Prepping Students for a Global Society

At a time when No Child Left Behind requirements have our teachers fixated on testing, several schools and programs have been recognized for promoting international education at a grassroots level. Instead of hyping strategies to pass tests, the educators involved with these efforts are preparing students to meet the demands of the global community.

Earlier this month, Asia Society announced the 2007 winners of The Goldman Sachs Foundation Prizes for Excellence in International Education.The following winners received $25,000 for helping promote cultural awareness, world history, and a global curriculum as education essentials.

1. Ohio's State Board of Education is the first in the country to engage in a systematic international benchmarking study. The state's Creating a World Class Education System ( PDF, 2.24 MB) in Ohio compares its educational system to others globally and makes recommendations for policy changes. The Board has also revised its state curriculum standards to increase the amount of international content in which students are expected to demonstrate proficiency.

2. Sunset Elementary School in Miami, Florida is an urban magnet and neighborhood school that, for the past 20 years, has offered a unique International Studies magnet program to its diverse student population. The program offers an inquiry-based, global curriculum focused on the topics of civic responsibility, cultural and environmental awareness, and knowledge of the global economy.Coursework includes foreign language programs and instruction in math, science and social studies in foreign languages.

3. Eugene International High School in Eugene, Oregon is a teacher-developed school-within-a-school across three high school campuses in that serves approximately 1,300 students.Established 20 years ago, the required core curriculum centers around culture, history, economics, and political and belief systems. Each grade level focuses on a particular region of the world through coursework. Students are required to take at least three years of French, Spanish, Japanese or German.

4. Reischauer Scholars Program, Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE). The program is a college-level distance learning course for high school students that provides a broad overview of Japanese history, literature, religion, art, politics, economics, education and U.S.-Japan relations. The course, offered in 29 states, involves 10 sessions held over six months and is taught by senior scholars, diplomats, and other experts from the U.S. and Japan. Students can earn college credit by engaging in lectures, readings and online discussions.

This is clear evidence that despite a flawed NCLB Act, public school educators are as dedicated as ever to providing graduates with the skills they need to compete in our global society.

--John Rosales

News Flash!

Spelling Discovers 1

The Secretary of Education has decided that a school that keeps missing one No Child Left Behind targets doesn't have to be treated as if it missed, say, 37 targets.

At least, not if that school is in one of 10 states participating in a pilot program Secretary Margaret Spellings announced recently. Other states must shut down or drastically change schools that persistently miss even one target, but the lucky 10 will not.

It's called "differentiated accountability."

"This is something good, something we’ve been advocating," commented NEA President Reg Weaver. But much more needs to be done, he added.

Spellings' new policy leaves intact the law's rigid reliance on test scores to measure school quality. And some observers point out that it treats urban schools with many minority and low-income children much more harshly than schools that are richer and whiter. In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of NCLB, schools that are wealthy and mostly White can pass with the same scores that would flunk an urban school.

That's because, if there are only a few English language learners, they don't have to meet the school-wide test score goal, but if there are a lot of ELLs, they do. And the same for other subgroups.

The idea of making schools accountable for the achievement of a subgroup only if the group has a certain minimum size was justified on the grounds that a small number of students might not be statistically representative, so the school shouldn't be responsible, but the achievement of a large group is more likely to represent school quality. If that were the real reason, though, the minimum group size would be the same across the country and it would be determined by a statistical test. Instead, every state was allowed to pick a different number -- clearly a political decision.

Urban schools generally have more members of many subgroups, so they have a higher hurdle to jump to reach the all-important "adequate yearly progress.

Here are some comments on the new program from NEA and from the Columbus Education Association.

--Alain Jehlen

What March Madness Has to Do With the NEA

Admit it: your NCAA tournament bracket is in ruins. Your alma mater lost in the first round, you picked the wrong upsets, and you had Duke going all the way. Now is when you can shift allegiances, rooting for teams not because of the "science" that is bracketology, but for purely emotional reasons. How about this one: the mother of two of the stars of the tournament-twins Brook and Robin Lopez of Stanford-is an NEA member.

We first told you about Fresno, California, high school teacher Deborah Ledford and her sons who were destined for college basketball stardom in January 2007 (weren't we prescient?!) The seven-foot twins averaged in the double digits for the regular Pac-10 season this year, and they've been on fire in the post season. On Saturday, they helped the Cardinals overcome a Marquette challenge to win 82-81 in the semifinals and advance to the Sweet 16. In the tournament, Brook leads his team in scoring (18.9 points per game) and rebounding (8.2 per game.) Robin follows at 10.3 points and 5.7 rebounds per game.

And mom Deborah even got a little face time on CBS, shown rooting in the stands for her boys during the game. The math and German teacher is a Stanford alum herself, but we're guessing that she'd cheer for the Cardinals, regardless.

--Cynthia Kopkowski

The $125,000 Salary Experiment

Two weeks ago The New York Times reported a story on a newly formed Brooklyn charter school whose founder, according to The Times, seeks to answer one simple question with his venture: will $125,000 salaries attract the best teachers?

This charter school, which will open next year to 120 students in grades 5-8, is a product of The Equity Project, the brainchild of Zeke M. Vanderhoek, a former middle school teacher turned entrepreneur who will also serve as the charter school's first principal. Vanderhoek plans to make the $125,000 salaries viable by inverting the traditional hierarchy among teachers and administrators (the principal will earn only $90,000) and by cutting back on support staff, administrators and technology. For their part, teachers will be expected to work longer hours and more months out of the year.

As I see it, there's little doubt that high salaries will attract well-trained, accomplished and effective teachers. And there are other significant questions raised by this $125K experiment. To start: if salaries are tied to student performance, how will performance be measured? If today's educational climate is any guide, it can only be one thing: tests.

Following that: If the student performance rises, what impact will the $125K experiment have on teacher pay in other localities? And on the flip side, what lessons will be learned from a failed experiment? That teacher quality, though a significant factor in student achievement, isn't the only factor? We already know that a stable home life, parental involvement, and support for ELL and special ed students are significant factors as well.

Those writing in the classroom blogosphere also have questions. There are many excellent conversations out there among teachers. Dan, a high school math teacher in California, started a great conversation among his readers on the merits of this experiment and the problems that may arise in assessing student achievement; here's my favorite response:

"I wonder if they'd accept, as an example of student achievement, work from the student with Down Syndrome who was in my class for 'socialization' a couple of years ago and who progressed from sitting in class with his hands down his pants to circling 'yes' or 'no' in answer to questions about a photo."

Edwize contends that you don't need to sacrifice support staff, administrators and technology for high teacher salaries. A history professor wonders if higher salaries for secondary teachers will break down stigmas within the profession between teachers at the high school, community college and university levels. A teacher's wife is skeptical that higher salaries could fix the discipline problems and bureaucratic oppression that plagued her husband's teaching career, while a former teacher thinks a $125K salary might have kept her in the profession. A school board member in South Dakota is looking to see if such an experiment might work in his state. Mike Antonucci, the teachers' union watch dog, is laying in the tall grass, waiting to see how NEA, AFT and others will respond.

It will be interesting, to say the least, to see how this $125K salary experiment turns out. We're all watching.

--Joe Hammond

Dropout Prevention 2.0

If you can't fight 'em, join 'em. That's what some large school districts have decided in the struggle with media saturation for students' attention. Last month, New York City distributed cell phones to 2,500 students as the first salvo of a $2 million campaign to engage students more in school. Some planned uses for the phones sound useful (teachers will be able to text students on important upcoming assignments, tests, etc.), others a bit tired (hiring celebrity spokespeople to record downloadable messages encouraging students to do well in class).

But can school really be marketed as a "must-have" product to disinterested teenagers and would-be dropouts, as some advertising gurus would have us believe? Los Angeles Unified School District seems to think so, recently spending millions on Web 2.0 applications to improve its graduation rates. Last fall, the district launched a Web site devoted to re-enrollment and assembled a team of mentor students to communicate with their peers via a MySpace page and You Tube videos telling their stories and encouraging their friends to re-enroll.

Naturally, skepticism abounds from those who believe that utilizing tools such as cell phones, viral marketing schemes, etc. amounts to little more than a "kitchen sink" strategy to attack an enormously complicated problem. We'll soon see how it plays out--although New York's campaign to "rebrand" school is still in its infancy, LAUSD hopes to bring 5 percent of the current 17,000 current dropouts back into school by the end of this school year.

--Tim Walker

Teacher Pay Falls into the Gap

Salary growth for teachers lags far behind the salary growth in similar professions, making it nearly impossible to attract and retain the highest quality educators, according to a new study.

The study -- The Teaching Penalty: Teacher Pay Losing Ground -- found that public school teachers are paid about 15 percent less a week than people in similar professions with similar educations, like accountants, registered nurses and computer programmers.
Even when health insurance and pensions are added in, teachers still make 12 percent less.

"Teachers are the single most important ingredient in educational success -- and it's important for schools to compete for and keep the best qualified teachers," says researcher Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute and director of EPI’s education research program. "But this widespread and systemic devaluing of teaching sabotages those efforts. If you deliberately set out to design a plan to drive away your most experienced teachers, this would be a good way to do it."

Surprisingly, even during the period of solid economic growth, high employment and rising wages of the late 1990s, the teacher pay gap continued to grow. While earnings of college graduates increased by 12.7 percent during the boom of the 90s, teachers' earnings didn't grow at all.

Holding advanced degrees doesn't help matters -- in 2006, teachers with a bachelor's degree earned 12.2 percent less than their peers in other occupations in 2006, while those with a masters degree earned 11.3 percent less.

The EPI study offers the most thorough examination to date of the trend in relative teacher pay. In addition to breaking out data by gender, seniority, and education, the authors examined and compared their results, which are based on decennial Census data, to results from other researchers. They found broad consensus on the fact of a teacher pay disadvantage that has grown over time.

NEA is working to promote professional pay, and you can join the campaign. Learn more at nea.org/pay.

--Cindy Long

Bus Drivers are Educators Too

From Phoenix, Oregon, comes a story about a school district's effort to get bus drivers involved in cutting down on inter-ethnic bullying on the ride to school.

According to the Mail Tribune newspaper, the district brought drivers together to learn about bullying and think about how they can help stop it.

A former bilingual teacher gave them a taste of what life is like for the 15 percent of their students who don't speak English--she spoke to them rapidly in Spanish, asking questions, demanding answers. Only one driver understood what she said. But the rest understood her point.

The teacher told about her own hard days as a child with limited English, on the receiving end of ethnic slurs. She said a friendly driver can make a big difference. Her favorite driver posted a happy birthday card on the bus window as each child's special day came along.

That turned out to be difficult advice for these drivers to follow. They aren't told the children's names, never mind their birthdays! And they don't know which students have trouble speaking English, so if a student doesn't answer a question posed in English, they have to figure out whether that's because the student didn't understand or just wants to ignore them.

Can you imagine a school district not telling teachers their children's names?

One driver spoke up about how frustrating it is that drivers aren't thought of as taking part in the children's education.

Happy ending: An administrator said afterwards that because of feedback at the workshop, drivers will be getting those names--soon.

--Alain Jehlen

Arts Smarts

We hate to say "I told you so," but it turns out the arts do play a vital role in education. According to a three-year study by the Dana Foundation, participating in the arts helps children learn.

The study, Learning, the Arts, and the Brain (PDF 2mg), was conducted by cognitive neuroscientists from seven universities who sought to answer a fundamental question that might help educators shape curriculum -- are smart people drawn to the arts or does arts training make people smarter?

According to their preliminary research, the arts makes people smarter. Here's how:

• Children motivated in the arts develop attention skills and strategies for memory retrieval that also apply to other subject areas.
  

• There's a connection between musical training and the ability to manipulate information in both short-term and long-term memory.
  

• Music training also appears to improve kids' reading skills.
  

• Acting classes lead to better memory and better language skills.
  

• Dance learning, acquired through observation and mimicry, appears to improve cognitive skills.
  

"There is still a lot of work to be done," says led researcher Dr. Michael S. Gazzaniga of the University of California at Santa Barbara. "But we now have further reasons to believe that training in the arts has positive benefits for more general cognitive mechanisms."

Well, maybe we don't hate to say we told you so. Actually, we're delighted.

--Cindy Long

2008 Read Across on the Web

Last week NEA celebrated the 51^st birthday of The Cat in the Hat and the birthday of Dr. Seuss with its nation-wide reading event, Read Across America. Now in its 11^th year, Read Across America was bigger and better than ever.

Parents, teachers, students and reading buffs of all ages documented their participation in the event with their blogs, pictures (and more pictures!), and videos.

My favorite blog post comes from an author who participated in a Read Across event at a local elementary school:

It was a carnival-like atmosphere. Every adult in the school was wearing a Dr. Seuss/"Cat in the Hat" hat -- even the community's policemen who came to read wearing their bullet-proof vests and holstered guns. There were three or four young adults from a semi-pro soccer team. There were retired teachers and veterans and moms and dads. It was amazing to see such a diverse group of people; but, what I loved the most was this feeling in the air that although we came from different backgrounds and professions, we were all there to do something for the greater good.

I haven't found a better summation of what makes the day so special.

Here at NEA, we have our own photo gallery, but I like the pictures below, which show the spirit of the adults and the wonder (okay, maybe just the cuteness!) of the children.

Not surprisingly, NEA state affiliates and leaders were active in the celebration. What's different this year is the video coverage: WEAC leaders visited an elementary school in Milwaukee; NEA Vice President Dennis Van Roekel participated in kick-off festivities in Austin, TX; and, North Carolina Association of Educators produced a highlight video of their activities.

Not all schools marked Dr. Seuss's birthday in a conventional way. At an elementary school in Mira Mesa, Ca., the teachers and students celebrated with lively music and dancing. Everyone seems to have enjoyed themselves, but no word if reading and books were involved. Charlie Chittick Elementary School, on the other hand, created a puppet show.

--Joe Hammond

The Virtual Stork Brings an Interesting Package

In reporting the article "Lolita in the Classroom"--about the sexualization of young girls by the media and advertisers--for the March issue of NEA Today, I spoke with Wes Kanape, a high school drama teacher in Wilmington, North Carolina. At one point, Kanape had six pregnant girls in his class. These days it's not uncommon for a pregnant student to talk excitedly with classmates about her baby shower, illustrating to Kanape that the pregnant teen stigma isn't what it used to be.

Little wonder then that Crave Entertainment, a video game company, felt compelled to create "Baby Pals," a video game in which players design and care for virtual babies. Here's how the ad in the magazine I was flipping through touts Baby Pals:

Congratulations! It's a toy! With Baby Pals, the game that lets you do all of the fun things real parents do, you can bring home an adorable baby to feed, bathe, play with, and love . You'll have hours of fun choosing your baby's name, gender, eye color, skin tone and much more. And if you're a really good parent, your little one will even love you back!

Even more interesting: the ad was in a magazine targeting tweens and teenagers. What message does it send to young girls that having a baby is arguably as simple as picking an eye color and skin tone, then remembering to tickle them and play peek-a-boo and patty cake (actual baby care responsibilities on Baby Pals' website)? A colleague pondered whether these virtual babies whine and wake up their "parents" at night.

It seems we've come a long way since the days when students toted eggs or sacks of flour around for a week to simulate parenting. But even with the egg and the flour, there was no convenient "off" button.

--Cynthia Kopkowski

Compromise over Bible Class in Texas

Yesterday, a mediator in Odessa,Texas successfully negotiated the end of a dispute over a district's Bible course that--gasp!--has all parties walking away happy. At issue was a high school elective class that teaches the King James Bible with materials produced by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools (NCBCPS).

The American Civil Liberties Union and the People for the American Way Foundation sued the Ector County Independent school district in May 2007 on behalf of eight parents in the district, claiming the class promoted certain religious beliefs to students.

A mediator tailored a proposal that was approved last week by the district's trustees and earlier this week by the plaintiffs. Under the agreement, Ector County schools may not teach the current course after this school year. If the board decides to offer a different Biblecourse in the future, the course must follow strict legal standards for objectivity and may not be based on the NCBCPS curriculum.

Calling the agreement a "victory," Dr. T. Jeremy Gunn, Director of the ACLU's Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief said "It is unacceptable for government officials to decide which religious beliefs are true and which are not and then use the public school system as a means of proselytizing children."

Hiram Sasser of the Liberty Legal Institute, who represented the district, is also happy. Why? Because, after the dust settles, the district will "continue to offer a Bible course, it will be a curriculum of its own choosing, it may use portions of any existing curriculum as a resource, and the Bible will be the main textbook for the course."

--Tim Walker

It's a Boat..It's a Bus...It's a Windsled!

As an NEA Today writer, I've been thrilled to visit schools all over the country -- from Boise to Bar Harbor. But I am pretty sure this will become the WORST JOB EVER -- if my editors don't send me (immediately) to La Pointe, Wisconsin.

Please? Pretty please with a cherry on top?

Check this out. It's a school bus on skis! Is that the coolest thing ever?? The New York Times reported on it last week, describing it as "mystery vehicle, with two large fans on the back." The locals know it as a windsled. "That's right: in one of the more unorthodox modes of student travel anywhere in the country, the children of La Pointe, on Madeline Island (full-time population 250, triple that in the summer), actually windsled to class several weeks out of every year."

The $500,000 "boatmobile" delivers about 20 students across the shifting ice of Lake Superior to the mainland town of Bayfield, in the upper northern region of Wisconsin. Although I think it's just about the coolest (and coldest) thing that I've seen, the kids are much more blase (as is their way.)

"It's just our life," one told The Times.

So, come on...

--Mary Ellen Flannery