questions or point us to useful resources and information posted on the web, even the bits and pieces buried within technical reports and federal data archives. Here's a quick take on five 'reliable sources' -- from EWA's Friday afternoon speed sourcing session.

Don't be confused, public radio fans (you know who you are). MPR (www.mprinc.com) is not Minnesota's esteemed radio station. The website coordinates all kinds of national college completion data, along with useful explainers to help decode some of the intricacies of college-linked data, reporting and analysis. One great tool, Grad Rates 101, walks through the basics of how graduation rates are calculated (and how the numbers can change, depending on what's considered). There's also a terrific resource, Quickstats, that MPR supplied to the National Center for Education Stats (www.nces.ed.gov/datalab/quickstats) that lets you plug in your own variables and create charts and graphics. They're best at context for national graduation numbers, community college info, and on understanding student progress in post-secondary education.

You want to learn? Step One: Show up for school. Attendance counts focuses its energies on making this point on a national stage; to date, only a few cities track long-term or chronic attendance (despite collecting daily attendance data for NCLB, which mandates truancy reporting -- but doesn't require record-keeping for explained absences, even those that sum up, over a school year, to a month or more out of school. Attendance counts has data showing that low attendance in Kindergarten leads to low levels of student achievement in elementary school and, for the poorest kids (often facing the greatest challenges) up into 5th grade. Contact them to get a better understanding of how to look at your own district's attendance patterns -- and to learn about model cities like Baltimore, which has revamped many of its school structures (largely folding stand-alone middle schools into K-8 schools) to improve attendance and achievement. Learn more at www.attendancecounts.org.

Special education and how it's funded is a huge topic for most local reporters -- and one that's plenty mysterious and fraught with confusion. For help decoding special ed funding policies in your state, and for understanding the federal mandates on special ed spending (and the proportion the feds actually spend), get in touch with Tom Parrish at he American Institute for Research. Before you do, though, check out the new report soon-to-be-posted to the NASDE website, www.nasdse.org, link to follow, detailing special ed funding for all 50 states. He's a great connector, having worked in 25 of the 50 United States, and can help reporters find published resources (and sometimes, actual human sources) for stories in their states.

Bruce Fuller of The Institute of Human Development at UC Berkeley is a sociologist whose original research aims to inform national education policy. He's recently studied Latino kids "social agility" in school and has long worked in the area of early childhood education, whether via charter schools, traditional publics or private preschools. (See his book Standardizing Childhood for what he calls a "left-wing critique" of universal preschool.) Fuller favors a kind of "mixed market of institutions," blending traditional, charter, and alternative/nontraditional school models, and investigates how that mix can improve the quality of education and advance equity. Contact him at the Institute, http:ihd.berkeley.edu.

Early on at the EWA conference, we heard about using gaming to both motivate and measure student learning. While the folks at UCLA's QUESST aren't quite producing World of Warcraft competition, they do have a pretty nifty game, involving trampolines and fractions, that they're evaluating with middle-school students in central California. I got to test-drive the game, and it's easy to see how the math folds into the play -- and how much fun kids have when they get into the bouncing, clicking and fraction-figuring. They're working on other math-based games for K-12 students -- but the one I'd really like to play is the naval firefighting game they built for the U. S. Navy. Learn more: contact Terry Vendlinski or Ron Deitel at CRESST, via the National Center on Research and Education at UCLA, at www.cresst.org. http://www.cse.ucla.edu/

Reporters' Roundtable: The Polarized Education Conversation

Charter schools. Merit pay. Firing teachers. Turning around schools. As the federal government gets more involved in the daily operation of public schools, and reform becomes a buzz word for every politician, the education debate seems more heated -- and polarized -- than ever. We took an hour to talk about how the new education wars are playing out in our reporting.

Greg Toppo, national education reporter for USA Today discussed how a less-than-glowing story about Teach for American can lead to accusations of shilling for the teacher unions.

Phillissa Cramer, an editor at Gothamschools.org in New York City, talked about the slew of vitriolic comments that any story charter schools inspires, and her attempt to promote a more thoughtful on-line conversation by personally emailing and thanking commenters who say something that sounds more reasonable than mean-spirited.

And Linda Perlstein, public editor for the Education Writers Association, wondered if editors are contributed to the problem, if black-and-white stories are an easier sell for the front page. "'Charters Work,' or 'Charters Don't Work,' make a betters headline than 'Some Charters Work and Some Don't,'" she said.

Some tips the panelists and audience members shared for not getting too caught up in the cross fire.

-- Visit schools! Talk to real people. Don't forget about that. Get off the phone with the union reps and the charter advocates and politicians. Talk to students and teachers and principals to see what they think and how they are affected by the debates.

-- Fact check. Don't just quote outrageous-seeming facts that opponents are spewing about or at each other. It's our job to truth squad these statements.

-- Include context. While Teach for America has had a huge impact on debate, such teachers still constitute a small number of the overall teaching workforce, for example.

Assessing Quality Preschool Classrooms

Figuring out if a preschool classroom is a welcoming and educational space for children doesn’t require special skills, say Kira Hamann, a preschool teacher at Ravenswood Elementary School in Chicago and Lisa Vahey with the Chicago-based First Five Years Fund, a nonprofit organization that supports early education.

The classroom should have a large, inviting space that allows children and the teacher to gather for group activities. Several “centers” should be set up around the room that allow small groups of children to explore activities on their own. And don’t forget quiet nooks that allow an individual child space for privacy.

And forget an explosion of store-bought materials taped to the wall. Instead of emptying out the local teacher supply store, preschool teachers should have classrooms that focus primarily on work done by the children. “It should be the students’ work that’s pushing through,” Hamman said.

When it comes to the teacher’s interaction with young children, reporters should see that the teacher is comfortable with engaging her students’ attention as well as allowing them independence to play and do projects on their own. That comes through whether the teacher is animated or more subdued in her approach to teaching, said Vahey and Hamann.

Keeping these clues in mind, time-pressed reporters visiting preschool classrooms can usually spot good teaching in just a half hour of observation, they said.

“A 30 minute view of teaching is a pretty authentic snapshot,” Vahey said.

Hamann and Vahey’s presentation included videos and pictures of effective interaction with students as well as classrooms geared toward early student learning. Reporters looking for further examples of infant and toddler interaction of adults can visit the California Department of Education Infant/Toddler Learning and Development Foundations, http://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/re/itfoundations.asp, for links to reports and a companion DVD set.

—Christina A. Samuels

Mining Federal Data

Mining federal education data can pay dividends for higher education reporters looking for information about a wide range of institutions - from prestigious four-year colleges to the cosmetology school just down the street.

At a session on how to access data at the National Center for Education Statistics, reporters learned about ways to find relatively up-to-date information through the IPEDS data base, which currebtly has reports from close to 7,000 schools, for the school year 2007-08.

They also learned about the QuickStats database, which surveys an estimated 117,000 every four years to get an overview about the lives of America's college students.

David Radwin, of MPR Associates, showed how the IPEDS data -- updated annually -- provides information by race, gender, age, and full- or part-time status. It also has graduatuon rates, financial aid statistics, faculty salaries, tuition and fees, and the estimated cost for a year on campus.

For parents ans students looking at colleges, he advised that they consult NCES' College Navigator site.

The IPEDs data base allows users to enter search criteria that allows comparisons between institutions. He compared Stanford to UC Berkeley on Pell grants, which he said was the best marker for low-income students. His search found that 12 percent of Stanford's students received Pell grants, compared to 31 percent for UC Berkeley.

Anyone seeking help using the data base should contact Aurora D'Amico, at 202-502-7334 or aurora.d'amico@ed.gov. The IPEDS help desk is at 866-558-0658. They have free webinars that can help you use the data.

Another source of online data can be found at the site of the Institute for College Access and Success.

-- David McKay Wilson

A dozen higher education stories to chase

Scott Jaschik, editor of Inside Higher Ed, offered up a host of story ideas, along with a few trends worthy of a skeptical eye.

1. The new yield: It refers to the percentage of accepted applicants who actually attend a school. He says there is an increasing shift of institutions having multiple yields, based on the type of majors being pursued by students.

2. The newly competitive public university: Most students don’t go to Ivy League schools. Increasingly, it’s getting more competitive elsewhere. It’s interesting how many places are in the business of rejecting applicants, that didn’t used to be.

3. How to evaluate doctoral programs is about to become a hot issue: They are expensive. They determine prestige. And there is a lot of attention on them, as universities are considering trimming their programs. New rankings are about to come out – and could mean big things for schools around the country.

4. The completion agenda and community colleges: This is one of the most under-covered areas of higher education, Jaschik said. Community colleges take pride in being access institutions. There’s a big debate over how much tough love community colleges should provide. Some are starting to tighten up admission standards. Private colleges – particularly the smaller ones concerned about their own enrollment - are also starting to pay more attention to community college for transfers.

5. The non-public public: Schools desperate to cope with cuts in state funding are shifting away from their public roots by relaxing limits on out-of-state or international students to capture more dollars. It’s often cloaked as a diversity move, but it is money that is fueling the shift.

6. Fairness in budget cuts: There has been too little scrutiny of these cuts. Cuts are often done across the board. But is that really fair, considering the level of reliance of each school? Community colleges, for example, rely more heavily upon state appropriations than flagship four-year schools.

7. For profits: One of the big impacts of the recession has been a surge in for profit enrollment. Look at who’s going to these schools. How are they paying? They are not inherently bad. Many of them are doing good things. But there are some real abuses going on.

8. Non profit/for profit linking up: Look at the relationships forming between for profit and non profit schools.

9. Non-profit privates that are in trouble: There have long been predictions that economic troubles could force some schools to close. It hasn’t happened yet. But it could. For profits are now in the market to buy struggling non profits – chasing their accreditation.

10. Will the iPad change everything? For years, everyone has been predicting that some tech change would revolutionize higher education. Jaschik says the iPad could be significant.

11. Culture wars at religious schools: Tensions are rising on these campuses across the country – in part because Catholic colleges enroll a lot of non-Catholic students and hire a lot of non-Catholic faculty.

12. Grading: Teacher grading standards are under scrutiny. It’s a subject on which everyone has an opinion.

And here are three trends to be skeptical about:

1. The three-year degree: Most of the places offering them have had very little interest. There is a very small subset of students for which this works.

2. Out of state students are going to save us: Some of the states talking about it as a sure thing to fix their budgets may be disappointed.

3. Research excellence is going to transform the state: A lot of states are putting big money into their research institutions. There are too many puff pieces being written about it. The problem is that too many schools are overselling their ability to make it into the top tier of research schools.

Panelists Debate Proper Role of Foundations in Education Reporting's Future

At Friday's Education Writers' Association luncheon on the future of education journalism, panelists could not reach consensus on what type of role, if any, nonprofit foundations should play in the profession's future.

On one side of the debate was Executive Director of the Hechinger Institute for Education and the Media Richard Colvin, who argued that foundations are funding the kind of in-depth, explanatory journalism that education beat reporters have neither the time nor the financial means to tackle without such support. On Monday, Colvin launched the Hechinger Report, a new education reporting venture he hopes will dramatically expand reporters' access to foundation funding for investigative reporting projects. Colvin encouraged EWA members to follow his lead and start doing education journalism differently. "Stop doing what you're doing," Colvin told the luncheon audience. "Editors who tell reporters they must go to every school board meeting should stop ... We have to start adding value and authority to our stories."

Inside Higher Ed Editor Scott Jaschik disagreed with Colvin's advice and warned that journalists may have been too quick to embrace Colvin's model. Jaschik says he has great respect for foundation journalism and the likes of NPR, Education Week and the Hechinger Report, but worries that their narrow focus on producing excellent features negates the good reporting that comes from following a beat. "The best pieces come from beat reporting," Jaschik says. "I think you figure out the wonderful features because you have gone to those school board meetings."

Whether it be through hard-hitting investigations or day-to-day beat reporting, panelist Steve Barr, president of Green Dot Schools, told EWA members to focus on storytelling. "The technicality of education reform is so boring. That's why publishers always say how people aren't interested in education news," Barr says. "But on Friday afternoons, when I sit with the parents of my kids' preschool acquaintances, our kids sit and play and we talk about education. Ad nauseam. They are talking because they are obsessed with it, which is why we need more great storytelling to draw people into these issues."

Evaluating Charter Schools

Charter schools are a hot-button issue, and oceans of research are pouring out from organizations all over the country. Some say only a tiny percentage are producing students who are performing better than those who attend traditional public schools. Others show that in some cities, charter schools are saving the educational futures of thousands of children.

Margaret (Macke) Raymond, a researcher at Stanford University, said a decade ago, journalists placed little reliance on research. She talked about the "challenging responsibility" that journalists have to sift out the reliable sources and information. She said there is purpose and facts in every piece of research produced, but there is also bias. Knowing the organization's agenda can help in finding out which way they'll slant.

Raymond also pointed out that every study design has its strengths and weaknesses--if a researcher doesn't acknowledge that, they are driven too much by ego or bias.

Eva Moskowitz, the founder of the Success Charter Network in Harlem, said she has "a tremendous skepticism of data."

"I know it's almost not educationally, or politically correct," said Moskowitz, a former New York City council member. "Of course, we believe in data, we're data-driven, but it's really complicated."

Moskowitz gave an example of a typically high-performing student who may not feel well, or are experiencing family problems. The parents may have been embroiled in an argument that morning, or the father may be in the local precinct. Six kindergartners could have had a stomachache.

"If those kids don't do well, it looks like the teacher's lousy," Moskowitz said. "We know she's not. We go and see her teach. When you're dealing with little kids especially, emotions come in. We still use data, but when dealing with kids, we have to consider it with a dose of skepticism."

Moskowitz said a "perfectly legitimate approach" to breaking down the nuances of research is to call the sources. Every good reporter has a large network of sources to help analyze data. And contacting the people who are affected by those numbers can be "illuminating," Moskowitz said, but of course there will be a bias attached.

After the women wrapped up their advice for using research, reporters--several from Moskowitz' home state of New York--used the question-and-answer portion of the session to vent frustrations about what they called a lack of transparency in charter school data. Journalists said they have trouble getting special education statistics, expulsion and suspension data and teacher retention and salary numbers.

Moskowitz defended the claims, saying charter schools report "voluminous" information to many agencies. She also shed light on the "knock-down, drag-out fight" in New York over charter schools.

"It's hand-to-hand combat of the nastiest kind you could possible imagine," she said. "I'm not sure at the end of the day that it furthers public debate."

Raymond said the fight has only begun, and that most of country is only in the first of four wars that will be waged against charters in the next five years. First, school districts were trying to ignore charter schools, acting as if they are inconsequential and irrelevant. The second war is an orchestrated campaign of misinformation, which has certainly begun, and then the war of lawsuits, which has also been emerging. The last will just be "all out Armageddon," which Raymond said she saw in the airline and telecommunication industries.

"This is only the beginning of a very carefully strategize campaign against the charter school system," she said.

Moskowitz said she felt the charter schools were targeted, but at the end of the day, she knows that reporting is crucial.

"I think that when schools suck, you should write about them."

Is your teacher pension underfunded?

The answer is: yes, it is unbelievably underfunded.

But the real question should be: by how much? And how can you as a reporter figure that out?

A session at the Education Writers Association 2010 conference late Friday afternoon about state teacher pension funds gave reporters an idea of the problems and how best to access the information about covering what could be the most important financial problem facing U.S. schools.

Stuart Buck, a doctoral candidate at the University of Arkansas, and John Abraham of the American Federation of Teachers gave differing points of view on the pension mess.

Both urged reporters to track down their state pension plans' comprehensive annual financial reports and search for the actuarial sections that show how much money the pension system needs for future payouts and whether it sets aside enough money.
Buck, who wrote the report "Underfunded Teacher Pension Plans: It's Worse Than You Think," said the basic finding is states are under-reporting how bad it is.

By looking at the basic state reports, U.S. teacher pension funds are underfunded by $332 billion or at about 78 percent.

That is not the real story.

Most pension plans, he said, assume they will get an average interest rate of 8 percent on their investments, called a discount rate. That means they don't have to have as much in the bank now to pay off future liabilities.

But Buck believes that rate is too high and should be more like 6 percent - which would peg the unfunded liabilities at more like $933 billion.

"Private plans generally choose a discount rate based on a blended average of corporate bonds," he writes in his report. "We do contend that public pension funds should adopt the private pension practice."

That was a bone of contention with Abraham, who said over the time of the fund the interest rates will ebb and flow, leaving an average of about 8 percent.

"The $933 billion number is a made up number," he said. "They said we should follow the private sector's model."

But the private sector typically invests in more stocks than bonds, producing more wider swings when the market rises or falls, he said.

Buck said Abraham was ignoring the fact that politicians usually use the heady times of the stock market to provide more benefits ... thus putting more stress on the pension systems in more lean times.

The difference is significant because how poorly the pension plans are underfunded may determine how states and school districts cut jobs raise taxes in the future.

"The basic difference is one of assumptions," said Scott Stephens, senior writer at the Catalyst Ohio, who moderated the discussion. "John (Abraham) has taken a traditional point of view and Stuart (Buck) is going to more of a conservative point of view. It's hard to find right or wrong answers in this."

Tracking College Budgets

“Don’t trust everything works the way it’s supposed to - money in, money out.” - Ryan Gabrielson, Center for Investigative Reporting Fellow.

College budgets are a behemoth hard to understand, but rife with stories, if you know how and where to look, according to Gabrielson and Josh Keller of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Budgets are hard to understand, and most of the stories center on tuition and administrative salaries.
But if you have and understand budgets, you are a better reporter. Keller made the example of UC Berkeley increasing the number of out of state students it admits. A high ranking official said it was to expose California students to the rest of the country, but in reality, it was to help plug a large budget gap. Josh had the budget in front of him, and was able to call the official on the spin.

• Sit with someone who can explain the budget. They want to talk
  
• Go to the Chronicle of Higher Education website for data and information on budgets
• Get on Moody's e-mail list for your university to get reports on their finances
• Get the university and its foundation's 990s for information on salaries and compensation.
• Take an accounting class or two so when you sit down with finance officials they don't have to explain every little thing.
  
• Get audits on the university. File FOI requests if you have to. Schools will try to hide behind FERPA. The SPJ website has information that can help.
  

Ryan gave the example of a fake art program he discovered through audits.
A great story idea is to look into faculty disclosures for work done outside official university duties. In medical schools, these disclosures are pretty wide-spread, because faculty will get paid for lectures, etc.

Foundations are tougher to crack, but they are really important as they provide a lot of fundraising efforts for cash-strapped schools. Get their 990s. University agendas are quietly set by donors.

A lot of universities and colleges have an internal office that does institutional analysis. They are an internal control on the university.


Go to Academic Senate meetings! They are a great source of information. Talk to students, because they are living the policies set by the university. Go to board meetings for community colleges.

Evaluating Teacher Performance

Experts talked about the pros and cons of tying student performance to teacher evaluations with most of the discussion focusing on so-called "value added" testing, which means measuring a student's progress over time through a data system.

Henry Braun of Boston College pointed out that teachers are professionals and warned about the pitfalls of equating teaching to test scores and noted that other factors can influence this.
He said that it should really be used not so much a measure of performance, but more as a way to pinpoint where triage in needed i.e. which teachers need help or training.

George Noell of Louisiana State University talked about how Louisiana, one of the poorest performing states, has been trying to turn around schools for over a decade. He said they have been taking a look at graduate programs for teachers to determine how well they are training future teachers and to try to determine which subjects they teach well and which are weak.

Julie Baker said Houston's public school system has been using value added system since 2007 with success. The review process rates a teacher's performance and gives them feedback. She said teachers need meaningful effective feedback to improve.

Other points made during this session seemed to be that teachers should be involved in setting up any kind of evaluation system and that test scores should be only one measure of perfomance.

Edmoney.org helps journalists, public decipher stimulus spending

With a $787 billion in federal economic stimulus dollars being doled out, and a promise of transparency from President Obama, it should be easy to find out how your local school district or college is benefitting, right?

Unfortunately, no, according to the panel, “Tracking Education Stimulus,” held Thursday at the Education Writers Association conference in San Francisco.

The government’s stimulus web site, recovery.gov, gives little detailed local information about how much is allocated to specific schools, colleges, road projects, housing programs and other initiatives, panelists said.

So, EWA is providing a new resource called edmoney.org to help journalists, policy makers, educators, parents and the public understand how the money is being spent in each local community.

“The place where stimulus is the most interesting is on the local level,” said Matt Waite, a former investigative journalist who now builds Internet databases for the St. Petersburg Times.

Waite and four other journalists working part-time for EWA are making records requests to school districts, community colleges and universities around the country. Then they build databases with the information. Obviously, that’s a mammoth task, so they’re asking for your help.

If you’re a journalist who has written a story about how stimulus dollars were used for local education, EdMoney wants you to send it to them. If you’re a parent or a teacher who has some inside information about how stimulus dollars were used, or perhaps misused, send it on. That could provide some good story ideas for journalists, Waite said.

To submit create an EdMoney account at edmoney.org/accounts/register.

The project is being funded by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Ready or not: Getting to 2020

The nation's chances of meeting President Obama's ambitious college-completion goals by 2020 are fraught with challenges, panelists said Friday morning. Chief among them: What is college completion?

The federal government, for example, does not count two-year degrees or certificates as completions, said Terry Hartle, a senior vice president at the American Council on Education. The rest of the world, on the other hand, does. So how can we possibly be ranked No. 1 in the world without counting those people, he asked. Both Obama and Sarah Palin are counted as college dropouts by the government's flawed definitions, Hartle said.

Much of the discussion centered on the use of statistics and whether the right numbers are being used to measure completion. The government should be focusing on the actual number of people finishing college programs rather than completion rates, said consultant Art Hauptman. The emphasis on percentages is likely to cause problems, he said.

Despite obvious misgivings with the way the United States will measure completion, panelists said the 2020 goal is an opportunity to improve U.S. higher education. Universities, for example, need to start looking closely at the social problems that plague urban areas, said Mohammad Qayoumi, president of California State University East Bay. Helping students from those troubled regions will be a key to improving graduation rates, he said.

Out of every 10,000 students in the bottom economic quartile, Qayoumi said, only 771 get a bachelor's degree. And only 32 of those degrees are in science, technology, engineering or math fields. Those figures are alarming, he said.

States in particular need to make some fundamental changes to improve their numbers, Hartle said. Among his recommendations: Create more college-ready students, invest in public higher education, focus on nontraditional students such as veterans and the unemployed and start emphasizing completion rather than access.

Speakers also alluded to some tough choices. Should public universities keep out students who have remedial needs in order to boost completion rates? Should budget-conscious schools, particularly those in California, reverse their recent enrollment caps by increasing teaching loads?

GRE Program & Future of Graduate Education Update

(Speaker Thomas Van Essen, PhD, Director of External Research at the Educational Testing Service - tvanessen@ets.org)

• GRE revised General Test

The GRE General Test is going to be revised in response to feedback from the graduate community; content will more accurately reflect the skills that candidates need to succeed in the 21st century. Verbal Reasoning will have greater emphasis on complex reasoning skills, will be more text-based/about reading, will be less dependent on vocabulary knowledge, and no longer have antonyms and analogies. The emphasis is switching to reasoning about texts. Quantitative Reasoning is going to be covering the same content but with more real-life scenarios instead of abstracts; there will also be fewer multiple choice questions and new computer-enabled questions. Analytical Writing measure will not change other than having questions more sharply focused (aimed to prevent test takes memorizing general essays prior to test). Test takers can navigate freely within a timed section and can access a test preview/review tool; a calculator will be provided on the Quantitative Reasoning measure. Exam is still adaptive but will be so by section (i.e., done by section, not by question).

Score scale is also changing "professional standards (AERA, APA, NCME) require us to change the scale" because the test is changing so much.

July 2010 - free test preparation will be available to test takers; August 2011 - first day of testing for the revised test; Nov. 2011 - score reporting for the revised test begins. Test takers who need their scores before Nov. 2011 must take the GRE General test before August 2011.

Paper exams will still be available in some areas where technology is not available for new test format.

Sign up to receive information at http://www.ets.org/gre/updates

• ETS Personal Potential Index (ETS PPI)

"A more complete picture of graduate applicants" -- how do you measure the things that are most important for success?

The PPI measures the following personal attributes: Knowledge & Creativity, Communication Skills, Teamwork, Resilience, Planning & Organization, Ethics & Integrity. These are difficult to test, however, because they are often "fakeable" on an exam. (Original format of this was called a standardized letter of recommendation.) The PPI now sends people (professors, etc., who are selected by the applicant) a link to an electronic form, where results go back to ETS.

These results are tabulated and prepared between the different reviewers of a candidate. Results are also put on scale where they are compared to all other candidates. (Results can also adjust for, for example, a professor who always gives high ratings.) Reports are sent to institutions, with graphic charts that present both quantitative information and qualitative comments.

• "The Path Forward: The Future of Graduate Education in the United States" (by Commission on the Future of Graduate Education in the United States)

(Short video; actual report is available online: http://www.fgereport.org)

Looking at the skill set of today's workforce. Much attention has been paid to K-12, but if the skills of graduate students are in trouble, the country is in trouble. What's happening to graduate schools is a real big issue. Outstanding graduate education provides leadership in the global community; America needs to remain the leader of graduate education. Key currency now is ideas, economy is dependent on innovation. Only 26% of college graduates complete a graduate degree in 10 years. Graduate education has gone global and America's model of graduate education has been adopted on a global level. It's a good thing that other countries are catching up, but what does that mean for the American system? U.S. graduate education needs to reflect these global changes. How do we better support people in graduate programs? How do we make graduate programs affordable for the best and the brightest who cannot afford a graduate education?

Changes need to be made at universities, employers, and government. A partnership across these domains yields the best solutions.

Posted by Kelci Lynn Lucier, Guide to College Life on About.com
(http://collegelife.about.com)

Waiting for Superman: A chat with filmmaker Davis Guggenheim

The documentary filmmaker of Academy-Award winning "An Inconvenient Truth” shared clips and details from his upcoming film, “Waiting for Superman,” during the first evening of the Education Writers Association conference in San Francisco.

Davis Guggenheim is not a journalist, but he uses many of the same techniques in capturing and telling his stories. But unlike many journalists, he lets his passion and ideas show. Guggenheim says his goal in making this film, which follows the lives of a handful of urban public school children as their families try to get them a better education, is to energize regular people to become more passionate about improving our nation’s public schools.

The filmmaker admits toward the beginning of the documentary that he carries around a haunted feeling because of the three public schools he drives past each day on the way to drop his own children off at a private school.

Gugghenheim says the public is disconnected from the debate over public schools and most parents don’t know what to do to get their children a better education. Because the movie aims to explain current education reform ideas and research in a way that everyone will be able to understand, the filmmaker expects some education insiders will find something not to like in his movie. But his goal is to get a conversation going and if the questions asked by education reporters are any indication, this movie will likely be a talker.

Waiting for Superman isn’t scheduled for general release until next fall, but it’s going to be shown at the Seattle International Film Festival in a few weeks, so I will get to see it then. If you want to come to Seattle to see it with me, call and we’ll go out afterward to start the conversation.

Donna Gordon Blankinship