FEBRUARY 2006

Musically trained children process language better

STANFORD, Calif. (AP) — People who learned to play musical instruments as children process spoken language faster and more accurately than their non-musical counterparts as adults, according to a Stanford University study.

Researchers hope the findings, presented Wednesday at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, D.C., will help children with reading problems, such as dyslexia.

The study, based on research performed in 2004 at Stanford, shows that musical training can help the brain differentiate between rapidly changing sounds, an ability that is key to understanding and using language effectively, researchers said.

"What this study shows, that's novel, is that there's a specific aspect of language ... that's changed in the minds and brains of people with musical training," said John Gabrieli, a former Stanford psychology professor now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Researchers used adults ranging in age from 28 to 40 and divided them into groups of musicians and non-musicians, then matched them by age, sex, intelligence and general language ability.

The musicians were required to have started playing an instrument before they turned 7 years old and to never have stopped.

Researchers played tones of different pitches in rapid succession and asked participants to distinguish between them. Scans showed that the musicians' brain activity was more focused and efficient than their non-musical counterparts.

Participants were also asked to rapidly differentiate between similar word syllables, which the musicians did with more accuracy and speed than those without musical training.

Gabrieli said many children who become poor readers have trouble making auditory distinctions.
Some education observers caution against reading too much into the findings until it is proven that music training actually improves reading ability in children.

San Francisco Chronicle
November 17, 2005
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/discoveries/2005-11-17-music-training-language_x.htm


Handshakes with the past

An online forum is giving history students the chance to actually meet people who have lived through the periods they are researching. John Simkin and Heather McLean report

It's become fashionable in recent years to view history through the eyes of real people. But it's still a rare history lesson that can offer access to a Red Army colonel, peace activists, Vietnam veterans or those living in eastern Europe before the fall of communism.

Such a colourful array of human resources - and many others - are available at the International Education Forum (www.educationforum.ipbhost.com), designed for teachers to share ideas and best practice in any subject, and to break down barriers between countries.

It was here that 16-year-old Evgenia Plotnikova-Doumerc turned for her research into the history of the Soviet Union while she was studying at the International School in Toulouse, France. Born in Russia, Plotnikova-Doumerc was looking for an alternative to the received western view of the Cold War as a period of oppression and purges for the Soviets but drew a blank in traditional textual sources. "My questions were quite unusual. I wanted to go against the conventional view of Russia and take a positive view, but you can't normally find that in history books," she says.

By using the forum's Ask an Expert section, Plotnikova-Doumerc was able to put her questions to people who had lived through the Cold War as well as historians, academics and teachers.

"The forum has allowed me to ask questions I couldn't get answered anywhere else, talking to experts from all around the world," she says. "I've also heard first-hand experiences, which are important in study."

E-Help team

The interest in e-learning and ICT from key history teachers on the International Education Forum has spawned the European History E-Learning Project (E-Help), which aims to encourage and improve use of ICT and the internet in classrooms across the continent.

The E-Help team includes historians from France, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK. Over the next three years they will be researching, evaluating and presenting evidence of good practice in ICT and the internet in history teaching. The information will be available on E-Help's website and forum, due to be launched by the end of this year. More details can be found via the forum website's front page under International Projects.

When the members of E-Help met in Toulouse for their first discussion on best practice use of ICT and the web in history teaching, Anders MacGregor-Thunell, head of history at Hvitfeldtska secondary school in Gothenburg, Sweden, showed how his students created teaching materials using the tax records of people living in Gothenburg between 1880 and 1900.

The students chose an address in one of the oldest areas of the city, Haga, which grew up in the early 1600s. They used records from the local archive offices to compare the lives of the people living at those addresses in 1880 and then in either 1899 or 1900, depending on the condition of the records available.

"The students were told that the material they were to produce was for a website," he says. "This meant they did not have to write at length but had to succinctly evaluate the sources they used; they could also use technology such as digital cameras. It's important that students can read and understand a primary source and also understand how an old source can be portrayed in modern media."

Students documented the changes in the households they chose, such as the number of people living there, and then evaluated the overall changes to the area.

Emigration will loom larger as the project evolves, MacGregor-Thunell says, as Gothenburg was a stopover point for many Europeans leaving for the US between the 1860s and the second world war.

"We're actually building up a project that can be used by people outside our school, and anyone can continue to build on this in any country," he says. His current project is at www.macgregorishistory.com.

Interactive storyboards

Andrew Field, head of ICT and a history teacher at Neale-Wade community college in Cambridgeshire, gave a virtual presentation on his interactive storyboard, available on his website at www.schoolhistory.co.uk. It uses boxes that students can fill with provided graphics plus their own text, so minimising time wasted on playing with fonts and other details that students are apt to concentrate on, Field says.

"We need to create things that can be put together easily by teachers and that add benefit in class. With my interactive storyboard, students are given a scaffold which they can structure in the way they want to in terms of historical interpretation, but which limits the amount of ICT messing around they can do."

Dan Lyndon, head of history at Henry Compton school in Fulham, spoke to the group about webquests, one solution to the problem of students cutting and pasting web material without processing the information.

"A webquest is an online lesson that is contained, so everything the students require is in the pages provided by the teacher," he explains.

One of Lyndon's webquests examined the role played by black and Asian soldiers on the British side in the first world war.

For the "quest" itself, students had to produce a mock newspaper article on the topic given. They were also given an assessment page to guide them on completing the quest effectively.

"This was an opportunity to increase the amount of material on multicultural British history, which I hope other teachers will be able to use and add to," says Lyndon. "A lot of my students have gone into this subject a lot deeper than they would have normally because of the webquest." Lyndon's web quests are at www.comptonhistory.com.

Doug Belshaw, a recently qualified history teacher at Portland school in Worksop, has set up www.mrbelshaw.co.uk, a resource-filled website that enables pupils to use ICT outside school time. The site has spawned www.historymagic.co.uk, a new departmental site for his school that was designed by and for his pupils.

Belshaw also advocates using commercial technologies, particularly within the history curriculum. At the forum meeting, he spoke about legally using more peer-to-peer (P2P) software to promote international collaboration in history. He wants to encourage history teachers to pre-empt P2P technology by getting involved in website-based resource share forums. His own forum is at www.mrbelshaw.co.uk/shareforum.

Mind-mapping

But history teachers are not the only ones involved in E-Help. Janos Blasszauer, head of English at Battyany grammar school in Nagykanizsa, Hungary, is a big fan of mind-mapping software, which allows students to add their opinions using text or audio file and add in interviews on digital video. Technologies such as Skype and videoconferencing can be added in.

"Students are visually orientated," he says. "Mind maps can allow history teachers to create a timeline that will bring history alive, breaking the monotony of routine in the classroom."

After all, he adds, that's what this technology is all about.

• John Simkin runs Spartacus Educational, a website providing a forum and resources for history teachers (www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk)

The Guardian
November 15, 2005
http://education.guardian.co.uk/elearning/story/0,10577,1642286,00.html


Schools want male teachers

BEIJING - "Why do we have so few male teachers?"asks middle school student, Li Tie, who lives in Shijiazhuang, the capital of northern China's Hebei Province.

That's according to a report in the Hebei Daily Wednesday. The paper reports that when the student recalled his kindergarten, primary and junior high school days, he found him surrounded by women.

Li Tie's experience is not uncommon. When you visit Chinese kindergartens, primary or middle schools, you may be surprised to see there are very few male teachers on campus.

Why is this so? In order to explore the issue, the newspaper interviewed some teachers, students, and parents in the provincial capital, Shijiazhuan, which lies some 200 kilometers south of Beijing.

A mother surnamed Zhao said that her fifth-grade son was very excited one day last autumn when he reported that he had a male head teacher for the new semester. Several months later, the boy appeared a little different, becoming more active in class, and showing more confidence, the mother told the newspaper.

One primary school in the city has more than 100 teachers, but there are only seven men amongst them. Why do we have so few male teachers, both students and parents frequently ask?

In China, very few male high school students want to join teacher-training programs at the country's Normal Schools. In a class of 50-60 students majoring in education, english or music, there might be only 6-7 boys, sometimes even fewer.

The Hebei Daily believes social prejudice has prevented an increase in the number of male teachers in schools, as few parents or students have an ambition to become teachers.

Provincial authorities make a rough estimate that the male to female ratio in teaching schools in the province stood at 1:2 in 1987. By 1995 it was 1:3. And the situation is getting ever worse in China's Normal Schools.

The Hebei Daily says that some people look down upon primary school teachers, especially male teachers, and also note that schoolteachers are not very well paid, which is another major reason cited for the shortage of male teachers.

Cheng Jun, an expert on primary and middle school education in Shijiazhuang, says that the imbalance between male and female teachers is a dominant feature of primary and secondary schools worldwide. Many countries, however, have begun to address the problem. Cheng Jun cites the example of the UK, where some schools have hired retired police officers for teaching positions, with the hope that the male officers would exert a positive male influence on children.

China has been suffering from a shortage of male teachers for a long time, and the problem has got more serious in recent years, the Hebei Daily quotes Cheng Jun as saying.

A child's character would be normally be fixed before the age of 14, the expert says, so it is no good for children to be surrounded by female influence, from kindergarten to primary school. Like children from single parent families, school children without male teachers are likely to encounter some character problems.

The expert calls on more boys and young men to join the teaching staff at primary and middle schools, saying the shortage of male teachers isn't in the interests of the Chinese nation.

CRIENGLISH.com
November 16, 2005
www.chinaview.cn
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-11/16/content_3788946.htm


State assessments show boys lagging in literacy

Patrick Callahan, 14, recently read "The Da Vinci Code" and enjoyed it. Ask him what else he's read lately, and there's a pause. A long pause.

Much of the high school freshman's free time is taken up with sports. "I play a lot of sports -- hockey, lacrosse, snowboarding," he said.

Patrick also enjoys computer and video games, which his mother, Annie Callahan, limits to short stints on the weekend. "I have to limit his time, otherwise he'd do it all day long."

The West Windsor mother makes an effort to keep her son reading -- an effort that is probably necessary if he's to avoid what many educators and social observers say is a worrisome trend. State assessments show girls outperforming boys in most subjects, but especially in reading and writing.

Vermont Education Commissioner Richard Cate expressed worry about the gender gap when state assessments were released last month.

The trend is not unique to Vermont. National and international studies suggest boys are significantly behind in literacy, and that in the United States girls who were once behind in science and math are catching up.

First lady Laura Bush is leading a campaign to help boys in school, and earlier this year the Academy for Educational Development released a national report suggesting a crisis in boys education.

The report stated that not only are many boys struggling academically, they are much more likely to have other problems. Consider the barrage of bad stats: Boys represent 70 percent of students with learning disabilities and 80 percent of those with social or emotional disturbances. They represent 70 percent of school suspensions and commit 85 percent of school violence. Boys also are more likely than girls to drop out of high school and college.

Perhaps because many of the worst-performing boys don't take college entrance exams such as the SATs, or perhaps because of other factors, boys still outscore girls on that influential test. In Vermont in 2005, boys averaged 523 on the verbal section compared to the girls' 518; and 534 on the math compared to girls' 502.

Facts like these, as well as statistics showing men continue to earn significantly more than women and dominate many high-paying professions, especially in the sciences, technology and business, make it hard for some people to believe boys as a group need special help in the literacy department, or perhaps, any department.

That thinking is wrong, said Larry Shelton, a University of Vermont associate professor of human development and family studies who conducts workshops on sex differences and raising boys.

The boys who aren't succeeding in school are much more likely to drop out and wind up on public assistance or in prison. Society just can't afford that, yet there still isn't much going on to address the problem, Shelton said. "I'm not at all sure that we're getting the word out about where boys are being served well and not being served well in the system -- the school system," he said.

Not targeting boys

Although many educational institutions have established programs designed to help girls succeed in science and math -- and these programs are thought to have helped girls make real headway -- few literacy programs are targeted at boys and some proponents of reading are reluctant to consider them.

South Burlington Community Library doesn't have any programs specifically targeting boys' literacy and library director Louise Murphy is not sure it is appropriate.

"In some respects I think it would not be. I feel that it's discriminatory. I think that parents of little girls would wonder why we don't offer the same thing."

She and many other librarians do agree that boys and girls like to read different books. Boys often lean toward fantasy, survival stories and non-fiction books or periodicals. Girls have fairly broad tastes and don't mind reading a book featuring a male protagonist, said Marje Von Ohlsen, children's librarian at South Burlington Community Library.

While girls will read the "Harry Potter" series, boys won't read the "Little House on the Prairie" books, said Von Ohlsen. "If it's a book about a girl, generally they are not interested."

Even very young boys are often quite selective, she added. "They are very picky. Even to the point where they see the cover and if the cover isn't what they like, they won't read it."

Titles for boys

Most schools approach literacy without any gender-specific programming, but some educators are looking more closely at studies on boys' development and at their reading habits.

Essex Elementary School is embarking on a new approach to reading and writing instruction that calls for much more intensive study of individual student performance and tailored plans to help students improve.

Through this process, the school looked carefully at its selection of books to make sure there were plenty of titles for boys, who sometimes have different tastes than girls, said principal Jan Keffer. "It's particularly important for boys to have lots and lots of books at a whole variety of levels that are non-fiction."

Second-grade reading scores at Essex are high among both girls and boys, but girls are slightly ahead. Ninety-three percent of girls at the school met or exceeded the standard on the Vermont Developmental Reading Assessment in 2005 compared to 85 percent of boys.

Keffer does not believe this difference is significant enough to suggest a gap, or a need for a reading program specifically targeting boys. "The focus of the school is on what everybody needs in order to be successful rather than we've got to do this for boys versus this for girls."

Making reading fun

Although reading is a problem for some boys, many boys love books and excel at both reading and writing. Richard Gliech is a Burlington father of three: boys ages 7 and 12; and a girl, 14. He and his wife read to the children from the time they were babies and all three are book lovers now.

Gliech said he's reluctant to make generalizations about gender differences based on the small sample size of his family. However, Gliech finds his daughter reads more than her 12-year-old brother, and he seems to be more "into math." While his daughter is in a mother-daughter reading group, the boys aren't in a father-son group and Richard Gliech doesn't know of any.

"I don't seem to have heard of any father-son groups as far as reading is concerned."

In order for boys' literacy to improve, society needs to start promoting reading as an activity that's fun for boys, said Barbara Sprung, co-director of the Educational Equity Center at the Academy for Educational Development in New York.

A lot of work has been done to try to help girls see math and science as fields where they can excel, and this has helped close the gender gap in these subjects, Sprung said.

"A lot of work was put into that effort and it's paid off. We really need to look at boys in the same way."

Contact Molly Walsh at 660-1874 or mwalsh@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com

Molly Walsh, Free Press Staff Writer
Burlington Free Press
November 16, 2005
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051116/NEWS01/511160311/1009


Disabilities can result in steeper learning curve for some

For some Dartmouth students, attending class is not as simple as just showing up, taking notes and participating in discussion. Looking around the room, you may not notice that the student next to you isn't taking notes because he is physically incapable, or that he needed a few extra hours on last week's midterm because of a learning disability. Or maybe you do notice because there is an aide in the front of the class translating into American Sign Language.

Learning with a disability at Dartmouth can be a struggle that often goes unnoticed. In order to combat the difficulty disabled students face in the classroom, the College offers support through Student Disabilities Services.

An extension of the Academic Skills Center, SDS has been operating since 1987. Cathy Trueba, who previously worked as disabilities resource coordinator at the University of Wisconsin, became director of SDS this summer after long-time director Nancy Pompian retired. Her job is to facilitate accommodations for all disabled students, acting as a liaison between them and the College's faculty.

Kristen Wong '06, a religion major, has sought support through SDS because she is hearing impaired.

"Being hearing impaired is like a hidden disability sometimes," she said. "Few people tend to notice right away so their behavior isn't adjusted for it. I function extremely well regardless, but I'm not ashamed to use the aids that are available for me."

Wong is one of almost 300 Dartmouth students who receive daily academic and co-curricular support from SDS.

Trueba's role as director of SDS has a defined process. She must first determine if a student has a disability and is eligible for assistance. If a student is eligible, she helps provide the necessary accommodations for both curricular and co-curricular activities. Trueba pointed out that her job does not entail individual outreach, as a student must come to her with concerns about a disability before she can initiate the accommodation process.

In order to be eligible for assistance after approaching SDS, a student must prove that he or she has a documented disability. Trueba defined the standard as "anything that affects the learning process." She placed the disabilities she deals with into three categories: learning disabilities, health- and psychological-related disabilities, and mobility and sensory disabilities.

Trueba highlighted one shared characteristic in most of the cases she sees.

"The thing most disabilities share in common is time. As in more time to read, more time to write," she said. "It's a thread of continuity through a lot of the accommodations we provide."

For Wong, time can be the most demanding aspect of the learning process, especially when class discussion becomes intense.

"It's hard to tell people to only talk one at a time when everyone's in a heated debate," she said. "I hate having to change people's behaviors and so most of the time I just try the best I can. Sometimes I can feel very isolated from the group because I'm always a step behind."

Instead of utilizing an interpreter to translate lectures into American Sign Language, Wong uses a technology called CART to transcribe lectures and discussion in her classes. At the beginning of a lecture, she opens up a telephone conversation on her computer using the program Skype. An employee on the other end of the phone line, who may be in Nevada or Oregon, transcribes the lecture into note form with almost no delay.

The program Wong uses is one of a host of new technologies available to students with disabilities and falls into the category of adaptive technology.

Trueba listed voice-recognition software and audio texts as other examples of adaptive tech developments. She sees this type of technology as a rapidly developing area in disabilities services, and something she hopes utilize more in the future.

As for faculty response to student disabilities, Wong said some professors are better than others.

"Dartmouth went above and beyond what I expected," she said. "However, I will say that I have had some truly atrocious professors who can be completely insensitive to my needs."

Trueba took a more positive stance on faculty cooperation, citing that in her first term here she has not encountered any problems.

"The most common question I get is 'What can I do to help the student?'" she said. "I would expect the faculty are more interested in how to do it than why to do it."

Sam Rendall, The Dartmouth Staff
The Dartmouth
November 15, 2005
http://www.thedartmouth.com/article.php?aid=2005111501050%20


Drawing Out Autism
Using brain imaging and advanced genetic tools, a new MIT collaboration is trying to show how genes could mold the autistic.

Scientists know volumes about the language and social problems that plague autistic children. Yet so far they've been unable to build a clear picture of the possible underlying genetic causes and neurological deficits. Now a group of MIT neuroscientists is attempting to unravel the intricacies of the disorder.

Autism is considered the fastest-growing developmental disorder in the United States. Typically diagnosed within the first three years of life, it leaves a person with profound problems in social interaction and communication.

Studies have shown that autism has a strong genetic component. Today, researchers think the disorder may involve 30 to 40 genes, which each exert a small effect, in combination with environmental factors. Large-scale studies of autism-affected families have revealed some candidate genes -- but little is known about how these genes contribute to the social and behavioral problems that characterize autism.

"The most pressing question is the causes of autism," says Andy Shih, chief scientific officer of the National Alliance for Autism Research, based in New Jersey. "It's crucial to understand how the genetic differences translate into the phenotype."

With the aid of a $7.5 million grant from the Simons Foundation, the MIT researchers will combine imaging and genetic tools to better understand this link.

"We will look for a relationship between gene variation and variation in the brain," says John Gabrieli, an MIT neuroscientist. Gabrieli will use fMRI, a type of MRI that shows which areas of the brain are active when people think about specific problems, to compare brain activity in normal individuals and in those with different forms of the suspected autism genes. Specifically, his group will look at how people deal with social functions, by imaging brain activity in response to faces and facial expressions.

Mriganka Sur, the neuroscience professor who heads the project, will look at similar genes in a variety of mouse models. By either blocking or boosting the action of these genes during critical periods of mouse development, researchers can determine the function of the genes, as well as the key timing for therapy.

While doctors and families long for a better understanding of the disease, they also want to find behavioral treatments that can help autistic kids function better in day-to-day activities. To that end, Pawan Sinha, another neuroscience professor at MIT, plans to develop a visual training program for autistic children.

Researchers theorize that autistic children have social problems because they can't read faces well. For instance, they have difficulty telling if an emotional face is angry or sad. But Sinha says their deficit may actually be much broader -- an autistic child may not be able to integrate different visual cues into a comprehensive whole. "Parents say their child tends to lose the forest for the trees, to become fixated on specific details," says Sinha. "We still need to do a more comprehensive study of this."

Previously, Sinha studied children in India with curable blindness. When they first learned to see, the children showed problems reminiscent of the deficits in autism, he says. For example, when shown a picture of two superimposed squares, they saw only a group of lines. While these Indian children eventually learned to see squares as objects, children with autism are unable to learn such strategies naturally, says Sinha.

Sinha's group will use a newly developed testing program to better characterize these visual problems. In the exercise, a blurry image becomes progressively clearer as the children try to rapidly guess the identity of the picture. To recognize a degraded object, the subjects must look at the whole image. Sinha assumes that autistic children will have trouble with this task because they tend to look at only local parts of a picture.

Ultimately, the researchers plan to use the testing program for teaching autistic children how to better integrate visual cues. Although the technique can improve normal adults' skills in a matter of weeks, it's unclear how much training autistics kids will require.

Emily Singer
November 14, 2005
http://technologyreview.com/BioTech-Genomics/wtr_15875,312,p1.html?PM=GO


TAKS welcomes three new additions to the family
Tests are state's attempt to satisfy federal special-ed requirements

The TAKS test is only three years old, so it may seem a bit young to be starting a family.
But the state's main standardized test is preparing to welcome three new tests into the world: TAKS-I, TAKS-M and TAKS-Alt. And you thought there were already enough acronyms in academia.

The three new sister tests promise to make an already confusing test landscape downright bewildering.

They are an attempt to satisfy federal requirements for special-education students and push Texas schools to raise their standards.

"There's an increased focus on giving special-education students access to the regular curriculum," said Cari Wieland, director of special-education assessment for the Texas Education Agency.

"We want special-education students to have the benefits of higher expectations. Not every student will be able to do it, but we want to get closer to that goal."

Most Texas students will never take any of the new tests, but many of the state's 500,000 special-ed students will.

Educators say they don't know enough about the tests – which are still in early development – to judge their quality.

But at least one is hopeful.

"I'm looking forward to see what the future is," said Cindi Walker, director of special education for Fort Worth schools.

Here's an introduction to the three new members of the family:

TAKS-I

The "I" stands for "Inclusive." It's a direct response to new federal requirements laid out in last year's renewal of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA. That's the law that governs special-education policy nationwide.

The law now includes a basic requirement: If a state offers a test for mainstream students, it has to offer a corresponding test for special-ed students.

For most grade levels and subjects, Texas already meets that requirement. It gives the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test to students in grades three through 11 in a variety of subjects. It gives the SDAA II – the second version of the State Developed Alternative Assessment – to special-ed students in most of those grades.

Most, but not all. There's no SDAA II for science or social studies at any grade.
And there's no SDAA II for 11th-graders.

Enter the TAKS-I. It will be given in the grades where SDAA II isn't, starting in February.

That's just the beginning. The grand plan is to replace the SDAA II with TAKS-I in all grades and all subjects.

"We're thinking of this as a kind of transition," said Victoria Young, who directs the TAKS program for the Texas Education Agency. "We're hoping we have a couple of years to take a look at this and see how it works."

What makes the TAKS-I different? Its questions will be identical to those on the regular TAKS. The only differences: There'll be fewer of them, and they'll be printed in a larger size for students with visual problems. Some students will also be allowed to use instructional aids such as dictionaries during the test.

Unlike the SDAA II, for which a child's required passing standard is set by his or her teachers and parents, TAKS-I will have a uniform standard for all students. Passing the TAKS-I will require the same level of performance as passing the regular TAKS.

That's good news to federal officials, who have pressed Texas and other states to raise standards for special-ed students. New federal regulations require states to limit the number of children who are outside the state's mainstream testing system.

The other big change will be that TAKS-I will only be given to special-education students who are performing on grade level. Students can currently take versions of the SDAA II that are at grade level or versions that are significantly easier, depending on the child's ability.

TAKS-M

The "M" stands for "Modified." The TAKS-M will look a lot like the TAKS-I, but it will be given to children who are performing below their grade level. For instance, an eighth-grade special-ed student who is learning at a third-grade level would take the TAKS-M instead of the TAKS-I.

The TAKS-M will probably be used more often than the TAKS-I because most students in special education are behind their peers. Last spring, about 209,000 students took the math version of the SDAA II. Only about one-fourth of those were learning on grade level, according to state statistics.

TAKS-Alt

The "Alt" stands for "Alternative." TAKS-Alt is less a test than a tool that teachers can use to evaluate the most severely disabled children, those with serious cognitive disabilities. It will probably take the form of an online checklist, Ms. Wieland said.

Those students are currently evaluated with locally chosen assessments, many of which are designed by teachers or district staff members. New federal rules say those children must be evaluated with a state-developed tool.

The TAKS-I will debut Feb. 21. It's still unclear when it will expand to other grades or when the TAKS-M and TAKS-Alt will follow. That's because federal officials must approve the new tests, and negotiations are ongoing. Ms. Wieland said the transition wouldn't be completed until 2007-08 at the earliest.

Even the names of the TAKS-M and TAKS-Alt could change during development, she added. "We're still in the planning stages," she said.

What's also unknown is how these tests will be integrated into the federal and state school ratings system. SDAA II results are an ingredient in the current ratings system, and poor performance on the test has tripped up some schools seeking high ratings. State officials have said TAKS-I results won't be counted against schools in 2006 but may be included in the system in future years.

But Ms. Walker said she hopes the new system provides a more unified system for testing, better tying the expectations of special-ed students to those of other children.

"We've got to be accountable for results, and TEA is really working to make sure those tests are aligned with each other," she said.

Joshua Benton, The Dallas Morning News
E-mail jbenton@dallasnews.com
November 13, 2005
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/education/stories/DN-newtaks_13met.ART0.North.Edition2.2ed3ffe.html


Math gap grows for minority students
Difference in WASL scores shows significant jump at seventh grade

While state and local education officials trumpet annual gains made on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, a review of test results over the past few years shows that the achievement gap between white and minority students is widening in math scores.

Since the phased-in introduction of the WASL eight years ago, the gap between white and minority students on reading and writing scores statewide has narrowed slightly for most grade levels and ethnic groups, but the math gap has grown.

That discrepancy becomes particularly worrisome now, because this year's sophomores -- the class of 2008 -- are the first students who must pass the reading, writing and math sections of the WASL to graduate from high school. The science portion of the test does not become a graduation requirement until 2010.

Districts statewide are starting various programs in an effort to head off the widespread WASL failures some are predicting. A major federal initiative has been credited for helping boost reading and writing scores on the test, but experts say a similar initiative -- backed with real dollars -- is needed to help students struggling in mathematics.

Between 1998 and 2005, the math gap grew for all minority groups, with the exception of Asian students, and was particularly pronounced at the seventh grade.

The difference in math scores between white and black seventh-graders grew from 17.9 to 31.3 percentage points during that eight-year period, and for Latino students, from 17.3 to 29.3 percentage points. For American Indians, the gap widened from 17.1 to 23.8 percentage points. Overall, just one-quarter of minority seventh-graders statewide passed the math section of this year's WASL.

The picture is similar in Seattle.

The district has made some progress in closing the achievement gap on the reading and writing portions of the WASL, with 60 percent of all fourth-graders meeting the reading standard on last spring's WASL, double the percentage from eight years ago.

But the math gap has increased over the past eight years for all minority groups on the fourth-, seventh- and 10th-grade WASL, with the exception of Asian students and a negligible gain among sophomores of American Indian descent. The gap between black and white 10th-graders increased from 35.9 to 44.2 percentage points over the past eight years and jumped from 32.7 to 47.7 percentage points between black and white seventh-graders between 1998 and 2005.

WASL critics point out that the tests are only a snapshot of a student's achievement and, because they reflect the work of different groups of students each year, do not provide a comprehensive perspective on student progress. But with the new graduation requirement looming, the trend is troubling.

"It's a tough, multifaceted issue, but one that has to be tackled honestly," said Mary Alice Heuschel, the deputy state Superintendent of Public Instruction. "We've got to get off the blame game."

Heuschel and other education experts say the factors underlying the achievement gap in math are layered and difficult to remedy. One of the biggest contributors is a dearth of qualified math teachers nationwide, said Ross Wiener, a principal partner in the Washington, D.C.-based Education Trust, an organization focused on narrowing the achievement gap.

Teachers' knowledge of math plays a critical role in student learning, he said. At the same time, "We have a crisis in terms of the shortage of math teachers who majored or even minored in math or a related field in college," Wiener said.

A 2001 Education Trust survey found that 63 percent of high school classes in Washington state were taught by teachers who majored in the subjects they were teaching, but the number dropped to 52 percent in schools with high numbers of children living in poverty. Because those schools tend to educate higher numbers of minority students who often have less academic support outside of school, "We sort of compound their challenges," Wiener said.

David Marshak, an associate professor at Seattle University, said the highly sequential nature of math, which requires mastering new skills each step of the way, makes it easy to fall behind. Children's differing levels of education when they start school, their varying rates of development, the support they get at home and the quality of their teachers, he said, all combine to push some children along while others fall behind.

"If you start falling behind, and the teacher doesn't address it or doesn't have the capacity in a single-year relationship to deal with it appropriately, then you keep falling behind," he said.

Marshak is critical of the educational reform effort that began in Washington in 1993, saying it should have focused first on improving schools and then implemented an assessment system, rather than the other way around. Before the effort began, he said, the educational system had adopted practices that reflected research demonstrating that children learn differently and develop at varying rates.

The standards and testing movement has obliterated that and created the assumption that kids are all the same, and, of course, kids are not the same," he said. Educators say a major challenge in raising math scores is the seismic shift in teaching strategies that today's math standards require. Past practices of memorizing times tables and learning by rote fall short of the WASL's requirement that children not only reach the correct answer, but also be able to explain how they got there.

"One of the things we don't know for sure is whether our students don't have the content knowledge or whether they're struggling to communicate that knowledge to a reader," said Jane Goetz, director of instructional services for Seattle Public Schools.

Chronic underfunding is another factor frequently cited as an obstacle to academic achievement. An Education Trust study last year found that Washington spends 87 percent of the national average on per-pupil funding, putting the state 44th in the nation, although Washington ranks sixth nationally in terms of education funding raised at the state level versus federal funding and local levies.

The Reading First initiative, part of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, has allocated more than $3 billion nationally to provide research-based professional development for teachers with the aim of improving reading instruction in kindergarten through third grade.

Over a three-year period, Heuschel said, the initiative closed the racial gap in reading scores at 51 Washington schools that participated in a pilot. The state education department is applying for additional funding to expand the effort.

To date, the federal government has no comparable math initiative. The state has launched its own math effort, developing summer school curriculum for students not meeting the WASL math standard and providing training for teachers. This summer, schools around the state will offer five-week classes targeting the specific areas in which students fell short on the math portion of the WASL.

The state is also working with colleges and universities to develop math expectations for juniors and seniors that extend beyond 10th grade -- the last year students write the WASL -- and a statewide committee is reviewing dozens of math textbooks to help districts make informed curriculum decisions.

Seattle Public Schools is currently working to standardize its math curriculum, which varies from school to school.

Six years ago, the district started a grant-funded initiative that involved teachers' reading case studies on math instruction, watching videos depicting instructional practices and then applying those in their classrooms. The work was supplemented by weeklong summer training sessions.

Although math scores among minority students have increased on the fourth-grade WASL since the initiative began, the racial gap also has widened.

Goetz is at a loss to explain why, but said the solution is a complicated mix that includes providing teachers with the different types of professional development required at various stages of their careers, making sure principals know what to observe in classrooms and holding all students, regardless of ethnicity and background, to the same standards.

Stephen Fink, executive director of the University of Washington's Center for Educational Leadership, said Seattle's lack of a consistent math curriculum has doubtlessly been a major factor in the achievement gap.

But even with consistent curriculum in place, he said, providing the intensive training and coaching required for effective math instruction is difficult.

"The way you close the achievement gap is knowing your content well enough as a teacher and knowing your kids enough as individual learners," Fink said.

"That might sound like common sense. But powerful teaching is so nuanced and the degree of professional development that's required is such that most districts, I believe, don't even have the resources to invest, let alone the singular focus of mind to do that work."

Though children come to school with varying levels of preparedness and parental support, Fink said effective teaching can help level those inequities.

"You give a kid two years with a very powerful teacher, and that will mitigate against any family condition," he said. "You give kids two years of poor teaching, and it puts them at risk for the rest of their school-aged life."

P-I reporter Deborah Bach can be reached at 206-448-8197 or deborahbach@seattlepi.com.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Deborah Bach, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Reporter
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
November 14, 2005
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/248250_waslgap14.html


DPS maps plan to 'fix' district
Language curriculum one of several issues school chief will address

Some students struggle with English three years after enrolling in Denver Public Schools because the district still lacks clear guidelines on how to teach the language.

In some schools, there are even classrooms for English language learners where no English is found on the walls. Every poster, every picture, nearly every phrase is in Spanish.

That's one of the more troubling discoveries that DPS Chief Academic Officer Jaime Aquino and his boss, Superintendent Michael Bennet, have made in recent weeks.

Here's another: Children who fall behind have few, if any, opportunities to catch up.

"There's been a lot of talk about intervention in this district," Bennet told one group of middle school teachers on Nov. 7, "but the evidence of it is thin."

For Bennet, who took over in July and who has no experience in K-12 education, and for Aquino, a former New York City instructional superintendent who started in DPS on Oct. 2, the past few weeks have been a whirlwind of school visits, principal talks and teacher meetings.

This month, they plan to release a strategic plan for reform that will boost student achievement in an urban district where test scores have been flat for years.

To do so, they must - in relatively quick fashion - figure out what's wrong and how to fix it.

As part of the process, Bennet agreed to allow the Rocky Mountain News to shadow the pair over four weeks.

The ground rules were simple: Report anything you see and hear but don't identify specific teachers and principals. In some meetings, the reporter's presence was noted. In others, it was not.

Finding a direction

The lack of a clear plan in DPS for teaching English language learners, who make up nearly a third of all students, was a key issue identified by teachers and principals.

"What is the curriculum?" a frustrated principal said at one meeting. "I didn't have this issue before, but now I have 30 students who barely speak any English. I call the curriculum department, they tell me to call the ELA (English Language Acquisition) department. I call ELA, they tell me to call curriculum. It's a vicious cycle."

Aquino, himself a native Spanish speaker, saw this gap for himself when he visited a classroom for English language learners at a northwest Denver elementary school. Most of the students, now second-graders, had been at the school since kindergarten.

"Help me understand why there's not much evidence of English in the classroom," he asked an assistant principal as they walked out of a classroom filled with Spanish.

"There's been a lot of questions about transitioning students from Spanish to English," she told Aquino, "about when that should occur."

That was confirmed in a later conversation with the teacher.

"There doesn't appear to be a uniform curriculum for our English language learners," Aquino said. "If it's in writing, it's not being followed. There is no language allocation policy that says: Teach this amount of English, teach this amount of Spanish."

A 1999 federal court order governing Denver's ELA program sets out rules for compliance, such as how to identify students for services, but it doesn't consider achievement.

"It's been all about compliance," another principal said. "It's still all about compliance."

Among other issues identified in recent weeks:
• Literacy programs lack instruction in basic reading skills after about third grade, a problem in a district serving many students who are poor, transient or learning English.
• Interventions to help struggling students catch up are largely absent, leaving children to founder as they're passed from grade to grade. Summer school is being considered.
"We have got to do a better job of aligning time to intervene with kids," Bennet said, "and not to use summer doesn't seem like a good idea."
• DPS' $565 million operating budget is mostly dispersed based on the numbers of students vs. the needs of students. Bennet, who expects cuts again this year, wants that to change.

"If we get $11 million, the right answer is not to apply it equally," he told a group of principals, using a hypothetical example. "It's to do what we can to maximize student achievement."

The strategic plan is expected to address some, but not all, of the concerns voiced during the school visits.

Class size is top concern

In a meeting last week with teachers at a large northeast Denver middle school, class size was a top concern.

"A lot of our teachers have over 35 students per class," the school's librarian said.

"We hear that all over," Bennet said of the issue. "You guys have it worst. . . . Your school consistently comes up basically first" in having DPS' largest classes.

He said he's also heard it from parents, who have cited large class sizes as one reason for pulling their children out of DPS.

But Bennet said he needs more time to deal with that issue - among the most costly of school reforms - and it isn't resolved in the strategic plan.

"Class size is a variable, but that's not the solution," Aquino told a group of middle school principals who raised the same concern. "When you drop from 35 to 19, if teachers are teaching the same, learning is not happening."

Bennet, who aggressively recruited Aquino from New York, sometimes refers to him as "the expert." That's not a term Aquino, who turned 41 on Nov. 3 and who is 25 days older than Bennet, uses for himself.

But Aquino is quick to reassure teachers he has done his time in the classroom. He spent his first year as a teacher in the Bronx, teaching a class of 43 fourth-graders.

"I'm going to be coming to your schools and your classrooms," he tells a group of teachers at a central Denver elementary. "Don't ever feel intimidated. I am not there as the curriculum police. I could care less what color your book baskets are."

Those lines, part of the opening patter that Aquino and Bennet have developed as they visit two to three schools every day, are intended to reassure teachers wary of speaking up. Sometimes it works.

"There's a lot of talk about accountability," one elementary teacher said. "Is there accountability for people in the district who are not teachers?"

Bennet, standing in front of the group of teachers, smiles.

"It's been like a game of telephone, but one-way," he says of district mandates. "There's been transmission but no reception going the other way. That's why I'm here. This is the best way to discern how effective the layers between me and you have been."

The "road show," as Bennet refers to the school visits, is intended to gather information as well as to improve the district's strained relations with teachers.

"What do you think of them?" he shoots back at a middle school teacher who asks about the district's literacy and math programs.

"You really want me to tell you?" she asks.

"Yeah," he says, prompting her to start talking about the literacy plan.

"I think there are some good elements," she tells him, "but I think it assumes our kids know more than they do."

It's not always so easy. Aquino, who succeeds a chief academic officer in DPS who was criticized as autocratic by many teachers, finds that he makes some nervous when he walks into their classrooms.

An assistant principal who trailed him on a walk through her elementary school said an earlier walk by his predecessor, Sally Mentor Hay, left her staff deflated.

"She made us feel as if we had so far to go," the assistant principal said.

Aquino, who met with four teachers after visiting their classrooms, left a different impression.

"I was nervous," a fourth-grade teacher said. "I won't be next time."

Getting a plan in place

Bennet lets some details slip in the meetings about the upcoming strategic plan.

"We're going to do something a little different," he tells a group of elementary teachers. "We're going to release this draft strategic plan, and it's really going to be a draft."

The plan, expected to run between 65 and 70 pages, will be debated by a wider district committee for 45 to 60 days after its release. Work groups composed of teachers and others will be formed to further review the different issues it addresses, such as English language learners.

"There's not a line in this document not mentioned in these meetings," Bennet tells the group of elementary teachers. Later, he adds the word "virtually" to the statement.

The plan's focus will be the next three to five years in DPS, with many of the likely changes targeted for implementation next fall.

"A lot of what you hear us saying will be for next school year," Aquino told another group of teachers. "We're in the middle of the school year and it would be too disruptive to do this now."

Bennet said he's fully aware of the pressure to fix DPS quickly.

"Everybody wants it all fixed today," he said, "and no one wants it all fixed today more than I do. But what I'm really interested in is fixing it."

In fact, he expects to continue reviewing the plan "over the next 12 months, 18 months, based on what we learn and its implementation."

Perhaps the biggest finding for Bennet and Aquino in recent weeks has been this one: The focus on compliance has left little room for what really matters - for what kids need, or how to help teachers, or what parents want.

The result, they say, is illustrated in an anecdote they frequently tell about a bright student they met one Saturday morning at a northwest Denver high school. The boy was there for a math lesson.

He is doing well in math, he tells them, but he can barely speak English. He tells Aquino, in Spanish, that he's been in DPS for three years.

"That's not going to cut it," Bennet said. "We'll make mistakes, I'm sure of it, and we're not going to make everyone happy. But we can do better."

What's next

Denver Public Schools Superintendent Michael Bennet will release a draft of his strategic plan for district reform by month's end. That will be followed by 45 to 60 days of discussion by a district committee. What's being considered:

BUDGET
• Targeted funding for students who need extra help, such as struggling readers

CURRICULUM
• Bolstering basic skills instruction in literacy programs
• End-of-course exams in literacy, math, science and social studies
• Summer school to intervene with struggling students

ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS
• Guidelines about how much instruction is to be in thenative language and in English
• Training for every teacher in teaching English language learners
• Ensuring equity in classrooms for English language learners and native English speakers

TEACHER TRAINING
• Investing in training of teachers that is relevantand useful
• Flexible planning guides for teachers in everysubject to ensure consistency across the district
• Training principals alongside teachers so theycan be instructional leaders?

Nancy Mitchell, Rocky Mountain News
mitchelln@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5245
November 14, 2005
http://insidedenver.com/drmn/education/article/0,1299,DRMN_957_4236865,00.html


The special squad

Teachers of children with intellectual and physical disabilities operate in a highly skilled, but often misunderstood, area of education, writes Dylan Welch.

From dealing with students with mild dyslexia to profoundly intellectually disabled children, wheelchair-bound and unable to speak, there are many different jobs for teachers interested in working in special education. Whether they are helping visually impaired students negotiate the world or teaching severely physically and intellectually disabled students in specialised schools, it seems there is one characteristic that unites them.

"I would argue that those people who are good special educators are what I would see as highly skilled teachers," says Associate Professor David Evans, the co-ordinator of the special education program at Sydney University's education faculty.

"They have good classroom practice and good whole-school perspective. Some of the best principals that I know of have come out of special education. I believe they are people with far more refined instructional-design skills [and] curriculum-design skills; people who can manage their environment, work within a classroom [and] work with teachers."

According to the 2001 census, in NSW there are an estimated 80,900 school students with an intellectual or physical disability, accounting for 7 per cent of the school population. Of those, more than three-quarters (61,200) have reported a schooling restriction. This means they attend a special school or class, need at least one day a week off school or have difficulty at school.

Special education may also be the most varied sector within education, with schools for intellectually disabled, physically disabled, schools for behaviour, schools for vision and hearing impairment as well as itinerant positions, where the teacher works with various mainstream schools with special education students.

"You can't just say because you're a special-ed teacher you know all there is to know about special ed," says Nyree Bjazevich, acting principal and head of the infants program at Wairoa School in Bondi, which caters for students with moderate or severe intellectual disability.

Bjazevich says her job is rewarding because although it can take a long time to get her students to the next stage in education, it can make a huge difference to them and their families when she does.

"Developing independence in our students is the main goal and if you can get them to be independent eaters or independent bus travellers, it's just such a major development in that student's life and in the whole family's life because all of a sudden that child can be part of the community."

Kym Gribble is an itinerant teacher of vision-impaired students in the Department of Education's North Coast region. Based at Hastings Public School in Port Macquarie, Gribble spends 22 hours a week teaching two vision-impaired students at local schools. The rest of his time, up to a further 30 hours a week, is spent in the detailed preparation required for schooling blind students.

"I love classroom teaching as well, but in special ed I feel like you can see change in kids a lot quicker," he says. Gribble says his job allows him a much broader role than if he were teaching in a classroom.

"[There was] this young girl in year 7 who went blind this year. The family are obviously devastated, but having someone like me there with a fair bit of experience is great. I expose them to other students; they see that life goes on. It gives the families a lot of confidence knowing where their kids might end up, and that there's support - that's why my job's so fantastic, with those kind of challenges every day."

But, like any job, teaching special education comes with its own set of problems. "Whenever I tell people that I work with kids with disabilities, the first thing they always say is, 'Oh you must be so patient; you're so wonderful for doing that'," says Bjazevich. "And sometimes I find that quite patronising. I know it's just from a lack of knowledge of the area [special education] but they tend to look at kids with disabilities as either charity cases or aliens."

Gribble says: "You're perceived maybe not as a real teacher sometimes."

But neither Bjazevich nor Gribble believes in criticising people in the community or at mainstream schools for their misconceptions about students with disabilities and their teachers.

Says Bjazevich: "You don't win by telling [people] they're horrible, you win by showing them how the kids are achieving." Anyone who does an undergraduate degree in education has to complete at least one unit in special education. Generally, the education sector requires teachers to complete a postgraduate course in special ed before they are considered qualified to teach. The department offers 40 to 50 cadetships for classroom teachers interested in working in special education. The successful cadets are given one year of study leave to complete a graduate diploma and are then placed in a full-time position with special education.

For more information on these cadetships, contact the department on 95618000. Friends of the Wairoa are holding a fund-raising night on Tuesday, November 29, at Jackies Restaurant Bar, Bondi Beach. Money raised will go towards a sensory garden and other special initiatives to help the children of Wairoa. Inquiries to Jackie Milijash: 93009812.

Dylan Welch, The Age
November 12, 2005
http://www.theage.com.au/news/employment-news/the-special-squad/2005/11/11/1131578211245.html


Schools look abroad to find needed teachers
Practice Expected To Grow Nationwide As Districts Struggle To Fill Openings

Hiring teachers from overseas wasn't something the San Mateo-Foster City school district had considered -- until last year, when six positions went vacant for nine months.

The district advertised in Bay Area newspapers, solicited at job fairs in California and New York, and posted classifieds on craigslist and edjoin.org, a statewide database of education job openings. No luck. Out of options, San Mateo-Foster City turned to the Philippines, where a math teacher and seven special education teachers and speech therapists -- all licensed -- were recruited and hired.

Over in Canada, Susan Dodds had been teaching French as a foreign language for about a year when she applied for an opening in Cupertino that she saw online. Her résumé: a bachelor's degree in education and another with honors in French, a language she had been studying since kindergarten.

She landed the job at Hyde Middle School, where she now teaches French, as well as English for immigrant students. Her principal ``likes the fact that I am completely fluent in French,'' Dodds said.

Districts across the nation are hiring foreign talent to overcome domestic shortages of qualified teachers. In the South Bay, the San Jose Unified school district now employs 22 foreign teachers, including a biology instructor from Germany. The Cupertino and Franklin-McKinley elementary districts have brought on 12 and 19, respectively, from Mexico, Canada, Spain and other countries.

Nationally, as many as 15,000 elementary, middle and high school teachers from abroad now work in the United States on temporary work visas. And their ranks are swelling at the rate of 20 percent a year, according to the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers' union.

Over the next decade, the pressure on schools to hire from abroad is expected to intensify as teachers from the baby boom generation retire en masse -- and as campuses scramble to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which tightens teacher competency requirements starting in 2006.

Sad commentary?

School district officials say imported teachers are filling critical classroom needs. Others argue their presence is a sad commentary on the desirability of U.S. teaching jobs.

``If we need to recruit teachers from overseas, that says something about the state of the profession here in the United States,'' said Donald Washington, a program analyst in the NEA's teacher quality department. ``We need to raise salaries, improve working conditions and do more to retain teachers.''

In California, more than 3,000 preliminary credentials have been issued since 2000 to people trained in other countries, according to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

Local school district administrators say that licensed special education, math, science and bilingual Spanish instructors are among the most sought-after internationally, because qualified teachers are in short supply in these areas. In math, for instance, about one in five California teachers is inadequately trained, according to the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning in Santa Cruz.

Experts attribute teacher shortages to low pay, inadequate capacity in teacher training programs and lack of support for rookies who then flee the profession.

Generally, imported teachers work in the United States on H-1B temporary work or J-1 cultural exchange visas, which with renewals are good for three to six years. They come from a wide range of countries, including Turkey, South Africa, Peru and France. The Phillippines are a particularly rich source of special education teachers.

``They have outstanding education programs in place for special education,'' said Tiffany Bettencourt, a spokeswoman for the San Diego-based Amity Institute, one of many agencies that place overseas teachers with U.S. school districts.

School district administrators say that overseas hires typically have stronger résumés than domestic applicants, and even hold doctorates in their fields.

``You really get very qualified people this way,'' said Michael Gallagher, a human resources director with the Cupertino Union School District.

Cupertino does not recruit internationally. But if someone from another country applies and is the best-qualified for a job, the district will apply for an H-1B visa on the teacher's behalf. Cupertino now employs 12 teachers on such visas, with specialties in math, music, special education, elementary education, Mandarin, Japanese and French.

In California, foreign educators typically enter the classroom with the same preliminary credential most entry-level teachers hold. To get this credential, they must possess college degrees and certifications that are equivalent to what would be required in the United States. Like the state's rookie teachers, they then have five years to earn a permanent credential.

Four local districts -- Franklin-McKinley and San Mateo-Foster City elementary, and San Jose and West Contra Costa unified -- said they pay foreign teachers the same as other teachers in the district with equivalent qualifications. And district officials -- rather than some middleman agency -- act as the imported teachers' employers and visa sponsors.

According to a 2003 NEA report, school districts nationally have the same general practices.

Not problem-free

But the importing of teachers from abroad is not without its problems. Districts can come under fire for the expense of recruitment trips abroad, as the Ravenswood school district did in 2001 when the Mercury News reported on a pattern of excessive travel spending there. Foreign teachers lack the due-process rights of U.S. teachers, and if English isn't their first language, classroom communication can be awkward.

Cultural differences must be overcome on both sides.

Rogelio Calimag, a 31-year-old math teacher from the Philippines assigned to San Mateo's Bayside Middle School, says he is adjusting to the fact that students here are more socially outspoken, while at the same time less willing to participate in class academically than in the Philippines.

``To get them to explain their work, I have to push them more,'' Calimag said. ``In the Philippines, they would, even if they were nervous about it.''

Calimag taught mostly math in the Philippines for 12 years. He has a bachelor's degree in education with a specialization in math, has taken graduate courses in math, and is working on a thesis for a master's degree in education.

One of Calimag's algebra students, Eva McAvoy, says that her teacher's accented English makes him difficult to understand. At the same time, she appreciates the extra cultural dimension that he brings to the classroom.

``He's told us how people have to try harder for what they get in the Philippines,'' Eva said. ``We have it a lot of easier here.''

Contact Maya Suryaraman at msuryaraman@mercurynews. com or (408) 920-5505.
Maya Suryaraman, Mercury News
November 13, 2005
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/living/education/13157120.htm


Sending classrooms video digitally

Nearly every week, a video crisis breaks out at school - either a video gets lost or two teachers are ready to duke it out over the best VHS tape or DVD about colonial history or photosynthesis.

Digital delivery is a practical solution. A variety of vendors now make it easy for teachers to more elegantly bring engaging instructional video into our classrooms. Several teachers can show a video simultaneously. With a computer, a projector, and a set of speakers, the classroom teacher can get a wide variety of videos directly from the Web, or from a dedicated server.

These services allow teachers the flexibility to show an entire video, a clip, or a selection of clips, with opportunities to stop at any point for discussion. Teachers may create playlists and easily incorporate clips into lessons.

The solutions come in two flavors. Streaming-video solutions, which require a fairly robust network, allow users to view video on demand over the Internet in a real-time stream. Schools with networks that are less than robust get around the problem by downloading clips during quieter times. The other solution is server-based, where the media collection resides locally and is accessed over an intranet, reserving limited bandwidth for other types of activities.

Among the growing number of options for educators are these four major players:
Unitedstreaming.com (www.unitedstreaming.com), from Discovery Education, can be streamed via the Internet or through locally hosted video servers to ensure automatic updates of locally hosted content during off-peak hours. An average of 300 to 400 video titles are added annually to the database of 4,000 videos. The product also offers state curriculum standards, teachers' guides, lesson plans, quizzes, and a gallery of clip art and images. Videos come from such sources as Weston Woods, Discovery School, Environmental Media, Rainbow Educational Media, and others. Schools can add their own content for local users.

Classroom Content Click!, or CCC (www.ndmccc.com/curriculum/index.jsp), by New Dimension Media, offers high-quality, curriculum-specific programming that has been featured on Discovery Channel, PBS, History Channel and other stations. Streaming teacher segments help emphasize key concepts. Teacher guides, student activities, and assessments of comprehension accompany each program. Plato Learning has correlated each program to state standards. The system is designed to work off a server on a local or wide area network, or it may be streamed over the Internet. Users can export images and clips from programs. CCC adds hundreds of programs each year, combining its original programming with videos from its partners, including Disney Educational Productions, PBS' Nature, and newsreels from the Hearst Archives. Users can customize the system by adding local content.

PowerMediaPlus.com (www.powermediaplus.com) is a result of the 2004 merger of educational media companies Clearvue and SVE. The service offers streaming or locally based delivery and the ability to customize delivery. It includes 2,400 segmented, standard-aligned videos; 4,000 audio files, as well as photographs; and print resources. Users may build their collections with locally developed content. The collection crosses subject areas, and includes content by Weston Woods, Globe Trekker, Goldhil's Just the Facts Series, the Standard Deviants and Rabbit Ears. PowerMediaPlus is especially proud of its large collections of art, music and children's literature.

Schlessinger's SAFARI Montage (http://SAFARIMontage.com) offers an alternative to streaming. It loads its core video collections onto servers. The K-8 core content package includes 1,000 titles. A package for grades 9-12 will also include 1,000 titles, and it will be available this month. Educational programs come from such educational video publishers as Disney, PBS, Scholastic, Weston Woods, BBC Worldwide, National Geographic and Schlessinger Media, the producer of award-winning educational programming for the content areas. All Schlessinger Media programs are well-indexed, correlated to state standards, come close-captioned, with teacher's guides, and are created with Spanish language tracks. The package will soon include tools to aid students and teachers in the creation of multimedia.

Contact columnist Joyce Kasman Valenza at Joyce_Valenza@sdst.org
Read her recent work at http://go.philly.com/kasmanvalenza

Joyce Kasman Valenza
The Philadelphia Inquirer
November 13, 2005
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/business/13151794.htm


School board to end 'zero tolerance'

Toronto schools will be encouraged to steer clear of blunt "zero-tolerance" discipline, under a new deal in which Canada's largest school board agrees to be more sensitive to why students act out.

In a landmark settlement with the Ontario Human Rights Commission to be released this week, the Toronto District School Board has agreed to take steps to better understand why students of various backgrounds sometimes break the rules, and to prevent punishments that are unfair.

The agreement, signed late last week, follows a four-month investigation of complaints that the board was applying Ontario's new Safe Schools Act more harshly with black students.

While there was no finding of bias on the part of the board, the deal spells out that from now on:

• Principals will avoid suspending or expelling a student until they first try less severe penalties such as detentions, peer mediation or transfer to another school.
• Principals will be reminded to consider mitigating factors when meting out discipline — and for the first time, they will be told to examine whether racial harassment helped provoke the misdeed.
• In a bid to quash any hint of a crude zero-tolerance approach to discipline, the settlement stresses "nowhere in Ontario's Safe Schools Act do the words zero tolerance occur."
• The board must begin to collect data starting next fall on the racial background of students who are suspended or expelled.
• When police are called due to a student's misconduct, the school board will ensure parents are called, rather than have them learn later their child has been taken to the police station.
• The board will ensure expelled high school students have the chance to continue to earn credits toward their diploma from home or elsewhere.
• Principals will be urged to ensure students suspended for more than five days have the chance to maintain their school work from home or elsewhere.
• The board will meet with the Ontario Human Rights Commission before Jan. 31 to discuss how it plans to recruit more teachers from visible minorities "in order that there be equitable representation reflective of the Toronto community."

"This helps put us back on track and gives us the impetus to make sure we're moving forward with safety while addressing all needs in a multicultural city," said Toronto Trustee Chris Bolton, who has been a leading critic of how the board has applied the Safe Schools Act introduced by the former Conservative government.

Bolton chaired a task force last year that held public hearings into suspensions and expulsions, and made recommendations for ensuring discipline is enforced fairly, many of which are echoed in the new deal. Nearly 1,500 people contacted the "Safe and Compassionate Schools Task Force" with examples of how schools seem quicker to suspend black students than white students who break the same rules.

"Sometimes a principal's discretion has worked against the rules being applied uniformly. What we're happy to see in this settlement is that principals are being urged to take mitigating factors into account. With this settlement, the Ontario Human Rights Commission is holding the board's feet to the fire to ensure principals enforce the spirit of the law, not just the letter of the law," said Bolton in an interview.

The Toronto board has launched a string of programs this year to promote fair treatment to students of all backgrounds, including naming a senior human rights watchdog, looking at gathering race-based statistics, and encouraging diversity when hiring teachers.

The board already trains staff in avoiding racial stereotypes and is working to broaden staff's diversity, which it agrees to continue under the settlement. It expects a blue-ribbon task force to report by January on the best way to gather race-based statistics, says Lloyd McKell, the board's new executive officer of student equity.

Louise Brown, Education Reporter
Toronto Star
November. 14, 2005
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