EWA in San Francisco

Community Colleges: Educate More With Less

2010-05-17T15:16:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-05-16T08:22:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-15T17:02:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-05-15T16:44:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-15T15:57:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-05-15T14:49:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-15T14:27:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-15T12:03:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-15T10:50:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-05-15T09:34:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-15T08:51:00.001-07:00

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

2010-05-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-14T17:38:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-14T16:53:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-14T16:47:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-14T16:43:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-14T16:04:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-14T16:02:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-05-14T15:51:00.001-07:00

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

2010-05-14T15:47:00.000-07:00

“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

2010-05-14T12:26:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-14T11:32:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-14T10:52:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

(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

2010-05-13T22:43:00.000-07:00

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

What if Tests Weren't Multiple Choice?

2010-05-13T20:38:00.000-07:00

Which comes first, assessments or curriculum? In this educator's version of the chicken and the egg, the assessments come first because they drive instruction. Teachers teach what will be tested.
This was a theme of "What if Tests Weren't Multiple Choice?" at an EWA dinner sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Jim Gee, professor of literacy studies at Arizona State University, said video games combine tests and learning. Players move forward as they learn and master skills. Ah, if only school were like the game he holds up as example: World of Warcraft! Some of the virtues of video games include problem solving skills, lots of data tracking progress, innovation and collaboration.
If we stick with the old testing system, Gee said, we will be shut out of the emerging market for learning, much in the same way that old energy technologies leave us stuck in a system not geared for the future.
Dan Schwartz, professor of education, said, that while there is room for improvement, academic standards tend to better than the tests. He showed a complex California standard in U.S. history -- one that would require lots of deep thinking -- and then showed the test item that was based on an isolated fact. What he thinks is important is having the skills to learn and keep on learning.
He highlighted one experiment in which students who first were told how to do something and then practiced it did worse than those who were given a chance to invent before being told. The inventors did even better when they were given new material to tackle within the test. Schwartz has digital lessons which gives students a chance to be creative and learn.
One of the reasons this is so important, Schwartz said, is tests affect what the public thinks is important to learn. If test items change, he said, so also will what counts as useful learning. And that could bring about significant change.
Some of us have stories about the multiple planes needed to get to this conference. The flight of the third speaker, Connie Yowell, director of education at the MacArthur Foundation, was cancelled.
Linda Lenz of Catalyst Chicago and Catalyst Cleveland, read some words from Yowell in a MacArthur report on digital media and learning. The remarks focused on how MacArthur had turned its attention from schools to learning, in particular how students learn outside of school via digital media.
"We soon discovered that a dramatic transformation is under way in how young people think, learn, socialize and engage in civic life," Yowell wrote.

The bloody transformation to the school beat

2010-05-13T17:11:00.000-07:00

Grisly homicides, drive-by shootings and serial rapists.
Those are the types of stories this female reporter from Southwest Florida wrote about for close to a decade.
But when the education reporter at our paper left to get her masters, this crime writer was politely asked if she minded taking over that beat.
“Do I have a choice?” I asked my editor.
“Not really,” he responded.
Why me? I thought.
I don’t have kids. I don’t even have nieces or nephews.
Frankly, the thought of covering education makes me want to play a round of Russian roulette.
I want blood and guts. I want to expose corruption and justice.
That’s exciting.
That’s what people want to read about.
So far on my new beat I’ve covered kindergarten plays, attended school board meetings and reviewed SAT results.
This week I’m in San Francisco with education reporters from across the country learning how to better cover my beat. But my main goal is finding a handful of juicy story ideas while attending the Education Writers Association’s 63rd national seminar.
Aptly, the first session I picked was for reporters new to the beat.
Facilitatators Linda Perlstein of EWA, Beth Shuster of the Los Angeles Times and David Hunn of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch led the 3 ½ hour session focused on how to stay on top of this massive beat. To boot, Perlstein said there’s no more interesting of a time to be in the education beat.
And that's not sarcasm, she said. Things are changing fast, especially with growing national interest in K-12 education reform.
Here are a few things that stuck out:
To learn the lay of the land, one must build a calendar, create a contact list and request public records.
But most importantly, get into schools – public, private, preschool and charter (yes I know they are public too).
That’s where you find the meat for stories.
My most intriguing lesson of the day?
You can carve a niche out of this beat.
“Pick up the things that intrigue you the most,” Perlstein said.
You can be a court reporter, you can be a crime reporter, or you can be a feature reporter.
“It’s what you bring to it in terms of your interest,” Shuster said.
I realized this when the group started discussing teacher merit pay – a hot issue in Florida right now after Gov. Charlie Crist last month killed a bill that prompted sick-outs, sit-ins, street protests and a flood of opposition throughout the state. Calling it “significantly flawed,” Crist decried the bill — which would link teacher pay to student test scores and eliminate tenure for all new hires — as both overreaching and too vague.
We were encouraged to find out more about the teachers in the districts we cover.
Where did they get their training?
How are they hired, evaluated and weeded out if necessary?
And how does their evaluation process work?
How much of a background check do they do for new hires? Do they drug test?
Ok, at this point my interest is sparked so I chime in.
I tell the trio of education experts I know a teacher who I know does drugs and drinks too much. She never grades papers and is constantly getting bad reviews.
This is a woman teaching impressionable young minds, yet can barely make a good decision on her own, I think. She is supposed to be instilling good decision-making in her students.
When the teacher and I interact about her job she says, “All I have to do is make it through this school year and I’m in. I’ll have a contract and be protected by the union. Then they can’t fire me.”
I might not be able to cover a drug dealer’s trafficking trial right now and tell readers they’ve been convicted and sentenced to 25 years behind bars.
But I can write a story about teachers with drug habits and how hard it is for them to get caught and axed from employment.
Yeah, this could be fun.

Natalie Neysa Alund
Bradenton Herald
nalund@bradenton.com
http://www.bradenton.com/

Journalists can help track school stimulus spending

2010-05-13T15:50:00.000-07:00

Many journalists got into reporting to follow the money. The Education Writers Association is taking on the colossal task of tracking federal stimulus funds funneling to school districts around the country online at Edmoney.org.

The site launched in January with a database that went live today, and, eventually wants to combine data with information shared by local journalists as well as others -- community members, think tanks, and more -- to give the numbers context and provide information about what is really happening to money gong to schools from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

Matt Waite of Hot Type Consulting and Nirvi Shah of the Miami Herald, both working on the site funded with a grant by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, updated journalists on the project on the opening day of the EWA 2010 Conference.

"We talked about it being a multi-layered story. It's more than data," explained Waite. "Data can't tell you where money was misspent on something. That is why God made journalists."

Waite is a journalist and author turned Web developer, and is perhaps best known for the Politifact.com site and its Truth-o-Meter. Other part-time staffers are spending time now collecting data from the federal government, and states. Said Waite, "Between links what other journalists are doing, getting data from the federal and state governments, and through our own journalism we thought we could paint a pretty good picture."

Waite and Shah encouraged journalists and others to contribute links to stories and share other information to feed the Edmoney engine.

I'd love to see parents and teachers and others tell us what (school districts) spent (the money) on," Waite said.

EWA meets in San Francisco

2010-05-03T13:11:00.000-07:00

Next week EWA will be in San Francisco. We'll be discussing changes in federal education policy at the K-12, higher ed and pre-k level. We'll talk about teacher quality and how you measure it. Community colleges are a hot topic for higher ed reporters. We'll look at bridging the gap between pre-k and K-3.

The conference runs from May 13 to 15.

Multiple Intelligences

2009-05-13T14:28:00.000-07:00

There are multiple opinions about the theory of multiple intelligences, as two sparring panelists demonstrated at a Saturday breakout session, but they did agree on one thing. It was “a masterstroke” for Howard Gardner to label his theory of different strengths in how to learn as “intelligences.”

For Daniel Willingham of the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia, Gardner’s use of “intelligences” rather than “abilities” is a rhetorical plus. That is, if the goal for schooling is self-actualization. However, if the goal is to use Multiple Intelligences theory to prepare students for the workforce, “it likely seems a disaster.” Willingham said it had added little to scientific knowledge about the functioning of the mind, although it actually is a theory of the mind rather than educational practice, he noted. He agrees with Gardner that Multiple Intelligences should not be taught in schools. Rather, schools need to set goals, according to Gardner, then use Multiple Intelligences to guide the curriculum.

Branton Shearer, on the other hand, supports the use of Multiple Intelligences theory in schools as a tool to offer more diverse learning opportunities for students. “It can change schools from a factory model to “inspired places for learning,” he said. Shearer is a lecturer at Kent State University and chair of the American Educational Research Association special interest group on Multiple Intelligences. He also has developed a self-assessment tool for students and parents to help them create students’ multiple intelligences profiles. He has edited a forthcoming book on the global view of the theory of Multiple Intelligences to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the release of Gardner’s work on the theory.

The two panelists also agreed that using abilities or Multiple Intelligences t o help students learn is good practice. “It is good to play to students’ strengths and appeal to their interests,” Willingham said, “but the instruction needs to know when and how to shift to larger learning goals.”

Asked about a new mandate in New Jersey to develop “personalized instructional programs” for all students, Willingham said that teachers say they like them, but research shows they hardly ever use them. Shearer does not believe such a top-down mandate will work because it takes time and training to change the culture of a school, which can only happen from the bottom up.

Gardner has set criteria for what has grown to eight “intelligences” in his theory, including linguistic, spatial, musical, logical-math, kinesthetic, naturalist, interpersonal and intrapersonal.

-- Anne Lewis

Early Childhood

2009-05-08T14:07:00.000-07:00

Support for early childhood education efforts might be at an all-time high. But Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, early childhood expert Joan Lombardi and Rhode Island KIDS Count director Elizabeth Burke Bryant lamented to a group of education reporters that the programs still haven’t expanded fast enough.

“The good news is that the battle is over,” said Kaine, who noted that Virgina politicians who battled him over the issue a couple of years ago now tout the benefits of pre-kindergarten programs.

But the bad news for Kaine, as well as Bryant and Lombardi, is that advocates have not been able to capitalize on the new momentum as quickly as they would like-- partly because of the economic downturn.

There’s “flat funding and Head Start is only serving half of the eligible children,” said Lombardi. “Although preK is growing, there’s a significant number of children who still don’t have access.”

Since Kaine took over as governor in 2006, the state has expanded access to pre-kindergarten programs for at-risk four-year-olds, created a unified office of early childhood education, and devised a voluntary rating system for private and public pre-kindergarten programs in an effort to create a “consumer mentality” among parents.

President Barack Obama has pledged billions of dollars for early childhood efforts, so some of the funding woes will likely diminish. Yet the panelists said more strident efforts must be paid to shore up quality and stability of early childhood education programs. Specifically, they mentioned simplifying the complicated and “hobbled together” funding streams in some cities and states, and ensuring that all early childhood educators are qualified.

Bryant said hopes that someday pre-kindergarten is so much a part of the American education fabric that kindergarten teachers will automatically ask families which pre-school program their children attended.

“We are missing whole generations…of kids the longer we wait before we scale up,” she said.

-- Sarah Carr

Thinking about how to improve math outcomes

2009-05-07T10:23:00.000-07:00

One of my more interesting sessions at the Education Writers Association conference was on how to improve math outcomes. It was moderated by a Washington Post reporter who has actually spent the past year taking an Algebra II course at a high school in Fairfax County. But most of the workshop was spent debating whether states and school districts should focus on creating new and higher standards or improving the quality of math instruction through better recruitment and training of math teachers. The panelists agreed that both are necessary, and it's clear that states focus on the standards more because it's easier and considerably cheaper. But it was also clear that raising standards requires considerable buy-in from math teachers, and maybe a new way of doing business for them. Also, there was a big debate on whether Algebra II is really necessary for life/college success. The guy from Achieve Inc. trotted out all his statistics that showed people who take Algebra II and beyond in high school are far more likely to succeed in college. I asked whether that might be because those kids are smarter in general, so it's more a correlation than causation. He said nobody's really studied that question. Oh. (Of course, I say this as a person who never went beyond high school geometry.)

Arne Duncan's vision

2009-05-07T10:20:00.000-07:00

Here's a roundup of the points made by Arne Duncan during his talk last week at the Education Writers Association conference:

-- While it's important have research-based reform, "the unproven program is absolutely worth trying. If we never try new things, we'll never find new things that work." -- Charter schools have been demonized by unions and lionized by the right, when the reality is that "some charters are good and some charters are bad." He said he is "fundamentally for choice and competition," and the number of charters should be expanded. He called for states such as Michigan to lift their caps on the number of charters. He also said that underperforming charters need to be shut down. -- Big proponent of basing teaching pay on performance to reward the best teachers. But he also said it's very important to work with unions in developing how that would happen. -- Also is pushing for much better teacher-evaluation systems, such as videotaping teachers in the classroom to review and analyze what they do right and wrong. He said that when he played basketball, his coach would rerun the tape of his mistakes "15 times and, trust me, you really learn from that." -- Says his department has hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on reform efforts. "Those districts and nonprofits making a different in student achievement, you want to partner with you and scale up those efforts." -- On the stimulus money for schools, "this is a real test of states' ability and creativity. There's a huge opportunity at the back end for more money, if you are creative with your stimulus dollars." -- Also suggested districts should spend their special-ed stimulus dollars on a "massive investment" in professional development for all teachers to help with work with all kinds of students. On Title I stimulus dollars, "I'd invest in time, time, time. I believe our school day is too short, our school week is too short, our school year is too short. I'd be investing in time and I'd be doing that this summer." -- Wants to focus on high school graduation rates to measure school district performance, but says he wants to back off four-year graduation rates because than schools don't want to help struggling students who take longer. -- Says he's a "big believer in value-added education," which is looking at growth in test scores versus just the scores themselves. Incidentally, the audience at Duncan's speech was standing-room-only and the crowd seemed very impressed. He is an impressive guy.

Under-covered Stories in Higher Education

2009-05-07T10:09:00.000-07:00

From Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed:

1) Take a critical look at so-called across-the-board state budget cuts to higher education. The schools in the public system share the state budget, but each type of school has a radically different share. So flagship universities, for example, have a lot more flexibility on tuition than the community colleges. Even if states make proportional cuts, are the cuts really fair?

2) Question the assumption that tuition freezes are a good thing. A number of governors and President Obama have suggested tuition freezes or low tuition hikes are a good idea. Scott says enrollment will go up at many public institutions – but money will go down. With less money, universities will make concessions like cutting sections and increasing class size. Scott predicts these things will disproportionately affect the ability of low income students to succeed – especially their ability to graduate in four years rather than 6.

3) Watch what the economy means for liberal arts disciplines. Scott says a lot of community colleges and urban publics are gutting liberal arts. He suggests watching for programs that get protected in its place – like allied health or business.

4) Look at what happens to second tier private colleges when the admissions numbers come out. Scott says small reductions in enrollments at these colleges can make a big difference for tuition-dependent schools.

5) Follow the Pell entitlement debate. Although this is a Washington-based story, Scott suggests looking for local angles. Not all colleges are rallying around the idea that Pell Grants should be an entitlement, as President Obama’s suggested. The student aid association is lobbying against it. So what are your local college presidents and financial directors saying about the plan?

6) Report on outsourcing academics. Schools are starting to outsource classes, not unlike outsourcing a school bookstore to Barnes and Noble or food services to Marriott. Higher Ed Holdings in Texas is providing schools with exam graders. Another company, Straighter Line, offers general education courses for $99 a pop. The company negotiates with colleges and universities to take transfer credit for these courses. The controversy? Outsourcing raises questions about efficiency, quality and what it means to say you have a college degree.

7) Watch for shifting ideas in the testing movement. The SAT-optional trend is growing. Schools like NYU and Colby College have made the SAT I test optional if students take SAT II, those subject matter exams in topics like biology, physics and French. This is a shift in the anti-test debate. Before it was all about getting rid of tests altogether; now there's discussion about simply limiting the kinds of tests applicants must take.

8) Track remedial education at community colleges. Huge numbers of entering students need to catch up with remedial ed. But how much they need to catch up depends on the institution, where standards (known as “cut scores”) vary. So applicants have started to shop for schools based on whether they can avoid remedial ed. This has prompted a debate over the standardization of cut scores.

9) Report on campus race issues. Scott says there was a flurry of racial incidents on college campuses recently, right around Election Day. Ten schools have a new student group called Youth for Western Civilization, and it's bringing anti-immigration advocate Tom Tancredo to college campuses.

10) Take a look at university anti-bias rules. Scott suspects this issue might come up at the Supreme Court soon. Public universities sometimes go beyond state and federal law when it comes to anti bias rules. But some religious groups on campus have been refusing to comply, saying admitting homosexual members, for example, could conflict with their first amendment rights. Scott says to look to the Christian Legal Society and the Alliance Defense Fund for leads.

11) Research whether the Israeli-Palestinian debate is heating up at your local colleges and universities. Since the Gaza invasion, the political left has been more vocal about this issue on campus. Scott cites movements to cut off academic ties to Israeli universities and academic freedom cases where tenure is delayed for professors critical of Israel.

12) Watch for the unionization of graduate students. Currently it’s illegal for private university graduate students to unionize, but Scott says this may be about to change. If it does, universities are in a bad position to negotiate on pay and benefits for TAs, since finances are already tight.

13) Investigate the rise of certificate programs. President Obama has talked a lot about Americans getting at least one year of post-secondary education. This call should bring people into the higher ed system who weren’t there before. Certificate programs take just one year, compared to associates degrees over two years and bachelors over four years. Scott says this is a shift in education, that a degree isn't all that matters.

During the discussion following his presentation, Scott suggested angles on college and university sports. If a school cuts sports, he says to watch whether a school gets challenged on Title IX. He suggests skepticism when groups connect sports cutbacks to a drop in giving, unless the school’s a big sports hub. There was also some talk about schools adding sports – like Georgia State’s new football team. Scott says this move is usually due to a school trying to change its image – to increase male enrollment, for example. Georgia State is transforming from a commuter college to one with a resident body, so that factors in as well. But Scott says, sports are rarely a moneymaker for a school.

To close out, Scott suggested some community college stories: Reverse transfer trends from 4-year to 2-year colleges; accelerated Associates Degrees; undocumented students landing at community colleges. North Carolina is the focal point, but there’s a big case in California as well; four-day week and one-day week; schools experimenting having students on campus fewer days; the community college inability to keep up with demand in health fields. Nursing and allied health programs are highly competitive. Look for how many qualified applicants nursing schools say no to.

-- Kristina Tabor

Paul Tough, Charter Capacity Sessions On Video

2009-05-04T10:03:00.000-07:00

Who needs writeups from me when there's these helpful NAPC videos that can show you what you missed?

Paul Tough NAPC
New York Times Magazine editor and author Paul Tough addresses a luncheon at the Education Writers Association annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on May 2, 2009

Charter Schools Panel at Education Writers Assoc. May 3, 2009 NAPC
Panel discussion on public charter schools at the annual Education Writers Association meeting May 3, 2009 in Washington DC.

Education Writers Conference: My Reality Check

2009-05-03T21:14:00.000-07:00

For a new education writer like me the conference was definitely a “Reality Check.” From the new media sessions at the Washington Post to opening remarks by Secretary Arne Duncan, to the incredible workshops, the exhibits and the wealth of information from the speakers and attendees it was well worth the time.

There’s a saying that the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. Well, I second that emotion. While I learned how much I didn’t know about the field of education (reality check) here’s some highlights of what I did learn.

Blogs allow readers to get involved with the story. “Let them in the reporting process,” said Emily Alpert of the Voice of San Diego, “Have a personal relationship with readers.”

Non-profit news outlets are successfully making their mark in the industry. Elizabeth Green of gothamschools.org explained that the site was developed by a philanthropist and it’s innovating new models on how to pay for journalism.

Facebook can be used for reporting. Pat Thornton, chief editor of beatblogging.org said, “The easier you make it for people to reach you, the more they will.” Twitter is also a good place for research. Lots of news is broken on Twitter. “

“It’s a great way to start a conversation, ask questions and get quotes,” said Mr. Thorton. “Put your blog entry on Twitter and Facebook. Use a tiny URL. Twitter and Facebook can be connected.”

Facebook is a news source he explained. It’s great for education writers because it was started for students. Be social. People get news from Facebook and they give news. Journalism is now a two-way conversation. People are willing to ask questions. Organize a weekly chat. The biggest thing is the interaction between people.

The research about high school dropouts goes all the way back to the 1870’s. Today 1.2 million youth drop out each year. Near 50 percent of Black, Latino and Native American students drop out. It’s called the “Million Dollar Mistake”.

Two thousand schools account for 66 percent of dropouts. By the third grade a student’s attendance, behavior and academic performance can predict whether or not they will drop out.

Denisse Levano, 23, an immigrant who came to this country in 2006 spoke about why she dropped out of school and returned. She will graduate next month. “I left to work. I came back because I don’t want to be a waitress all my life. I want to do something different. I don’t have my dad encouraging me. It’s just me and my sister.” She’s going to college in the fall.

John Bridgeland, CEO of Civic Enterprises spoke of the power of a caring adult in the life of a child. Ms. Levano’s counselor was instrumental in getting her back to school.

One size education doesn’t fit all. Some students need early morning classes, night school, and web based. Real life events can cause dropouts. So can boredom in the classroom. Young people start dropping out a year or two before they actually drop out.

The war of words between Marty Nemko, a college consultant and Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust about alternative education versus college readiness programs was an eye opener. Is college for everyone? Ninety seven percent of Black parents think so. But too many Black students are dropping out. Give them another option before they give up, drop out or get pregnant explained Mr. Nemko.

Options are what education writing is all about, so many stories, so little time. That’s my reality check. Tell me yours. Email me at nisaislam@mac.com, tweet me @nisaislam or hit me up on Facebook. I’m being social.

Denisse Levano speaks at the workshop Dropping Out: Why Kids Leave and What Brings Them Back. The workshop panel included Theresa Vargas, Washington Post, John Bridgeland, CEO of Civic Enterprises, and Danielle Mezer from the Mayor’s office in Nashville.

For Profit Colleges: For Better or For Worse

2009-05-02T15:21:00.001-07:00

An executive from the famous University of Phoenix shuttered when his business was called an empire and defended its growth by saying that it was student driven. Some 400,000 students attend.

In a panel discussion at the Education Writers Association conference, Jorge Klor de Alva, vice president for the massive online college, said that his enterprise started as a way to fill a niche for working adults who needed to finish a degree. It’s been able to continue to attract students because classes are small and curriculum is standardized.

Tom Snydner from the National Center on Education Statistics said that for profit colleges serve disproportionate numbers of women and black students, suggesting that some of this could be contributed to the fact that many of them are operated in urban centers.

He also presented a chart that showed that for profit colleges spend less on instruction than do public or not-for-profit institutions. Some of that could be attributed to fewer overhead costs as most for profits don’t provide room and board, he said.

Contrary to their reputation, Snydner said these colleges are not way more expensive than public and for-profit universities and that the same proportion of students get financial aid and loans.

Kevin Kinser, a researcher from SUNY-Albany, added that for profit colleges tend to spend a lot of money on marketing and recruitment, noting that every web page he goes to has an ad for the University of Phoenix.

Klor de Alva, however, insisted that students come to his college because of its word of mouth reputation and not because of the aggressive marketing.

There was little discussion in the session about what are some of the problems reporters could look for in for-profit colleges.

Latino College Crisis

2009-05-02T15:17:00.000-07:00

Only nine percent of young Latino adults have a college education, a figure that has stagnated since the 1970s as every other racial and ethnic group has seen increases.

Patricia Gandara, a University of California-Los Angeles education professor and a director at the Civil Rights Project, told reporters at the Education Writers Association that this was a critical issue, especially as the population of Latinos in the United States grows.

Gandara was joined on a panel by Sarita Brown, president of Excelencia in Education, and Diana Natalicio, who is the president of the University of Texas-El Paso. Brown and Natalicio talked about solutions to the problem.

But first Gandara walked reporters through some of the facts, using her recently published book The Latino Education Crisis as a point of reference. Gandara said that the lack of Latinos getting a college education is adding to the United States falling behind other countries in the number of college graduates. The average education level of Latinos is rising, but with college “there is an absolute ceiling,” she said.

Gandara said that in order to reverse the trend, colleges must realize that generally Latino college students work and go to school part time. She also urged the audience not to frame the situation as one about immigrants, though they are part of the story. Second and third generation Latinos are actually struggling to get college degrees also. She called this backsliding.

“This population is not incorporating and integrating as other immigrant populations have,” she said. “I think it has a lot to do with changes in society. Today the same individuals who would have gotten jobs in the past and sent their children to college, are having a problem getting a foothold in the economy.”

That being said, there are some shining examples of programs and colleges that are making strides in reaching out to Latinos and helping them graduate. Brown’s newly formed organization profiles some of those programs on their website. She said high school counselors and colleges need to be more deliberate in making sure that students get information to help them navigate into and through college.

“These are first generation college goers and they are not going to get the savvy advice that goes on in middle class households around dining room tables,” she said.

Brown, who worked in the Clinton administration, also is interested in making sure that the Obama administration makes college more affordable for Latinos.

Natalicio’s university has taken many specific steps to help Latino students. Two thirds of the school’s students are Mexican and most of them grew up within 50 miles of the university and are working their way through college. One thing the university realized is that at the beginning of a semester students are really stretched between paying tuition and buying books.

“Because of cash flow issues, sometimes they just stop there,” she said.

To combat that, the university allows students to pay over five installments and also has a revolving emergency book loan fund.

Merging Higher Ed and K-12 Beats

2009-05-02T14:58:00.000-07:00

Newspapers are cutting staff, so more reporters are on a combined K-12 and higher ed beat. This session turned into an informal discussion about ways to avoid compromising coverage at both ends of the education spectrum. Jennifer Jordan of the Providence Journal led the discussion.

An informal survey of reporters on the EWA listserv revealed the diminished coverage hits the higher ed hard. We discussed ways to wrap higher ed coverage into the K-12 discussion. A few ideas: Sometimes higher ed can be covered on another beat, like business. Pass along good K-12 stories too; for example if a school has a good theater program, offer the story to the arts desk. Write about things like teacher prep; how well are local colleges training teachers? Dual enrollment programs and early enrollment are also ways higher ed and K-12 topics overlap. Do more stories on STEM, since science and math are critical in every state. Look at pathways to college programs, joint agreements, and moving kids from community colleges into a 4-year program.

We also talked about ways to get higher ed into the paper while maximizing limited time. For example, other beats can cite university professors as sources. You also can grab wire stories about education and to it off with local information.

What a College Dropout Can Tell You About Changing the Odds

2009-05-02T11:32:00.000-07:00

Author Paul Tough just gave a fascinating speech about his book, which takes on a startlingly simple question: Why is it that poor kids tend to do so badly in school and in life? And more importantly, what can we do to change that?

The book, Whatever It Takes, chronicled the ups and downs of the Harlem Children’s Zone, a groundbreaking effort by nonprofit guru Geoffrey Canada to “flood the zone” in one of New York City’s poorest neighborhoods with both social services and tougher schooling to close the achievement gap. Families go through a “conveyor belt” of services from prenatal parenting boot camp -- dubbed Baby College – to a stellar preschool to a system of charter schools.

“He didn’t want to keep helping a few kids beat the odds,” Tough said of Canada and his quest. “He wanted to change the odds for children in Harlem -- and in big numbers.”

The project has had some remarkable successes. And the book is no slouch, either. It is phenomenally written, full of human detail and scholarly depth from neuroscience to sociology, and an amazing tale to boot -- I read the entirety of the book on a sunny February afternoon on the beach. (I live in San Diego. Go ahead and hate me.)

And the Zone could be coming soon to a city near you. Obama and Arne Duncan have talked about the idea of replicating the project by fostering “Promise Neighborhoods” in 20 cities, run jointly by the federal government and local businesses and nonprofits.

Tough has some worries about cloning the Zone, including that local nonprofits may lack the strict accountability that characterized Canada and his programs, but he sounded largely excited about seeing the plan go forward in an era when big questions such as what makes a good teacher are dominating the education debate.

“This is really the first new big anti-poverty strategy since welfare reform and in many ways the first comprehensive one since the war on poverty, and its apparently going to be run not by the housing department or the health and human services department but by the education department,” Tough said, cautioning that he was unsure if it would work. But he added, “If we can all manage to hang on to our jobs, we’re going to have front row seats.”

Here are a few other tidbits you might have missed from the speech:

Tough comes from a family of educators but dropped out of college – twice. The second time he dropped out of McGill College after taking a magazine internship that became his calling.

He took off six months from his job to finish writing the book, a period during which he did no reporting, only reading and research.

One reporter praised Tough for the personal stories he featured in the book, but Tough thought he actually didn’t do a great job at finding those stories, except at Baby College. He struggled with interviewing middle schoolers, for instance, but Tough felt that “there was something at Baby College that made people want to talk.” It didn’t hurt that he had a captive audience, cornering parents in the cafeteria before and after the classes.

He is “both dismayed and encouraged” by the debate over whether poor children just need better schools or just need social services. “The fact that it is being argued in such a dichotomous, one-side-or-the-other way seems just nuts,” Tough said. Interestingly, he added that the two people who have signed manifestos on both the need for social services and the need for better schools are Geoffrey Canada and Arne Duncan.

Whatever it Takes -- A Harlem Story

2009-05-02T11:17:00.000-07:00

Paul Tough, a New York Times Magazine editor and author of "Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Save Harlem and America," thought he was writing about poverty when he began following Geoffrey Canada, who founded the Harlem Children's Zone. The ambitious project is trying to reshape children's lives by enveloping residents of an area of nearly 100 blocks with a variety of social services. In 2004, that vision expanded to center around a charter school, the Promise Academy.

When the school opened, the founders gave standardized tests to the new sixth-graders and found they were mostly at least two grade levels behind in reading and three grade levels behind in math.

Tough realized what essential question his story would be organized around, he told EWA members: "Why is it that poor kids do so badly in school and life? And what can be done?" He said that the debates about education and poverty are beginning to merge, and for the better. Reformers are now focusing on directly helping children instead of just their parents.

"Unless there's a really high-performing school in the center, it can't be done," Tough said.

Canada's zone is all-encompassing. It starts with educating parents in parenting skills, moves on to preschool and K-12 and includes other social services.

The program has had false starts, but President Obama has expressed interest in trying to create other similar zones, called "Promise Neighborhoods," in 20 cities around the country. Tough said that there are several pitfalls that need to be avoided: too much local control and organizational disarray. There has to be an overarching vision and a power structure that will allow for failing programs to be discontinued, he said. They should also be rolled out gradually in a few cities at a time, he said.

"I am optimistic that there are leaders who can do it. They could be run better than the Harlem Children's Zone," where the idea is better than the execution," he said. "They took lots of wrong turns," including trying to work through the local public schools, he said.

If public schools can be adapted to be open longer hours and be more flexible, a public school could make similar reforms.

Does Math Matter? (or, Why Math Matters)

2009-05-02T09:14:00.000-07:00

Math matters, and it will take clear standards, inspiring teachers, and attention to our international neighbors to get at "the right math," according to the practitioners and reformers who addressed reporters at this session.

The three men -- Michael Cohen, president of Achieve; John Ewing, president of Math for America; and Mike Lindstrom, director of SciMathMinnesota -- agreed that academic standards and quality teachers are both important to increasing math achievement.

"If all (schools) do is raise the bar ... all you get is more frustration and more failure," said Cohen, of Achieve, a governors- and business-led nonprofit at the front end of the standards movement.

The key to success comes in translating those standards into the classroom, which requires teachers who are able to convey concepts as well as facts, and who inspire kids to see the oft-feared subject as key to their future -- and the country's.

"Not every teacher has to be Mr. Chips," said Ewing, referring to the fictional British boarding-school teacher. But respect for a profession that sees a high turnover rate, and a willingness to invest in bringing in good teachers who are in it for the long haul, are "foundational."

Ewing's program pays teachers $20,000 a year on top of their salaries as an incentive to go through their program, which emphasizes training and mentorship. To scale that up would take billions of dollars, but billions of dollars well spent, he said. "You could transform education."

Ewing derided any notion that standards are "a kind of secret formula that's supposed to be solving the crisis."

Still, the example of Minnesota shows that paying close attention to what's expected of kids -- and when -- can be a catalyst for getting out of the rut of routine, said Lindstrom, who said the key for his state was in looking overseas. "We can learn a lot from other countries."

Minnesota has seen its rankings on the TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) test surpass the United States average and near that of powerhouses like Singapore, Japan, and Hong Kong. It has done it by looking at how high-scoring countries lay out their math expectations, Lindstrom said.

In 1995, when his group first looked at the issue, other countries focused on a very narrow set of math skills at each grade level, while American schools crammed everything in, every year. "You never gained mastery."

Today, Minnesota's standards more reflect the international approach. But the tougher work remains, Lindstrom said. "The low-hanging fruit has been picked."

The common thread to each speaker's comments was that math is more than an algorithm -- it is central to building up high school graduates (and beyond) who can do more than calculate a restaurant server's tip. "Mathematics becomes a way of thinking," Lindstrom said.

What states shouldn't do in tough economic times

2009-05-02T09:10:00.000-07:00

One size fits all: good for clothing, bad for higher-education policy. But states are still heading down the one-size path as the economy tanks, two panelists told EWA attendees Saturday.

Micromanaging legislators are among colleges' top enemies, said Alan Merten, president of George Mason University in Virginia. Although the university receives less state money per student than ever before, lawmakers are becoming more meddlesome in areas such as tuition policies and how many out-of-state students a campus can accept, he said.

"We say, 'Everybody in the Legislature is an expert on education and transportation because they all went to school and they all drive a car," Merten said.

A better way to ensure accountability is for governors to appoint strong and knowledgeable governing boards, said Patrick Callan, director of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. Virginia has been successful in that regard, he said.

Disturbingly few universities have tuition policies, Callan said, making it difficult for parents to know how much college will cost their children years down the line. Although federal financial aid has started rising, those increases appear to be leading some universities to hike tuition to rake in more of those federal dollars, he said.

With many eligible students, particularly in relatively low-cost states such as California, failing to apply for financial aid, the country needs to find a balance, he said.

"We need to both control the cost trajectory in higher education and fix financial aid," Callan said. "Don't leave money on the table, but don't raise tuition just to capture more financial aid money."

But state legislatures should leave tuition policies to the schools, he said. Otherwise, he said, states risk coming up with standardized policies that will hurt some campuses.

Both men raised concerns about the continuing prevalence of merit-based scholarships, particularly at private schools. Although the economy has led to struggles at nearly all colleges, wealthier private schools are able to dip into endowments and are essentially "buying students," Merten said.

It appears Americans could come out of the economic crisis significantly more debt-averse, Callan said. With much of the country's higher-education model based on borrowing, people already asking more questions about the value of a particular school, he said.

The nation's colleges and universities may need to go back to the drawing board to answer fundamental financing questions, Callan said.

"There's some real landmines out there some of us probably should be thinking more about," he said.

Although federal stimulus money could provide needed higher-education resources, some states are using the extra money as an excuse to lower their own higher-education appropriations, Merten said. George Mason, for example, is scheduled to receive $140 million from the state in each of the next two years, but $10 million of this year's allocation is coming from federal money.

"Our states are now building long-term budgets based on short-term stimulus money," he said.

Universities and colleges should be responding to the economic problems by implementing politically touchy solutions, Callan said. For example, schools should consider increasing teaching loads before cutting enrollment, he suggested, and cut graduate enrollment before limiting undergraduates.

Both panelists offered story ideas:
- State policies are often based on the stereotype that college students are 18 and living on campus, Merten said. The truth is that just 20 percent of student fit that profile, he said.
- How are community college students being affected by the economy? Are those colleges able to help their students, who tend to be particularly vulnerable to economic problems?
- How are states using stimulus money for higher education?
- Are debt levels affecting job vs. graduate school decisions for this year's college graduates?

Tracking the Stimulus - Part I

2009-05-02T08:53:00.000-07:00

The $98 billion education stimulus package represents an unprecedented opportunity for both riches and risk for the nation’s public schools.
That was the message from three members of the “Washington Education Mafia,” as moderator and USA Today education reporter Greg Toppo affectionately described the panelists at this morning’s session.
The public – as well as educators – is looking to the media for clarity, said Michael Casserly executive director of the Council of Great City Schools.
“At the local level, school districts are receiving all kinds of very confusing and frankly erroneous information,” Casserly said.
His office is doing its best to stamp out the rumors, such as false limitations on how some of the Title I funds can be spent, “But they’re popping up even more frequently than we’re able to deal with.”
For Amy Wilkins, vice president for government affairs and communications at the Education Trust, the potential for backlash has her losing sleep.
Her “Big nightmare?” That at the end of the two-year funding cycle, schools, districts and states won’t be able to demonstrate improvement.
If that happens, it’s going to be “Very hard for those of us in education to go back to Congress and say, ‘give us more money,’” Wilkins said. “If the education community cannot stand and deliver here, we will have a problem.”
Education reporters need help tracking the stimulus money, and Wilkins hoped EWA would offer technical support and resources to assist with forensic accounting.
“The potential for this money to disappear into the mire is enormous,” Wilkins said.
And while there will likely be plenty of opportunities for journalists write about misuse of stimulus funds, panelist Scott Palmer co-founder and managing partner of EducationCounsel, urged balance.
Even though more positive stories “aren’t as sexy,” said Palmer, “I would implore you to also write about the examples of superior use (of stimulus funds) and true reform.”

Millennials - potential for great storytelling

2009-05-02T07:57:00.000-07:00

You may have heard of Baby Boomers and Generation X but a new term has been coined for the group born in and after 1982 – the millennials. Millennials were discussed in a Saturday morning session at the EWA conference.

Speakers for the session were Susan May, who works with a consulting firm that handles higher education strategies and Ian Shapira of the Washington Post. Shapira is making the millennial generation a new beat at his paper. Both advise caution when referring to the term millennials. People born during that generation don’t easily fit into a category like the G.I. generation of World War II or the baby boomers.

Instead, someone from the millennial generation, or the post-X generation, doesn’t accept labels or generalizations well.

The term was coined by authors Neil Howe and William Strauss to describe a generation of people defined as special, sheltered, confident, team-oriented, pressured and achieving. While several positives have been strapped on the backs of millennials, Shapira asks journalists to look at the group in a different way. Because there are different subcultures in the group of millennials there’s a treasure trove of stories that haven’t been told.

Shapira said these stories won’t be a part of the big government exposés. Instead, the beat offers great feature stories. He said a journalist could have a real opportunity to “tap into a world where people who are very discreet in life.”

He used the Washington, D.C. young gay scene as an example. A group that believes older gay men are “too discriminatory, too white and too homogenous.”

“We never really write about these people,” Shapira said.

Shapira was higher education reporter for the Washington Post before starting the millennials beat.

New Models of Ed School

2009-05-02T06:58:00.001-07:00

In this session, instead of looking at how to improve all teacher colleges, we looked at new models.

David Steiner talked about the Hunter College School of Education, which he is head of. Hunter has formed partnership with KIPP, other charter school organizations, and DOE to provide training to charter school teachers.

In the absence of substantial research on what makes a good teacher, Steiner says they turned to the best performing schools for guidance on how to best prepare future teachers. The partners are helping the Hunter faculty choose the best practices for teacher training, that is, the skills that make a difference in the classroom.

All courses at the Hunter College School of Education are co-designed and co-taught by volunteers from the faculty, who spent a lot of time in schools, and figuring out ways of improving urban education. They also get a great deal of support from the strongest teachers, principals and superintendents from charter schools.

Every time an hour instruction is taught at Hunter, that hour is divided into 10 or 15 minute segments. Everything is well thought out and planned: each exercise, assessment, as well as what is the aim in that class.

The educators teach their student teachers the way they want them to later teach in the classroom. They are evaluated immediately electronically and a lot of videotaping is done during the course of teaching. “We video tape all our student teachers and give feedback. We now have a library of 600 clips and entire Hunter faculty uses them as case studies”, Steiner said.

Out of the 400 teachers joining Hunter this summer, none will graduate from the program unless they will have shown demonstrable data based academic gains in their classrooms. “They will have to show, before they graduate, that they can bring a class of children to an academic performance level”, Steiner says.

What assurance does Hunter have it is choosing the right things to focus on?

“We do not have the whole research yet. But what I know is that when you look at various taxonomies, what is striking is that it is beginning to get more and more fine grained”, Steiner says. It turns out, he continues, that being an effective teacher is being in charge of the repertoire of skills, and at Hunter teachers insist on practice of these skills.

“This is a work-in-progress, but we are very excited, because we think we just began to break down walls between the ed school and the school”, Steiner concluded.

Another speaker - Andre Cowling, principal of Harvard Elementary School in Chicago, is also the product of another non-traditional teacher training program, the Academy for Urban School Leadership. In his opinion the Academy represents a perfect marriage between theory and practice. It effectively prepares student teachers for their job through classroom training with a master teacher for 180 days. The Academy trains 70 people each year to come from different professions to the field of education and latter supports them, as a result obtaining high retention rates.

There are 13 schools under the Academy’s leadership. The schools accept all children regardless of their zip cod, family situation and economic status. The teachers who have graduated from the Academy are prepared for these children and that they know how do deal in all sorts of situations.

Jim Cibulka, president of National Association for the Accreditation of Teachers Colleges, put everything in perspective.

He said he was very optimistic about the potential for reform and change at ed schools, because of:

- Developments instrumental in driving change: a move from regulations of Ed Schools around curriculum and libraries to candidate performance.

- Shift in driving reform being from outside the profession, i.e. the emergence in the 1980s of the market of mixed providers, which spurred competition between colleges of education and alternative providers. The strongest of the alternative providers have done strong clinical preparation, which is the future of strong models.

Considering clinical model for ed schools, Cibulka said that there is need for two things:

1) much stronger ties between schools of education and the schools, and traditionally universities and colleges of education have had tenuous ties with schools.

2) stronger knowledge on best practices. “Not only do we have a weak research based on teaching learning, we also have weak research based on what effective practices are in the preparation of educators”, he said.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan

2009-05-02T06:43:00.000-07:00

If Education Secretary Arne Duncan can change, he reasons anybody can.

Speaking at the conference Thursday night, Duncan pledged not to use three words he's become known for in his brief tenure: extraordinary, dramatic and incent. (We just had to get them into this piece more than once, however. Happy hunting.)

He slipped but once (on incent), but took the opportunity to outline the possible dramatic changes that may be coming, soon, to the American education landscape.

Duncan said while policy makers and the general public have been astonished by some parts of the Democratic administration's education agenda, including the expansion of charter schools and a push for performance-based pay for teachers, honest discussion about the topics is necessary.

In the meantime, he pledged to do whatever he can to incent educators to be extraordinarily more open and honest about their students and schools.

"That lack of willingness to open up actually impedes progress," he said in response to a question by EWA Public Editor Linda Perlstein.

He noted that while the press may sometimes be too quick to discredit a potential education reform initiative, its collective power can also highlight severe failures.

"We don't ask that you go easy on us," he said.

Don't worry, Secretary Duncan. That's probably not something us education reporters would consider changing for a second.

Arne Duncan, Sun God

2009-05-01T20:51:00.000-07:00

Notes and impressions of dubious value from Thursday's Arne Duncan appearance at the education writers conference. (For straight news coverage of the event go here):

The guy looks confident, clear, in stride -- like someone who's had a very good first 100 days. And it's true. Prepared text is below -- the best part is where he praises journalists and makes it sound like we're all in this together. (Oh, and the part at the start where he promises not to use words like "incent" and "dramatically" - I think Politics K12 was first to note that, right?). Chicago Tribune star and introducer Stephanie Banchero mocked the fawning coverage and suck-up commentary that the EdSec has gotten. Then the love-fest began.

First hug went to the Chicago Sun Times' Rosalind Rossi, who just published a piece showing that Chicago charter schools haven't performed very well compared to those in LA and NYC. (Seems like no one cares about Arne's record any more, however. It's all about the present and the fu$ure.) Most common question I heard in the hall during Duncan's long remarks was "Which one's Peter Cunningham?" Got to meet new arrival Massie Ritsch, who arrived two weeks ago and is the lead swine flu guy.

Meanwhile, word is that Margot Rogers, the Gates program officer from Chicago, will end up serving as Chief of Staff. (Way back in January Fritz had her as Senior Counsel but that was way back in January.) Makes me wonder who is going to get the Gates jobs that have been vacated by folks going into the administration. Good excuse to bug Marie Groark, who hates seeing her name in print.

Justin Pope highlighted the lack of accountability and performance measures on the postsecondary front and got a "transparency cures all" responses from the EdSec. Weak and inconsistent with K12. Ditto for Arne's mumbo jumbo response on national standards. Surprise mention of Locke High School at the end -- a first to my knowledge. Good quote for my book proposal and a good introduction to Locke for folks who are going to be reading a story about the school in the New Yorker as soon as next week.

At the reception: Jim Kohlmoos patted by Buddha belly and tugged on my goatee. Libby Quaid (AP) and Amy Fagan (Fordham) talked trash (in a good way). The Exxon sponsors gave away goodies like Flip videos but I forgot to enter the raffle.

Read the prepared remarks here.

Schnur

2009-05-01T18:09:00.000-07:00

It seems like I spent all day trying to sort out conflicting versions of the "what happened to Jon Schnur?" story, which has been a question of some interest at the EWA conference this year.

First came the story that he had been asked to be Chief of Staff but had withdrawn. This from a reliable source who didn't want to be named. Then another version came through saying that Schnur was actually never offered the job. Also from a knowledgeable insider who wouldn't talk without anonymity. Drama! Last but not least -- who cares? I know -- came the compromise / consensus version: Schnur was asked to do the job, vetted and cleared, but then withdrew before he was formally offered the job, which is the last step in this particular dance.

Yes, being "asked" to do the job is different from "offered" the job. Gotta love Washington.

Reporting test scores

2009-05-01T14:11:00.000-07:00

The annual struggle to make sense of test scores may be even quirkier this year, with the recession potentially shifting the playing field, a national testing expert told reporters at the EWA national conference.
As most of us know, year-to-year changes in proficiency rates can be affected by factors such as normal fluctuations, changes in cut scores and shifts in demographics for a school or district. Keep an eye on that last one, said researcher David Silver, with the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing.
"With the recession, we know there is an influx of people from private school to public school because they can't afford private schools. I would assume they will tend to be higher-achieving students," Silver said.
Paula Brown, who oversees data for the Hampton (Va.) City Schools, and EWA public editor Linda Perlstein urged reporters to go beyond reporting how schools stack up at the end of the year and look at what tests really mean for helping kids learn better.
Virginia provides student-by-student reports on who got which questions right. Smart schools break out results on students who failed to see which skills need to be taught better, Brown said. They should also look at what would help successful students advance.
Reporters may not get -- or want -- such detailed information. But Perlstein suggested sitting in on a session where teachers and administrators review their test data and figure out what should happen next.
She also urged reporters to look at the tests themselves, whether it's a high-school exit exam or the DIBELS used to size up pre-reading skills for young children: "Any assessment that you can see what it looks like, you should."

College for All?

2009-05-01T13:22:00.000-07:00

It's rare that a conference session gets heated, but Education Trust President Kati Haycock and college consultant Marty Nemko apparently didn't get the memo. The two went head-to-head in a talk on whether college is meant for every student.

Haycock says that every student should get a college prep high school education, no matter if they want to be a car mechanic or a brain surgeon. Students aren't challenged enough and are sectioned off into college-bound and hopeless far too early in their educational careers, which robs children of their potential, she said. Students will rise to the challenge if they are told they can go to college rather than being ignored and shoved into vo-tech curriculum, she said. She went as far as to call Nemko's belief that college just isn't for some students "racist" and "un-American."

But Nemko countered that not every student is meant for a four-year college, and schools need to offer options rather than simply forcing every child into a college prep class. Students who aren't interested in Shakespeare or calculus get frustrated and ultimately drop out because they are being taught material that isn't relevant to what they want to do with their lives, he said. The people who are racist and elitist are the ones who are "insisting everybody should be the same," Nemko said, responding to Haycock. He also passed out literature questioning the data produced by the Education Trust.

The two did agree on one thing: the American education system isn't do an adequate job of producing workers ready to take on the challenges that plague our country. The solution? Depends on where you're sitting.

You can't spell 'reformer' without the reform

2009-05-01T12:54:00.000-07:00

It’s always interesting to hear Michelle Rhee talk about the work she’s doing in DC, especially because since last time I heard her talk at EWA 2008 she’s become a rock star in the ed world.

She’s been on the cover of Time and Newsweek. Even my friend Susan who doesn’t have school-aged children and isn’t a teacher knows who she is.

Yep. It appears Rhee has officially worked her way into the national lexicon.

Her message this year felt a little softer than last year. It’s not that she’s backed away from her impassioned plea for reform; she’s just more immersed in it.

Her message this time centered around the idea that America’s schools aren’t suffering from bad ideas, they’re suffering from bad implementation.

“The fidelity of implementation is so poor across the board,” she said of DC schools.

She also talked about the need to build trust with staff when introducing new initiatives.

“With teachers, we have to be able to explain why we ask them to do things,” she said. “If you can’t give teachers a good reason, you can’t ask them to do it.”

Not to be outshone, Charles Payne, a University of Chicago professor and author of “So much reform, so little change,” explored the relationship between trust and achievement. He argues that social capitol should be considered when introducing reform, both with parents and students.

“The relationship piece is key,” he said.

Early childhood ed and the federal government

2009-05-01T07:37:00.000-07:00

The nation's economic recovery package doesn't neglect its littlest citizens.
So far, $5 billion has been earmarked to support child care and child development grants, Head Start, Early Head Start and special needs children through the U.S. Department of Education.
Some may also use portions of the $13 billion meant for Title I to aid early childhood education programs. Money expected for home visitation for parents and education challenge grants could help, as well. Here's some background from Ed Week.
President Obama's actions so far are giving hope to advocates, such as Joan Lombardi, director of The Children's Project in Washington.
She pointed out that significant numbers of children -- including about half of those eligible for Head Start and many more eligible for Early Head Start -- don't have access to education programs before 5.
Virginia Governor Tim Kaine outlined progress in his state thus far, including an expansion of the state prekindergarten program, a quality rating system and a centralized state office to oversee early childhood-related programs.
Elizabeth Burke Bryant of Rhode Island KIDS COUNT has been working on a blueprint of what children need to be ready for school. It goes behind education to other needs, such as health insurance and affordable housing.
With the new funding and policy priorities on a national level, it's "an exciting moment to really try to move the ball down the field a lot more quickly than we have," she said.

What causes students to drop out of high school?

2009-05-01T07:18:00.000-07:00

At a session I'm attending this morning on why kids leave, John Bridgeland of Civic Enterprises said the No. 1 cause is boredom. There's a disconnect between what they're learning in the classroom and what they want to do or what they see is relevant in their lives. Bridgeland, whose organization has studied the issue extensively, said most dropouts were spending an hour or less a night on homework and wanted to be challenged more. About a third of dropouts leave because of personal conflicts such as needing to hold a job, he said, so flexible scheduling would also help.

I also posted this entry on The Sun's education blog, InsideEd.

Welcome to the next edition of the EWA National Seminar!

2009-04-22T14:58:00.000-07:00

We're keeping the posts from the Chicago 2008 National Seminar but this will be the site to chronicle the next Education Writers Association National Seminar, "Reality Check: Where is Education Headed."

Reporters attending the conference will post items about the sessions as they happen. Stay tuned!

State investment in Pre-K

2008-05-13T13:33:00.000-07:00

With many states continuing to increase spending for early-childhood education services—even in the face of tight budgets, it’s important for reporters to understand the research base surrounding preschool programs.
Pre-K was a dominant topic at this year’s EWA annual meeting in Chicago, and in one session, participants heard from Arthur Reynolds, a child development professor at the University of Minnesota and the researcher on an ongoing study that reporters covering preschool have undoubtedly heard about—the Chicago Child Parent Center study.
The study, which has found lasting benefits for those who attended over 20 years ago, is used to argue that high-quality pre-K programs produce a big economic payoff down the road.
But Reynolds said reporters make a mistake if they focus too much on any one study. By itself, any study will have certain limitations. Instead, it’s the body of research that continues to build about pre-K, particularly for disadvantaged children, that is more significant.

He also addressed the comment that some have made about most of the future savings to society coming from a reduction in crime—not in educational attainment. While that is true, he noted that every study that has shown lower crime rates over time has also shown higher achievement gains when the children were in school.
“There had to have been a literacy effect or there wouldn’t be a long-term, social-emotional effect,” he said. “If you promote well-being in school, there will be education, health, and criminal justice benefits.”

It’s research like Reynolds’—and the way policymakers have embraced the cost-benefit argument—that inspired University of California, Berkeley professor David Kirp to write his popular book, “The Sandbox Investment.”

Kirp says that while there are plenty of high-quality model preschool programs, the challenge is bringing these efforts to scale when “politicians have the attention span of fruit flies.”

“Being committed to it and getting it done are two different things,” he said, adding that because politicians also like to claim credit for programs, it’s “easier to do the cheap and big than to start small.”
Of course, with the current budget reality in many states, it might be hard for lawmakers to deliver everything they’ve been promising.

Robert Ward, a state budget expert with the Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, NY, said that even though state revenues are weak, and inflation is rising, the economy would continue to grow over time.

He added that during the last recession in 2001, states didn’t immediately cut spending. And when they did, education was largely left untouched.
He also noted that policymakers are giving more scrutiny to programs that “have no bang for the buck.”
“Governors and legislators,” he said, “ are paying a little more attention to research than they used to.”

-- Linda Jacobson

Other coverage of EWA conference

2008-05-01T11:02:00.000-07:00

Kent Fischer, EWA vice president and Dallas Morning News reporter, has offered his own views on our conference. For instance, he examined whether there are any lessons for the Dallas Independent School District from Michelle Rhee's presentation. And he looked at the session on Two Million Minutes, a documentary that compares a couple of typical students from Carmel, Indiana, China and India.

And our own Alexander Russo, who contributed to this blog, also blogged about what he presented at the conference, gossip, besides his cross-posted last words on the conference.

Edited to add:
Scott Elliott writes on the debate over single sex education on his Get on the Bus blog.
And Michael Brindley of the Nashua Telegraph and his blog, Learning Curve, offers a summary of the highlights of the conference.

Final Thoughts From The Conference

2008-04-29T08:14:00.000-07:00

I thought I was done writing about the EWA conference (and lost my notes somewhere along the way), but apparently there's more:

You Talkin' To Me? Bad enough that he's white and male, but single-sex advocate Leonard Sax may be too argumentative to lead this fledgling movement into the mainstream. And I'm not just saying that because he's a guy.

Still On The Honeymoon: Despite an awkward start, Michelle Rhee's lunchtime interview gave education reporters an up-close look at Rhee's fresh-faced, blunt approach to revamping a struggling urban district. Rhee also made some news by effectively endorsing mayoral control -- no surprise -- and NCLB.

They're Everywhere: TFA is now infiltrating the mainstream news community, I am slowly figuring out. I'm told that TFA alumns who are education reporters include David Hunn from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Amanda Millner-Fairbanks of the New York Times, and...?

Post First, Ask Questions Later: Asked about how the Internet has changed his reporting and his relationship with those he covers, the Dallas Morning News' Kent Fischer said, "I'm no longer waiting for the district to respond." Fischer also urged communications folks in districts and organizations to "roll up your sleeves" and get involved in online debates about education issues. Associates I talked to seemed really cautious about doing this.

"They treat physics the way that we treat sports," remarked Two Million Minutes producer Bob Compton comparing the US obsession with sports and extracurriculars with the focus on academics in China and India. Indeed. Where would I be without having had those drum lessons in 9th grade?

Hispanic Students: Myths and Realities

2008-04-26T15:56:00.000-07:00

"Hispanics are everywhere," said Jose Martinez, assistant superintendent of the Racine United School District.

If you haven’t covered issues affecting Hispanic students, you will soon, said Richard Fry, of the Pew Hispanic Center.

Take a look at some of the numbers Fry presented:

By 2020, there will be about 4.8 million more students in the United States. Nearly 98 percent of the students will be Hispanics.
Most Hispanic students are native born. Of the nearly 1.8 million Hispanic students who are limited-English-speakers, the majority are born in the United States.
Less than 1 in 5 of about 9.8 million Hispanic students are limited English speakers

Fry also notes that just because Hispanic students can speak English, this doesn't necessarily mean they can read or write well in English.

Martinez told his story about rising from a non-native English speaker growing up in Manhattan to leading a fast-growing Wisconsin school district. It was two teachers in his eighth grade year that spurred him to a career that started out in Gary, Ind., as a bilingual teacher.

"My mission was to help children learn English," he said.

Both speakers offered suggestions for reporters covering Hispanic students:

What are your schools doing to help ELL students?
What are the graduation rates? The transition rates?
Which bilingual programs, if any, exist in your district?
Is there a transition program for ELL students? How successful is it in mainstreaming students?
Is your district testing ELL students and submitting the results?
Your district may tout a high graduation rate for ELL students but how prepared are they for college? Are they enrolled in advanced classes? What are they learning?

digital learning session: is this going to change what education looks like?

2008-04-26T14:33:00.001-07:00

Technology – especially digital media – may be the engine forcing the next stage of education reform. And we have no idea what that is going to look like. Just as we in our industry are struggling to figure out how to share news across multiple platforms and stay relevant, so too are the schools, or they should be. But our panelists for “The Digital Age: Do Kids Now Learn Differently” suggest that schools have been standing still while digital media and learning have been blasting past them. The panelists -- Connie Yowell, director of the MacArthur Foundation’s education learning group, USC researcher Mimi Ito and MIT researcher Henry Jenkins – shared their research and observations, and Yowell was frank and forward about the pressing issue of digital media and how it will shape education.

Ito noted that students are creating and sharing their work publicly. She described peer-to-peer networks as “micro publics built around shared interests.” Students flock to social sites and share and build relationships, swap stories and gossip and discuss issues, information and culture. But they also congregate in interest-specific online communities/networks. Ito said the trend reaches down to elementary age children, who play, hang out with friends and create environments in child-friendly virtual worlds. As the students grow older, the range of environments grows: blogs, social networks, interest networks, games, worlds. But Ito noted that despite the change of environment, some of what happens is ages-old. “In many ways, the conversation is what they’ve always done, but now it is done online,” she said. In both the interest and friendship driven networks and worlds, students are learning and sharing with their peers.

Students are driven to improve and build on skills and standards because they know people may read and critique what they do. The numbers of students branching beyond purely social networks into interest-driven networks are growing.
Jenkins linked the online work solidly with education: What we’re seeing is growing numbers of people engaging in activities with enormous educational benefit: literacy, team-work, communications, problem solving and other skills that once were the realm of the classroom. “Student may not do homework, but they may stay up all night solving problems online.”

Another Jenkins observation that resonates: “These are spaces where people are very invested in each other.” Age is irrelevant/ Knowledge trumps. And they push students to develop skills. “This is the world we’re living in right now outside the doors of the school,” he said.

But there is disparity. Not every child is a digital native and not every child has equal access to the digital world. Students who depend on schools or libraries for access cannot download and share information and may not have access to all the sites and networks they want to use. There is a gap in access to tools students need to build their digital skills. He also said “there’s a war of sorts that has emerged between schools and participatory cultures. … This new culture is where students are learning the skills and knowledge they need in the world. As long as it is locked outside of schools the students are being left behind.”
But Jenkins said there is an element missing in the warp-speed evolution of digital media use. He cautioned that there is a need to develop a sense of ethics for those digital worlds.

Jenkins was a great set-up man for Yowell, who noted that media and technology are moving forward at great speed, but schools are stuck with a mode of education delivery stuck in the 19th century.

She said we are fundamentally asking the wrong questions. We need to start asking what education looks like or should look like, what learning should look like in schools. “We are at a moment of paradigmatic change. We are having a revolution in learning outside of schools. … We have an adult public that does not understand the digital world.”

She said digital learning promotes peer-based learning. It can create a situation where students can move from being bored learners to students so engaged they almost don’t sleep.

Jenkins agreed saying students are finding they can learn more outside school than in school. There were also oblique comments about the relevancy of the core information students now learn. Jenkins noted that Pokemon is more complex than the periodic table, yet young children are adept with Pokemon because they are interested in it. He also said learning has to move toward more collaborative learning.

How are businesses responding to this? Ito said some of the most brilliant people she sees online are self taught. They are developing skills and traits prized by employers.

But Ito cautioned that the skills are not just about job training. They are relevant in civic life. “We’re talking about public education in a much broader way, we’re talking about how to participate in public life in a more critical way.”
She also harked to students learning to organize political and social groups around getting things done online in games. Again, skills useful in civic life and the job world.

For more information about what’s happening at the MacArthur digital learning center, check out the Web site: www.digitallearning.macfound.org
To hammer home the message that digital literacy can shape academic learning, Nichole Pinkard and company shared what is happening in a Chicago charter school developed by the University of Chicago. She said literacy is just as important in the digital world, but she presented a broader range of literacies, including cinema, network, simulation, graphics and multimedia. They try to support learning 24/7. They use out of school resources to support school based projects. A point she made was that its not that teachers don’t want to use digital tools and worlds for learning; it’s more that they don’t know how to do it.

So there is no question that there are new tools that go way beyond Smart Boards and Ipods. Now it will be interesting to see how the digital world and tools change the shape of what happens in classrooms. And how fast that change happens. I've got districts grappling with this and know their struggles will shape what I write.

Cathy Grimes
The Daily Press

Nobody's Kids: Looking at Alternative High Schools

2008-04-26T14:32:00.000-07:00

James Walsh found out how much Minnesota didn’t know about its alternative education programs -- and the students enrolled in them -- when he started asking about them for a Star Tribune story.
State officials didn’t know graduation rates or even how much money they spent on these programs, which serve 150,000 students in Minnesota.
School systems received the per-pupil funding for these students, but found a way to keep their scores on state-standardized tests from being counted.
His story, “Shadow Schools,” appeared in the Star Tribune last May.
“These were schools that operate in the shadow of the traditional districts, in the margin,” Walsh said. “Some were succeeding. Many more were not. And the saddest part of all is few people were taking notice.”
Stanford University researchers Jorge Ruiz de Velasco and Milbrey McLaughlin arrived at similar conclusions after evaluating dozens of alternative high schools in California.
They found a wide range in the quality and attitudes of teachers and principals. The best schools enjoyed strong support from community leaders in the public and private sector, as well as a commitment from their principals.
Those that failed were hamstrung by numerous factors, ranging from a lack of advocates for the children to insufficient educational materials.
A few questions to think about when you’re reporting on alternative education:
* Who is in these programs?
*What happens to these students ultimately?
*What do the students need from these programs in order to succeed?
*What is the definition of success for them?
*What is the supply and demand for alternative education in your area?

Reporting on Undercovered Stories

2008-04-26T14:30:00.000-07:00

Inside Higher Education editor Scott Jaschik and Jobs for the Future program director Travis Reindl came armed for bear with dozens of story ideas and different angles to popular story topics that have not seen a lot of ink.

Reindl spoke of a transformation in higher ed that will play out over the next 20 years with regard to money and people.

Most of the attention about on money in higher ed is on the price of college, but what about the spending side? Where is the money going? He said a report his group is coming out with soon examines this. It will show that contrary to what university officials say about expensive faculty driving up the cost, the past two decades of spending shows it's going elsewhere in the university budget.

Regarding people, he noted college classrooms will look different over the next two decades. They will be more racially and ethnically diverse, have more low income, first-generation and more adult students. He suggests looking at what that means to how campuses provide education and serve those population of students. What about the graying faculty and the impact their retirements will have on retirement systems that already are running on IOUs.

Jaschik suggested looking beyond the student loan “so-called” crisis, and asking finanical aid officers how many students are leaving school because they can't get loans? How much do the colleges rely on private loans to make up students' aid packages? Ask students to see if they understand the dangers of private loans. Do they know the difference between private loans and guaranteed federal loans? How much are the colleges in your area spending on merit aid to attract students and how do these merit aid policies advance the social good?

Other ideas he tossed out include taking a different approach to the admissions stories that have focused heavily on the difficulty of getting into elite schools by looking at where students in your area are going to college. Which ones are minority students choosing and why? How hard is it to get into a community college's nursing program? He noted in many community colleges “that is as hard as it is to get into Ivy League schools.”

Other story ideas offered: Take an on-line course and write about it. Sit in college classes to see what's changing in the instructional approach. Look at colleges' participation in the Voluntary System of Accountability to measure student learning and explore the debate of whether student learning can really be measured with this. Look at how your state divides up money for higher ed among sectors and what that says about priorities. Look at student debt levels and its impact on a college's alumni giving and on the majors students are choosing.

People left the room with their heads swimming. Lots of good ideas and story angles came out of this discussion.

Covering the big reform

2008-04-26T13:35:00.000-07:00

Veronica Anderson, editor of Catalyst Chicago, and Linda Shaw, an education reporter in Seattle, talked about the reforms school districts in Chicago and Seattle went through and how they covered them. Shaw broke coverage of reforms down to three areas: beginning, middle and end. Here's some pointers she and Anderson offered.

Beginning
- Have enterprise stories that go beyond district leaders' sales pitch ready to go when the next big thing is announced.
- Answer the basic questions of what's happening, where it's happening and how much it is going to cost.
- Look at other schools across the country that have done similar things to see how they went about implementing the changes, what growing pains they experienced and what the pay-off has been.
- Find out how leaders plan to measure progress and when they will start measuring it.
- If what they are doing is research-based, find out what that means. Ask for the studies they are using.
- Pay attention to costs. The most effective reforms include teacher training. Where will money for that come from?
- Be skeptical about writing too much before the plan actually happens. It's not real until it happens.

Middle
- This is when you can start answering the question of whether the reform is worthwhile. There is only so much you can say at the beginning - you have to give it time to work.
- When you are in schools for other stories, casually ask how the changes are going. People tend to be more candid in these situations and can offer "off the record" tips for you to follow up on.
- Follow up on the initial statements leaders said regarding when they would measure progress and how it would be done. Are they following through?
- It takes longer for changes to impact student achievement. More immediate changes that are signs the reforms are effective include improved attendance and decreased discipline referrals/suspensions.
- Look at whether the district spent the money the way they said they would.
- Use real examples to tell the story. Talk to the students who are affected and tell their stories.

End
Shaw and Anderson didn't talk much about this because there rarely is a clear end to reform efforts.

Are the costs of college sports worth it?

2008-04-26T10:20:00.000-07:00

Did you know that only a half-dozen universities in the country routinely make money on their athletic programs?

Although many colleges will say their sports departments balance the books, most take money from the general accounts of their school, explained Murray Sperber, a retired Indiana University professor who has written several books on college sports.

Wally Renfro of the NCAA said that while only a handful of college programs make money, neither do philosophy departments.

"Intercollegiate athletics in one of the places in higher ed that makes life goal development possible," he said.

During the "College Sports: Boom or Bust for Higher Ed?" seminar, the four speakers argued that collegiate sports should be an integral part of the higher ed beat, not the sole province of sports reporters.

Fraidy Reiss, now a reporter at the Asbury Park Press, talked about finding jaw-dropping perks for athletes at Rutgers when taking an investigating reporting class there. She uncovered special classes for athletes, early registration and students who were paid to report that athletes were attending class. The revelations made national news.

There are also good stories in Division III schools, said Kent Barnds of Augustana College. "It's an educational decision to offer sports," he said. Not only do the programs instill discipline, work ethic and the value of team work, but they attract boys to colleges. "One in ten boys at Augustana are on the football team," he said. Without sports, he said, many colleges couldn't attract enough students to stay open.

But Sperber said that in a recession, some schools may have to start cutting back some sports for financial reasons. He said that Division III schools, where students are not given sports scholarships, are a good model, and also said there might be some merit to professionalizing college athletics.

Renfro, of the NCAA, said that the societal beliefs surrounding college sports have to change. "We have a culture that has gone warped on how people think sports will be the answer to all their problems."

In fact, the speakers explained, most athletic scholarships do not last four years, do not cover all costs and require as much playing and practice time as a full-time job.

For teachers, money doesn't matter — but it definitely helps

2008-04-26T07:57:00.000-07:00

Sabrina Laine, executive director of the National Comprehensive Center on Teacher Quality at Learning Point Associates offered several reasons for compensation reform in yesterday's pay for performance session.

She'd like to first equalize teacher pay with that of comparable professions. Margaret Bobb, a Denver Public Schools teacher, agrees. An extra $1,000 a year (about $2.75 a day) on top of a $35,000 salary is not going to attract and retain high-quality teachers into hard-to-staff subjects and schools, Bobb said. ($5,000 however, might, she added.)

Short term financial incentives — housing assistance, bonuses, tuition reimbursement — will help attract teachers, but the panel mostly focused on how to retain those teachers, with long term pay for performance compensation. A large majority of teachers say that raising test scores should not be the only factor. Knowledge and skill-based pay must also contribute to the bottom line.

Arne Duncan, the Harvard-educated leader of Chicago public schools offered a passionate perspective on the subject.

"The public talks about the achievement gap but we also have a talent gap," he said. "We're in the business where talent matters tremendously."

Duncan is seeing talented teachers flee the inner city for tony suburban schools, but he wants to reverse that flow. A $40 million pay for performance grant should help that he said.

This year he piloted a pay for performance plan in 40 Chicago schools. Everyone in the building benefits from positive outcome — principals, teachers, janitors — creating a sense of teamwork rather than competition. Staffers are coming home with $5,000 to $10,000 extra this year thanks to his plan.

But, what he said at the end provided a sticking point for the entire panel: "Very few teachers come into the profession for the money."

Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, wholeheartedly agreed: "The motivational base for teachers is very different than the motivational base for entrepreneurs. They go into the profession to make a difference, not to make money. Still, does money matter? Yes, of course it does."

In the past six years, Weingarten has worked feverishly to raise the base pay of New York City public school teachers 48 percent. Over one summer in 2002, she decreased the number of uncertified teachers from 17 percent to 2 percent. Not surprisingly, she said, the January ELA scores shot up 6 points citywide.

For Margaret Bobb, pay for performance incentives are "payback" for the salary she should have been getting all along.

Kent Fischer, education reporter with the Dallas Morning News, asked Duncan why he can't just assign teachers to the neediest schools. "Because it doesn't work," Duncan said bluntly. "Forcing it doesn't make sense."

So, although teachers "aren't in it for the money," money definitely helps staff those failing schools.

Reporters should visit The Center for Education Compensation Reform for more information.

More on private loans and who colleges are actually helping

2008-04-26T07:37:00.001-07:00

Steve Burd, blogger from Higher Ed Watch (www.higheredwatch.org) said there’s a wealth of stories in answering the question of who is financial aid really helping? There’s a history of providing need-based aid for low-income students, but more and more colleges are offering merit-based aid.

He suggested looking at the public colleges and universities and asking whether they are still serving their traditional mission of everyone in the state, or are they really serving the wealthy students?

On the subject of private loans, he described them as more expensive and less safe than federal options. He pointed to the increasing reliance of undergraduates on private loans. Private loan volume has grown 734% over a ten year period, he said. Interest rates vary and are not capped.

Private loans are not automatically discharged if the borrower dies or is disabled. They can’t be discharged in bankruptcy, or if a school suddenly shuts down.

Yet 1 in 5 private loan borrowers take out a private loan before they exhaust their safer federal options – are they being pressured? Baum added that in some cases, parents tell kids to take out these loans so that parents themselves don’t have to borrow.

Burd talked about financial aid leveraging – how schools use limited aid budgets to provide merit aid rather than need based aid or woo the wealthiest students so they can get more full-pay students.

He also suggested reading Atlantic's story “The Best Class Money Can Buy” about colleges' admit-deny practice, where they offer low-income students bad financial aid packages to discourage them from attending. These are often the students who end up saddled with high private loan debt, he said. (Baum added that plenty of high-income students also take out private loans)

Look at the role enrollment management firms are playing in loan packaging: How are these connected to lenders. Not only are these ties worth looking into, but Baum added it's worth checking into how much colleges pay these consultants.

Another interesting trend worth following: Students who have to take out private loans to go to for-profit trade schools. Some of these schools have spotty records of graduating students and getting them into high-paying jobs.

Baum thinks reporters should look into the way public colleges dole out institutional grant aid. She said the College Board has found that – in some cases - more than half of the money is going to students who do not have financial need.

Piecing together student financial aid

2008-04-26T07:37:00.000-07:00

Sandy Baum of Skidmore College and the College Board laid out a general overview of the pieces that make up the complicated picture of student aid: Need-based and non-need based aid from federal, state, institutional and other sources in the form of grants, loans, work and tax benefits.

She gave a couple examples of students and their parents’ income and how much aid they might get from different institutions. One big difference between the public two-year example and the private four-year example was a $10,000 chunk of aid in the form of an institutional grant for the student attending a private four-year school.

There is order to this, she said, and it is possible to understand it, but almost any overarching simple summary statement is going to be wrong in some way. The most important thing to know is what questions to ask.

Weighed Down

2008-04-25T21:51:00.000-07:00

As a health reporter, Emily Hagedorn is a bit out of place at a conference full of us education wonks.

But she felt the story of obesity among children was so important she needed to come to the conference and tell us all about how her paper spent nearly a year tracking obese children for the project and how we could write similar stories for our publications.

The series, "Weighed Down," ran over the course of three days earlier this year in The Bakersfield Californian.

In the series, Emily and a group of staff photographers spent nearly a year with four children from ages 10 to 16 and brought their stories to life in narrative form.

The children also got in on the story in a first-person format, contributing diary entries they chronicled reality-show style using digital recorders. You can hear the kids in their own voices on the project Web site, accompanied with photos.

Emily said she decided to do this project because obesity is a significant issue among youngsters, and yet they don't fit our image of what sick children look like.

The health consequences, however, are very serious. Increases in the prevalence of Type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease among young people have been tied to obesity.

So how can other reporters start looking into this issue?

Emily suggested reports search for data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as the National Institutes of Health. State health departments are also a good source of information.

Here's a few story ideas she proposed:

Look at the nutritional content of a school lunch. What are a school's nutritional policies? Compare a menu today to one from 10 to 20 years ago.
what are the condition of a schools' water fountains? Are kids encouraged to drink water?
Do your schools reward good behavior with food? The school district I cover in Memphis just started a program that rewards middle school students who have good attendance with trips to Pizza Hut--in a city where an estimated 30 percent of school-age children are considered obese.
How are your schools building more physical education into the curriculum? Are your gym classes trying to me more current, such as by offering Dance Dance Revolution and Nintendo Wii?

Tackling childhood obesity

2008-04-25T20:59:00.000-07:00

Childhood obesity has developed over the past thirty years into a ballooning concern for American children.

And who better to be a weapon in the campaign against obesity than the media?

Adam Becker, executive director of the Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago Children, told reporters the work they do matters, highlighting the problem and potentially influencing policy and legislation.

'We often get phone calls based on what people see in the paper and have heard on the radio," he said.

Dr. Becker brought some damning facts to the table to make his argument.
In the 1970s, about 5 percent of children in the data were significantly overweight. In 2003, that number was about 20 percent.

"Clearly this is an epidemic and we have a naitonal problem," Becker said.

Despite our tendencies to look for a single culprit to blame, Becker said the story of childhood obesity is one filled with complexities and urged reporters to write their stories with the nuance needed to address that reality.

Parents, schools, communities and the larger society all play a role in why our children are larger.

No Child Left Behind has shoved physical education and other classes into the background as schools labor hard to make sure kids pass reading and math tests.

In some neighborhoods, schools lack playground equipment or are in neighborhoods too dangerous for children to play outside.

Here's some guidelines from Becker and CLOCC to help guide healthier eating and living:

5-4-3-2-1 Go!

5 servings of fruit and veggies a day

4 servings of water a day

3 servings of low fat dairy a day

2 or less hour of screen time a day

1 hour or more of physical activity a day

Iraq War Veterans and College

2008-04-25T20:25:00.000-07:00

Veterans from the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan who are attending college can
provide grist for good stories.
Veterans experience myriad problems - from financial issues to afford
college to emotional issues related to post traumatic stress disorder and
fitting in with the college community.
Rodrigo Garcia, a Marine Corps vet, spoke about the stresses he and other
vets face on campus.
There are vets like him with stories to tell on every college campus.
He works a fulltime job and balances that with his schooling. He founded
the Student Veterans of America to address some of those needs. He earned his
bachelors degree in two years and will get a masters this year.
He has persevered with an eye on following his dreams, a dedication to keep
trying and a determination to never be afraid to ask for help.
Other stories can be written on the fight to pass the new GI Bill that's
now before Congress. Patrick Campbell of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of
America says the bill will come for a vote in the next two weeks. The bill
calls for paying the full cost of public college education.
"Right now we are on the edge of history," he says.
So it could be a good local story to link to the national story.
You can also look at what your state is doing to address the hurdles
veterans face. Steve Franz, system director of the Minnesota State Colleges and
University System, talked about the state's "veteran-friendly" policies.
Cambell says Minnesota is the model state, so you can compare your state to
what's going on out there.
Franz also recalled how making personal connections with vets and their
families can be so important. He brought up the issues concerning the impact
deployment has on the lives of children of soldiers in the war. Also consider
stories about the wives of soldiers, getting education for the job they'll need
if their husband gets killed.
Both Campbell and Garcia said reporters shouldn't ask if they killed someone or
if a friend died. They need to trust the reporter. You can't ask that question
up front.
"Just have the veteran tell their story," Garcia says.
Campbell says ask about problems their friends are having because they don't
want to be seen as complainers.

- David McKay Wilson

Student Mental Health vs. Privacy

2008-04-25T18:11:00.000-07:00

Student Mental Health vs. Privacy

For many, mental health issues tend to surface while in high school and college, said Alison Malmon, who founded a student support group after her college-aged brother committed suicide.

Her brother Brian silently suffered from schizophrenia for three years without telling anyone. He felt like he was going at it alone, she said, not knowing that other people went through the same things he did like depression or thoughts of suicide.

At least 1,100 college students committed suicide last year, Wall Street Journal health reporter and session moderator Elizabeth Bernstein said. She followed a different suicide in an award-winning series about mental health issues among adolescents and college students. A college sophomore hung himself while his campus therapist struggled with the privacy issues of whether or not to tell his parents about his behavior.

More students with mental health issues are finding their way into the higher education system than ever before with the help of medication, according to Tim Marchell, director of mental health initiatives for Cornell University. But some are casting those meds aside in hopes to start anew, Alison said.

Tim explained that one in 10 students seriously considers suicide. But stigmas about mental health stir up memories of school shooters or other students kicked off campus after telling school officials about their mental health issues – all discouraging students from seeking help, panelists said.

Case in point was Alison’s brother Brian who struggled internally with schizophrenia, putting on the face of a dynamically successful student; 3.8 GPA, sports writer and eventual editor at his college newspaper, a varsity sports player and choir singer.

But he was stressed and depressed, and he waited three years before telling anyone about it. He stepped back from school for a break, but after watching his friends graduate and move on with their lives, he felt alone. Brian killed himself believing his schizophrenia was a life sentence and not realizing other people with the same problem can still live their lives, Alison said.

After her brother’s suicide, she founded Active Minds on Campus in an effort to raise awareness for mental health issues. Seven years later, there are 135 campus club chapters nationwide.

The link between substance abuse and mental health is also a telling factor. Some students say they drink because they’re depressed, but it’s really a “chicken or the egg” situation. Tim said roughly half those who seriously abuse alcohol will be diagnosed with a mental health disorder.

Tim painted Cornell as a university progressively dealing with mental health issues. The school with one or two suicides a year implemented a handful of programs to help identify, address and treat student mental health problems, he said. They include establishing a council on alcohol and drug abuse, a mental health policy group to implement changes in FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) and training faculty members and students to notice and respond to unusual behaviors.

Many students don’t know or understand the signs of mental illness, Alison said. She and her brother didn’t. She urged reporters to be sure to tell the positive stories in their coverage of mental health – the stories about students who faced these problems, who earned their degrees, who went on with life. Students need role models to help them ask for help. At the least, include an info box on how to seek help, she said.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Education is looking closely at FERPA after the media raised awareness that some schools don’t seem to fully understand the system. As a way around privacy issues, some schools are asking students to sign waivers giving universities the OK to share information with parents. Some schools are considering students as dependents under their parents unless a student says otherwise, allowing the school to release critical info to those parents if needed.

Adolescent Literacy

2008-04-25T15:58:00.000-07:00

The U.S. needs to make literacy a priority in its schools, speakers during a session on adolescent literacy maintained Friday afternoon.
"If kids can't read in our schools, what can they do?" asked Mel Riddile, principal of T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va.
But isn't literacy already a focus? According to Riddle, and Catherine Snow, an education professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, not only have schools placed more emphasis on grades K-3, but that emphasis has been more on learning to read - and not on reading to learn.
Consequently, adolescents are struggling with reading comprehension. And, Snow said, there's a misconception that the order of teaching reading goes from phonological awareness, to word reading, to fluency and then finally to comprehension.
Comprehension "should not be something that is postponed until word knowledge ... It's got to be about comprehension from the very beginning."
Riddile said there's a belief among lawmakers that "if we do the job K-3 it's over." It's a misguided notion.
"If we stop teaching math at third grade, you'd think we were crazy."
Part of the problem, they say, is that formal reading instruction ends in elementary school. And secondary teachers aren't trained to teach reading, and don't think it's their responsibility.
Increasingly, though, schools are paying attention to this issue, and trying to find ways to integrate reading throughout the curriculum.
"It's the most important thing we can possibly do for our kids," Riddile said.
Riddile presented a list of "musts" that must happen for this effort to succeed.
Included on the list:
- Policies that support literacy
- Consistent instruction
- Annual diagnostic assessment
- Targeted interventions
- Literacy leaders and literacy councils in schools
- Professional development for teachers
- Technology integration
- Monitor and measure progress to make sure that efforts are working
Want more information? Snow recommended these web sites:
www.carnegie.org/literacy
www.serpinstitute.org

Where's the money?

2008-04-25T15:17:00.000-07:00

School financial records can be your friends for making you a hero to your editor and a pain in the rear to your school districts.

Kent Fischer of the Dallas Morning News shared how he regularly asks for financial records such as purchase orders, check logs, credit card statements and payroll databases.

Kent’s review of purchase orders found how Dallas school officials engineered it for HP to win the district’s computer contract, which may explain why one guy is now in the federal pen. In another case, he found a clause in deal that saw Kinko getting the district’s printing contract and rewarding school employees with spots in a pricey golf tournament.

Receipts for credit cards showed how DISD employees spent $800,000 on largely untraceable retail gift cards. They also spent $24.95 on Americansingles.com and $70 for a Star Trek DVD set that was called “science videos” on a purchase form.

Kent’s review of grant records showed how money was being spent wildly before grant deadlines expired.

Kent’s look at itemized payroll records showed how they were padding employee pay with car allowances, even when folks didn’t have cars.

David Hunn of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch showed how much fun you can have looking at superintendent pay.

David said you need to look at the superintendent’s contracts and then get the records on all the payments made, including the actual stubs. This will let you see whether the superintendent is getting money that’s not part of his contract.

David busted the Riverside superintendent for asking for money he wasn’t entitled to get to spend on riverboat gambling.

Questions repeatedly came up about the time involved in checking these records.

Both guys stressed that it’s not as time consuming as it seems. Kent called it a monthly five-minute FOI chore to request the records.

They stressed the need to make sure the districts follow up on giving the records. Like a dog being trained, Kent said if you let them get away with stalling they’ll keep “crapping on the rug.”

Who's left out of Pre-K

2008-04-25T15:14:00.001-07:00

Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, led off the discussion some national background for reporters writing about Pre-K. First, it's difficult to get consistent numbers, but despite variances in the numbers from study to study, the trends are the same. It's no surprise that poor children are left out. But thanks to programs such as Head Start, they are not as impacted as the working poor or even middle class children.
Second, families who live in the wrong area are left out. Hispanic children fall into this category, Barnett said. It's a myth that Hispanic parents want their children at home. Hispanic children stay home because they tend to live in areas without subsidized preschool.
The children of high school dropouts are left out of preschool. So are children with behavior issues.
Barnett was followed by two reporters who spoke about programs in specific areas, Wisconsin and Oklahoma. Joel Dresang from the Milwaukee Journal said that not only do schools have the option to provide preschool, parents also have an option to send their children to preschool. (The legal age for attendance in Wisconsin is six.) A primary barrier for working parents is the need for all day child care, as opposed to half day preschool, and, along with that, transportation issues.
Solutions include school districts which offer afternoon childcare along with half-day preschool. Wisconsin is also pushing collaborations between the child care and preschool providers and school districts. Wisconsin has also set aside money for start up grants for 4-K programs in school districts taking a collaborative approach.
Dresang was followed by Ginnie Graham of the Tulsa World who talked about the growth of Oklahoma's preschool program since its inception 10 years ago. Initially Oklahoma's program was popular in rural areas, where they were losing enrollment. Urban and low income districts saw it as a way to help children be prepared.
Today the preschool debate in Oklahoma is mostly over, with 72% of districts offering some form of preschool for 4-year-olds. That number jumps to 90% if programs such as Head Start and private programs are included.
As in Wisconsin, collaboration has been key. For example, a school district that wants to start a preschool program but lacks a building may partner with a local child care provider who would likely close if free preschool was available. The school may provide the teacher and preschool, and the child care provider may provide the building and afternoon child care.
Some suggested story ideas include:
-- Budget driven stories. The Head Start budget is down 11%. Since Pre-K is generally a local district option, are districts stepping into the breach?
-- Instead of talking to education and preschool advocates, try talking to econoists, business people and parents.
-- Bring kids into the story. Young children grow dramatically in very short periods of time, so reporters can use that growth to illustrate the effectiveness of preschool.
-- Talk about play-based curricula, but instead of showing children playing, use a teacher (this would be effective in video as well as stories) to narrate what the child is learning through that play.
-- In today's climate, the issue of testing and preschool is coming. Should 4-year-olds be tested and how?

Wholly Holistic

2008-04-25T15:14:00.000-07:00

Had some wireless problems earlier, so my apologies that this post is going up a whole eight hours after the end of this morning's session... the gist of which was whether admissions officers can compile a racially and economically diverse class without looking at, um, the race and economic status of applicants.

Michele Sandlin from Oregon State University says yes. About eight years ago, her school developed an "insight resume" that the school uses to evaluate applicants consisting of 100-word answers on six topics such as dealing with adversity and community service. By her account, scores on the insight resumes better predict college success than SAT scores.

Juan Gilbert at Auburn University wrote a computer program, called AdmissionsQuest, that Auburn is now using for "holistic admissions." The program sifts through the qualifications of various applicants, using clustering software to compile an admitted class. Gilbert said that the students selected by the software had equal academic credentials but were more diverse.

Ted O'Neill of the University of Chicago described his university's reliance on "quirky questions" to identify prospective students not just by grades and SAT scores but on their intellectual curiousity and depth of thought.

Much of the discussion focused on everybody's favorite standardized test (you guessed it, the SAT), and whether getting rid of it in college admissions would be a wise move (O'Neill said he'd love to get rid of it, but professors, who usually had high SAT scores, would never go for it).

Teacher Contracts 101

2008-04-25T14:59:00.000-07:00

Tim Daly picked up the mantle of his predecessor Michelle Rhee and is now leading the effort to close achievement gaps in urban school districts by increasing teacher quality.
Daly, executive director of the New Teacher Project, hosted the session “Teacher Distribution: Do Contracts Define the Issue?” on Friday from 3:45 p.m. to 5 p.m.
He helped us ed beaters figure out how to decipher teacher contracts that most often are written in edu-jargon.
Here are some of Daly’s notes, quotes, and anecdotes (or some that caught my attention anyway):
--View the contracts through the lens of whether it supports teacher quality.
--Many contracts force schools to hire large numbers of teachers they do not want.
--Poor performers are passed around instead of districts developing a viable teacher termination process.

Here are some questions to be asking school districts and unions:
--Do hiring and transfer rules allow schools to build cohesive instructional teams?
--Within districts, does the contract appear to ensure that lower income students get the worst teachers?

Oh, and yes, the Michelle Rhee mentioned in graph 1 is the same who is now busting chops and straightening up dysfunction all in the name of higher achievement and a better future for the students of DC Public Schools.

Heated debate on gender differences, writing on research

2008-04-25T12:29:00.000-07:00

What started with a lot of jargon about vision and the brain became a heated -- and at times very defensive -- debate on how boys and girls learn.

Early Friday morning, Dr. Leonard Sax, president and founder of the National Association of Single Sex Public Education, took a largely pro-single-sex education stance. Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist at Rosalind Franklin University for Medicine and Science's Chicago Medical School, took the other side.

Both researchers covered several topics. Here are just some snippets of what they said. Feel free to add your two cents and additions.

Sax discussed how girls and boys interpret things they see differently. Girls' vision is more geared toward what they are looking at. This can be seen in the type of cells in their eyes and a study in which most young girls drew people, pets, flowers, etc., that are stationary. Boys are more focused on where an object is going. The type of cells in the eyes show this, along with boys' preoccupation with drawing scenes of action at great change, such as car crashes. Teachers can reinforce a stereotype that drawing is for girls when they criticize boys' drawings of action.

Sax was obviously very upset about the March 2 New York Times Magazine article, which he was in, about single-sex ed. He wrote his own rebuttal, which he encouraged everyone to read.

Eliot does not deny there are differences -- just not as many differences as many people think. She cited a study that found the largest difference between the sexes in height and the smallest difference in moral reasoning. Yes, boys' brains are larger than girls' brains but so are the rest of their organs. "You have to ask yourself, 'How do you know that is the result of genes or hormones?" she asked of brain photos showing different parts of girls' and boys' brains lighting up. The brain is very malleable, which means that the differences might be more due to nurture than nature.

One interesting thing Eliot brought up was that journalists are more apt to write about studies that reinforce the fact there are inherent differences between girls and boys. Studies that show the differences aren't as great as believed usually get no press.

Also, she encouraged people to see if a study has been duplicated. This gives it credibility.

What standards do you use when evaluating studies?

Friday Conference Gossip

2008-04-25T11:17:00.000-07:00

Random tips and tidbits from the EWA conference: Kent Fischer of the Dallas Morning News is, thanks to his new and wildly successful DISD blog, the happiest journalist I've seen in a while...John Merrow's shop, LMI, is apparently working on a new segment for the PBS NewsHour about student incentive programs, and trying out some interesting new things...Lots of traditional journalists -- Roz Rossi (Chicago Sun Times), Dale Mezeccappa (Philly Notebook), and others -- seem pretty interested in blogging and may be on the verge of following Scott, Kent, and others into the bloggy world. I'm excited and fearful at the same time.... Communications folks who work for education organizations still seem to be sticking to the traditional things: press releases, events, newsletters, etc. -- and are still reluctant to get involved with blogs and blog comments even when we're talking about their issues and organizations. I dare them to make a comment on this blog just to show that the world will not end if they do...Things may be rough for education journalists in the news industry, but times are still good for the education PR/marketing folks, I'm told. The recession hasn't hit the foundations, yet...New blog I've never heard of but sounds good: The Daily Coyote...Folks are talking about who might replace Russ Whitehurst at IES, and whether the effort to separate IES from the USDE will continue... The Exxon Mobile folks treated us to a nice reception last night, featuring the first African-American astronaut to walk in space. He told me that when he does school visits kids ask him things like Are you rich, what's it like to be weightless, and how do you go to the bathroom? A conference is barely a conference without party boys Josh Benton and Greg Toppo helping rounds folks up to find a nearby bar. We miss you, guys...Last but not least, the Gates Foundation's Marie Groark made my day by saying that sometimes she liked reading my blog, and sometimes it scared her. Just the reaction I'm looking for.

Can I get a price check on this?

2008-04-25T09:27:00.000-07:00

College tuition has risen precipitously across the country in recent years, but panelists at a well-attended session on Friday morning said the bigger worry has become the steep hikes in associated costs, such as housing, child care and textbooks. Higher education has developed a minefield of "hidden costs," they said.

Those nontuition costs can bring the cost of attendance to 40 percent or more of income for the poorest families, said Sandy Baum of the College Board and Skidmore College. That's a tough pill to swallow for families that struggle to make ends meet. And the schools themselves can do little to help students deal with living costs, she said.

The average overall student budget rose to $13,126 last fall, said David Baime of the American Association of Community Colleges. Although the maximum Pell grant is rising past $4,700 this year, U.S. tax code continues to ignore many of the living expenses that most burden nontraditional students, the bread and butter of a community college. The tax code's favoritism of wealthy students "is just a scandal" that deserves more coverage, Baime said.

Baime joined Baum in defending colleges as they try to deal with the nation's changing economic landscape. Median income is falling, he said, but schools are being forced to pay for their own rising expenses. What's a school to do?

Students increasingly are being hurt by rising textbook prices, said Luke Swarthout of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, or PIRG. The average annual price per student has reached about $900, he said, caused by a variety of factors that could be controlled. Publishers should resist the urge to come out with new editions every five minutes, he said, and provide professors the information and options they need to keep prices low.

And why not give textbook rentals, open-source online books and other innovative options a try? For more on these alternatives and a recent petition signed by 1,000 faculty members nationwide, Swarthout asks that you check out this PIRG site.

Baum, meanwhile, pooh-poohed (or pu-pu'd, for a more exotic flavor) recent discounts offered by Ivy League members and other prominent high-cost private schools for middle-income students. These schools, and particularly these deals, benefit only a small number of people, she said, urging reporters to look carefully at the discounts.

But those actions could end up hurting smaller private colleges, Baime said. Keep an eye on the effects of competition on colleges with smaller endowments, he said.

The story through the character

2008-04-24T19:34:00.000-07:00

"I would rather see the focus on the person and let it illuminate the issue." - Steve James

Documentary filmmaker Steve James of "Hoop Dreams" fame, you might be shocked to learn, isn't really interested in objectivity.

Truth, James told a sizable crowd at the EWA's Thursday night session, is what he's trying to find with all of his projects. And "Truth" is a much is tougher nut to crack. According to James, it requires time, compassion and a willingness to set aside the issue and follow the sources.

James used three of his film projects--"Hoop Dreams," "Stevie" and "At the Death House Door"--to describe how he learned to abandon preconceived notions about a story and let it go where it may.

All three projects had that forehead-slap moment when James realized that everything about the film was about to go in a whole new direction. In "Dreams," the moment of clarity came when an irregular high school basketball scout took a budding streetball star to a prep coach on a recruiting visit. James knew that their anointed setting, a basketball court in a tough Chicago neighborhood, had suddenly become just a starting point.

"The entire conception of the film changed," he said. "This, for us, presented a far richer possibility."

"Stevie" also started small and "grew in the telling," to paraphrase JRR Tolkien. A film about James' reaquaintance with a man to whom he'd been a Big Brother, it turned into a project about James' struggle to capture the truth about who the title character had become and why he ended that way.

"The film evolved in to something far more complicated," James said. "How do the Stevies of this world come to exist?"

"At the Death House Door" is James' most recent feature-length documentary. It weaves the story of a pastor who ministered to men during their state-ordered executions and two reporters who build a case that an innocent man was put to death. Initially, the reporters wanted the film to focus on their investigation. But James' interest was piqued when they described how the pastor kept a recorded diary of every execution he witnessed. That, James said, was a story. The challenge was to keep the viewers from being blinded by the "issue" of the death penalty.

"One of the lessons I learned as a filmmaker…is to try and grapple with people's complexity," James said. "My goal as a filmmaker should be to try to present people as complexly as they are, but not to let the audience make easy judgements."

Reporters necessarily have to be objective about their subjects, James conceded. But "At the Death House Door" demonstrates that great reporters are always compassionate, he said. More compassion might have saved the condemned man.

"It's what drives them to do their job better," he said.

In a journalism school class James teaches, he makes the students create short documentaries with little or no narration. Often, the students complain that the sources didn't say what they expected.

"It didn't fit," James said. "You have to change what you're doing. I've made them tell the story through the character."

(Colophon: IFC will present "At the Death House Door" on May 29. This is a little longer than I planned, but a man who spent 7 years making "Hoop Dreams" deserves a few extra paragraphs. I've also learned that it is possible to blog while drinking a Long Island Iced Tea in the hotel lounge.)

Just a spoon full of video helps the newspaper go round

2008-04-24T17:27:00.000-07:00

Bradley Piper wants you to know, you don’t have to be afraid of shooting video.

In the session: “The Dos and Don’ts of video reporting,” the Chicago Tribune’s senior video producer, gave reporters a crash course in how to shoot a video, from the nitty gritty of sound bites to tips for shooting sophisticated videos better than what you’d see on the nightly news.

My paper, The Tennessean, is pretty awesome about encouraging video and supplying equipment, but the major complaint among reporters is that there’s not enough time to shoot video without sacrificing the quality of your print story.

Piper taught the whole session with this point in mind and stressed that reporters can use video equipment to assist their reporting. Prop the camera next to you during an interview, and keep on taking notes.

My journalism crush

2008-04-24T17:25:00.000-07:00

My co-workers tease me about my love for The Washington Post. I go on and on about it so much, they call it my “boyfriend.”

Well, I’ve got news everybody, my boyfriend and me finally exchanged digits!

At the “Education-related packages and multi-media” session, I got to meet Dion Haynes, who helped create one of my favorite online packages, “Fixing D.C. Schools.” Haynes presented with Emily Hagedorn from the Bakersfield Californian, who also talked about her series on childhood obesity. The two shared helpful hints about putting together multi-media packages.

Naturally, I approached Haynes after the seminar to tell him how much I loved his series and to see if he would be willing to help me out with a project I am currently working on. He agreed and gave me his number!

Here’s to hoping he returns my call(s).

Building a better blogger

2008-04-24T17:22:00.000-07:00

Listening to Keung Hui of the Raleigh News & Observer talk about his blog made me realize how much mine needs a makeover.

Hui talked about how crucial it was to promote the blog and post fresh information on a regular basis. To be honest, I haven’t posted a blog in a while.

Kent Fischer of the Dallas Morning News had the great idea of offering up a “daily dish” to readers, which is basically a blog post that links to all the stories on the Internet about the Dallas school district. I’m still figuring out the whole RSS feed concept (but I love it).

Scott Elliott, the granddaddy of blogging and a reporter at the Dayton Daily News, said blogging made him a better writer and increased his visibility in the community. He’s been writing his “Get on the bus” blog since August 2005, a lifetime in Web years, and says it gets easier the longer you do it. That’s nice to hear, since I’m still trying to balance blogging with my other beat duties.

“If I couldn’t blog anymore,” he said, “I would feel like I was reporting with one arm.”

Why Blog, Why Not Blog?

2008-04-24T14:33:00.000-07:00

Below in completely raw form are the notes that I used to talk to education writers and public affairs folks from education organizations today in a presentation about blogging that I did with Kent Fischer from the Dallas Morning News.

I tried to explain why blogs are worth tracking, what they offer, why they're so popular, how to track blogs without getting overwhelmed, and how to get noticed in the blogosphere without starting a blog yourself.

I was much funnier live than you will think from this. Or at least I like to think so. More on Kent's presentation (which was much better than mine).

Click here for full text (cross-posted from TWIE).

Sweet Home, Chicago

2008-04-24T07:43:00.001-07:00

Hundreds of education writers -- and the folks who try to get them to write their stories -- are going to be in Chicago this week for the Umpteenth Annual Education Writers conference. [No, not the official conference title.] Speakers include Michelle Rhee, the new District of Columbia education chancellor, and Steve James, director of the award-winning documentary, Hoop Dreams. UFT president Randi Weingarten, Chicago schools CEO Arne Duncan, and National Association for Single Sex Public Education president Leonard Sax will be there. Click ewa.org to get all the details. Come up and say hi if you see me there. [Cross-posted from TWIE]

EWA to Blog about Annual Conference

2008-04-18T12:20:00.001-07:00

EWA has assembled a team of reporter volunteers to blog about the 61st annual seminar in Chicago. So far we have 12 reporters who will cover sessions ranging from gender and brain research to holistic admissions to covering school budgets.