Barry Maurice
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- Going for grants: 31 states join to create national academic tests SEATTLE (AP) — A group of 31 states has banded together to compete for a federal grant to create a series of new national academic tests to replace the current patchwork system. In the current system, every state gives a different test to its students. In some states, passing the exam is a graduation requirement. The federal government has said it will award up to two grants of up to $160 million to create a testing system based on the proposed new national academic standards in reading and math. Washington state is submitting the application on behalf of the group of states. The coalition's proposal describes a testing system different from what is happening in most states in a number of ways: — Testing would be online and given at least twice a year to help teachers and parents track student progress. — The exams would adapt to measure each student's abilities. It's expensive technology that most individual states could not afford on their own. — Teachers would be given other tools for ongoing, informal assessment to help them figure out if students are learning on a daily basis so they can adjust how they are teaching when necessary. TEACHERS: States push to base pay on performance — The high school test will be designed for 11th grade, while many states currently give it in 10th. BASICS: One-third of students need remedial college math, reading Individual states will still determine whether to use the high school test as a graduation requirement, said Chris Barron, spokesman for the Washington state education department. The test will be designed to be comparable with international exams. Half of all states currently require graduation tests of some kind. "These funds will go a long way to building the innovative system we need to help our children succeed," Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire said in a statement. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
- 4 charged in Texas videotaped school beating HOUSTON (AP) — A teacher and three other educators at a Houston charter school were charged Monday in connection with the videotaped beating of a 13-year-old boy who was attending the school. Teacher Sheri Lynn Davis , 40, was charged with injury to a child, a third-degree felony, and could face up to 10 years in prison and up to a $10,000 fine if convicted, said Harris County District Attorney's Office spokeswoman Donna Hawkins. A cellphone video recorded by another student shows Davis pummeling a 13-year-old boy in class on April 29. She was fired the following week from Jamie's House Charter School in northwest Houston. Three school employees — including school superintendent and founder Ollie Hilliard, principal David Jones and a teacher who witnessed the attack, Gabriel Moseley — were charged with failure to report child abuse, a misdemeanor charge, Hawkins said. Those defendants face up to one year in Harris County jail and up to a $4,000 fine if convicted. In the video, Davis is seen shoving, kicking and dragging the student, Isaiah Reagins, across the classroom floor as he tried to protect himself. Reagins suffered a black eye and other bruises in the attack. His mother, Alesha Johnson, sued Davis and the school. "What today signifies is what the kids have been telling us and what we've been saying all along is in fact true," Brant Stogner, Johnson's attorney, said Monday. "This goes beyond just one teacher and one kid, this goes to show a deeper problem at that school." Reagins is living out of town with family and attending vacation Bible school, Stogner said. He will not return to Jamie's House in the fall. "He's recovering well from his physical injuries, but it's hard to tell the extent of his emotional and physical injuries," Stogner said. "At this point, we're going to allow him to be a little boy this summer and when school starts up, see how he handles being back in school." An attorney for Davis, Chip Lewis, has said the attack started when she tried to break up a fight in the hall and heard her classroom door shut and lock behind her. She shook the door until she caught the attention of a student who opened it, and that is when the recorded incident began. Davis has apologized for the beating, saying she was "without excuse" for the attack. She has also met with the student's mother, and apologized. On Monday, Lisa Andrews, another attorney for Davis, said the full story will come out in court. "I feel very confident that when the entire story comes out and what precipitated Ms. Davis to do what she did, she will be vindicated," Andrews said. An attorney for Moseley, Carvana Cloud, did not immediately return a phone call from The Associated Press. It was not immediately clear whether the other defendants had retained lawyers. A voicemail left for the school was not immediately returned. Following the incident, the Texas Education Agency assigned a conservator to the school to review safety, discipline and teacher training and assist with improvements. The conservator will spend the summer reviewing the school's discipline and training policies, according to an agency spokeswoman. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
- Professor pushes return to slow reading CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Slow readers of the world, uuuuuuuu...niiiiite! At a time when people spend much of their time skimming websites, text messages and e-mails, an English professor at the University of New Hampshire is making the case for slowing down as a way to gain more meaning and pleasure out of the written word. Thomas Newkirk isn't the first or most prominent proponent of the so-called "slow reading" movement, but he argues it's becoming all the more important in a culture and educational system that often treats reading as fast food to be gobbled up as quickly as possible. "You see schools where reading is turned into a race, you see kids on the stopwatch to see how many words they can read in a minute," he said. "That tells students a story about what reading is. It tells students to be fast is to be good." Newkirk is encouraging schools from elementary through college to return to old strategies such as reading aloud and memorization as a way to help students truly "taste" the words. He uses those techniques in his own classroom, where students have told him that they've become so accustomed from flitting from page to page online that they have trouble concentrating while reading printed books. READING: Proficiency at 4th grade linked to nation's success COLLEGE: One-third need remedial reading, math "One student told me even when he was reading a regular book, he'd come to a word and it would almost act like a hyper link. It would just send his mind off to some other thing," Newkirk said. "I think they recognize they're missing out on something." The idea is not to read everything as slowly as possible, however. As with the slow food movement, the goal is a closer connection between readers and their information, said John Miedema, whose 2009 book "Slow Reading" explores the movement. "It's not just about students reading as slowly as possible," he said. "To me, slow reading is about bringing more of the person to bear on the book." Miedema, a technology specialist at IBM in Ottawa, Ontario, said little formal research has been done on slow reading, other than studies on physical conditions such as dyslexia. But he said the movement is gaining ground: the 2004 book In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Changing the Cult of Speed sprang from author Carl Honore's realization that his "rushaholism" had gotten out of hand when he considered buying a collection of "one-minute bedtime stories" for his children. In a 2007 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education , the executive humanities editor at Harvard University Press describes a worldwide reading crisis and calls for a "revolution in reading." "Instead of rushing by works so fast that we don't even muss up our hair, we should tarry, attend to the sensuousness of reading, allow ourselves to enter the experience of words," Lindsay Waters wrote. Though slow, or close reading, always has been emphasized at the college-level in literary criticism and other areas, it's also popping up in elementary schools, Miedema said. Mary Ellen Webb, a third-grade teacher at Mast Way Elementary School in Durham, N.H., has her students memorize poems upward of 40 lines long and then perform them for their peers and parents. She does it more for the sense of pride her students feel but said the technique does transfer to other kinds of reading — the children remember how re-reading and memorizing their poems helped them understand tricky text. "Memorization is one of those lost things, it hasn't been the 'in' thing for a while," she said. "There's a big focus on fluency. Some people think because you can read quickly ... that's a judge of what a great reader they are. I think fluency is important, but I think we can err too much on that side." It's all about balance, said Patti Flynn, an assistant principal in Nashua, N.H., and mother of a 10-year-old girl. Her school has offered, and her daughter has participated in, numerous reading challenges that reward students for reaching certain milestones — a pizza party for a class that reads 100 books, for example. Though such contests may appear to emphasize speed rather than reading for pleasure or comprehension, they also are good incentives for children who weren't motivated to read, she said. The challenges have encouraged parents to make reading a priority at home, Flynn said. "The goal shouldn't be to be whipping through a certain number of pages, the goal should be to make sure kids are gaining some conceptual understanding," she said. Her daughter, Lily, said she considers herself a "medium-speed" reader and had to increase her speed to finish about 10 books for her classroom's 100-book challenge. But she said she enjoyed the process and feels like she understood and remembers what she read. "It was fun," she said. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
- Microsoft ‘School of the Future’ in Philly finally in a groove? PHILADELPHIA — When the Microsoft-designed School of the Future opened, the facility was a paragon of contemporary architecture, with a green roof, light-filled corridors and the latest classroom technology, all housed in a dazzling white modern building. It might as well have been a fishbowl: Educators and media from around the world watched to see whether Microsoft could reform public education through innovation and technology. Although the school's creative ambitions have been frustrated by high principal turnover, curriculum tensions and a student body unfamiliar with laptop computer culture, the school graduates its first senior class Tuesday with each student having been accepted to an institution of higher learning. "The first three years were definitely a challenge," said Mary Cullinane, Microsoft's liaison to the school. "They're hitting they're groove now. I'm excited to see what's in store." From the beginning, everything about the $63 million School of the Future was designed to be different. Built in the city's rough Parkside section with district money, the school partnered with Microsoft on new approaches to curriculum, instruction and hiring. It attracted reform-minded teachers and students bent on avoiding traditional high schools. INFLUENCE: Bill Gates pushes education reform The vision was for a paperless, textbook-less school that embodied the motto "Continuous, Relevant, Adaptive." Each student would get a take-home laptop on which to keep notes, do homework and take tests. But learners are chosen by a lottery of public school students. Most are low-income and without home computers, yet they are expected to manage their high school careers on a laptop. "I felt kind of awkward," said senior Kenneth Bolds, 17. "I was used to using books and pencils for eight years." Educators also assumed learners would enter the school performing at grade level, but half the students in the academically troubled district are not proficient at reading or math. The school's first set of standardized test scores last year were dismal. Only 7.5% of 11th graders scored proficient or higher in math; 23.4% scored proficient or higher in reading. Cullinane notes that the school can't control students' education before ninth grade, but said test scores don't tell the whole story. "It is a long-term journey and we have to get away from short-term yardsticks," she said. The project-based curriculum also caused problems because it did not translate to district benchmarks. Its interdisciplinary nature made it hard to tell what material had been taught, said Nancy Hopkins-Evans, special assistant to the district's chief academic officer. "Our issue was that you had content and standards that you absolutely needed to cover," Hopkins-Evans said. Report cards, too, were incompatible with the district's needs. The narrative assessments rated students from "Advanced" to "Not on the Radar" instead of giving letter grades. And the idea to replicate a professional work day by using a 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. schedule had to be altered; some students needed the traditional school day. All the while, there were tours, tours, tours. More than 3,000 people from 50 countries have visited the school, said Cullinane, worldwide director of innovation for Microsoft Education. Senior Mahcaiyah Wearing-Gooden, 18, said she led countless tours as a freshman, showing off computerized blackboards ("smart boards") and digital lockers that popped open by waving an ID card. "It was a lot to process at the time," she said. Principal Rosalind Chivis — the school's fourth — described the building's journey as "trying to build a plane while flying it." Yet now, she said, a revamped curriculum, steady leadership and better use of resources and scheduling has yielded the "first full year of uninterrupted education." Teacher Aruna Arjunan said part of the school's strength lies in offering a combination of academic, technical and real-world skills. Students' familiarity with Microsoft programs make them employable straight out of high school, she said. They are also evaluated on "competencies" that Seattle-based Microsoft uses with its own employees, such as dealing with ambiguity and thinking on the fly. "There are kids in this building who would have flunked out of other high schools," Arjunan said. "I just think the culture here is unlike any other." All 117 seniors were accepted to post-secondary programs, from community colleges to selective schools like Villanova University ; however, 11 of them must attend summer school to graduate. Some students, like Wearing-Gooden, weren't even considering college as freshmen. But this fall, Wearing-Gooden will be studying climatology on a scholarship at Green Mountain College in Vermont. She said she realized her potential at the School of the Future, which offered individual attention, a supportive atmosphere and a familial dynamic. The hectic first years also taught Wearing-Gooden a valuable life lesson. "It showed me that the world is not as stable as we want it to be," she said. "Now I'm ready for anything." Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
- U.S. colleges see highest enrollment jump in 40 years WASHINGTON (AP) — The nation's colleges are attracting record numbers of new students as more Hispanics finish high school and young adults opt to pursue a higher education rather than languish in a weak job market. A study released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center highlights the growing diversity in higher education amid debate over the role of race in college admissions and controversy over Arizona 's new ban on ethnic studies in public schools. ADMISSIONS: Colleges urged to use affirmative action based on economic class Newly released government figures show that freshman enrollment surged 6% in 2008 to a record 2.6 million, mostly due to rising minority enrollment. That is the highest increase since 1968 during the height of the Vietnam War, when young adults who attended college could avoid the military draft. Almost three-quarters of the freshman increases in 2008 were minorities, of which the largest share was Hispanics. HISPANIC HIGHER ED: College success is all in the family VIDEO SERIES: 'Non-traditional' students struggle to complete degrees The enrollment increases were clustered mostly at community colleges, trade schools, and large public universities, which tend to have more open admissions policies and charge less tuition. Still, the gains in minorities were seen at almost all levels of higher education, with white enrollment dipping to 53% at community colleges and 62% at four-year colleges. Preliminary government data show freshman college enrollment continued rising in 2009 to fresh highs, but demographic breakdowns were not yet available. "The nation is moving beyond whether minorities have access to post-secondary education," said Richard Fry, a senior researcher at Pew who wrote the report. "The question increasingly is not 'which youth go beyond high school?' but 'who goes where?'" California, the District of Columbia, Arizona, Alabama and Nevada had the largest freshman enrollment increases in 2008, with gains ranging from 11% to 21%. States registering declines included Minnesota, Nebraska, Delaware and Oklahoma, which dropped as much as 5%. Demographers say much of the college enrollment gains reflect the nation's rapidly changing demographics, in which 43% of all students in K-12 are now minority. But the recession, too, is adding to the increases as more high school graduates — primarily Hispanics — enroll immediately in college rather than take their chances in the labor force. Among the findings: •Freshman enrollment of Hispanics in higher education jumped by 15% in 2008, compared to 8% for blacks, 6% for Asians and 3% for whites. •The share of 18- to 24-year-olds who earned a high school diploma reached an all-time high of 85%, up from 84% in 2007. Among Asians, the number was 92%, whites 90%, blacks 79% and Hispanics 70%. •Colleges showing the largest freshmen increases included Fresno City College in California, jumping 448% to 2,998 students; Arizona State University, rising 21% to 8,458; and American Public University System in West Virginia, increasing 332% to 121 students. The findings add to the burgeoning debate over the role of race in America amid a steady rise in the minority population that is expected to make them the new American majority by mid-century. In Arizona, Gov. Jan Brewer last month signed a measure banning ethnic studies courses in public schools if they serve to promote racial solidarity or are designed primarily for students of a particular race. Several minority groups have praised Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan , who as solicitor general authorized the filing of a brief by the Justice Department defending the constitutionality of the University of Texas' affirmative action program that considers race in undergraduate admissions. The case, still pending, is expected to be appealed to the Supreme Court. Fry noted that minority enrollment appeared to be concentrated in the "basic tiers" of higher education, such as community colleges and trade schools. It is not clear whether gains occurred in more selective four-year colleges, which often use affirmative action to promote diversity. In addition, while Hispanics have seen recent gains in college enrollment, they still lag overall. Hispanics make up roughly 12% of full-time undergraduate and graduate students, compared to their 16% representation in the total U.S. population. "These findings are only half reassuring," Fry said. "Many Hispanic teens still are not graduating high school, and the high school gains may not be sustained when the teen labor market revives. It also remains to be seen how many of these additional minority freshmen will actually complete degrees." Pew, an independent research group, based its findings on 2008 data from the Census Bureau and the Education Department. The figures for "white" refer to those whites who are not of Hispanic ethnicity. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
- ‘Rap teacher’ uses hip-hop to school L.A. kids in algebra LOS ANGELES — The class of eighth graders at a Los Angeles middle school tap their rulers and nod their heads to the rhythm of the rap video projected on a screen. It's not Snoop Dogg or Jay-Z . It's their math teacher, LaMar Queen, using rhyme to help them memorize seemingly complicated algebra and in the process improve their grades. "It gets stuck in your head," says Cindy Martinez, a 14-year-old whose math grade went from a C-average to a B. Queen, 26, is now known at Los Angeles Academy as the rap teacher, but his fame has spread far beyond the 2,200-student school in this gritty neighborhood. He's won a national award and shows teachers and parents how to use rap to reach children. "Math is a bad word in a lot of households," he says. "But if we put it in a form that kids enjoy, they'll learn." Queen is doing what many veteran educators have done — using students' music to connect with them. Where teachers once played the rock n' roll tunes of "Schoolhouse Rocks" to explain everything from government to grammar, they now turn to rap to renew Shakespeare or geometry. "Rap is what the kids respond to," Queen says. "They don't have a problem memorizing the songs at all." Queen's math raps came about by chance. Two months after starting at LA Academy in 2007 — his first teaching job after graduating from college — he was stung when kids told him his class was boring. They told him he resembled singer Kanye West and challenged him to rap. Little did they know Queen has been rapping since the seventh grade. Back then, he'd throw together rhymes as he walked home from school in Carson, a city neighboring Los Angeles. His students' challenge on his mind, Queen pushed aside work on his lesson plans and wrote a rap song 'Slope Intercept.' Word of his rapping soon reached the school's main office. Eyebrows raised, Principal Maria Borges went to investigate, and came out smiling. "It engages the kids," she says. "Kids seem to know all the rap songs, but they can't seem to remember different math rules." None of his raps are in the Top 40, but "Mean, Median, Mode and Range," "Polynomials," and "Quadratic Formulove Song" are chartbusters here. "Some kids who aren't even in Mr. Queen's class go around singing his songs," says Kejon Closure, 13, who went from a C-average to an A. In the raps, Queen defines a math concept and works through sample problems step by step. He follows up with more traditional class work on the whiteboard, maintaining a fluid banter with his students. Queen also tries to inspire them. His lyrics exhort students "to be a math sensation," "to get As on your papers," and even "be respectful. Listen to your parents." Sometimes the students appear in the videos as a reward for good grades and behavior. Queen says making learning fun is key for kids who often seem burdened with adult problems — there wasn't enough food to go round at breakfast, they couldn't sleep well in overcrowded homes or they have to serve as translators for Spanish-speaking parents in difficult circumstances. When they leave those troubles at home, they arrive at a school that's more fortress than learning sanctuary. The campus is surrounded by a steel-bar fence and padlocked gate. Teachers conduct uniform checks to make sure students are not wearing local gang colors of red or blue. "I try to get them to leave their problems at the door," Queen says. There was a point last year when he thought he might not be able to continue at LA Academy. He was laid off as an untenured teacher, but he returned to the school as a long-term substitute to continue to teach his students as he hoped to get his staff job back. In April, he won a national award for outstanding math achievement from Get Schooled, a pro-education initiative launched by media giant Viacom and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He's also been honored by school district and county educators. He's now hoping to make rap math a business and launched a website, MusicNotesOnline, with a colleague to market his rap CD and DVD, and expand the use of rap in education to other academic subjects. During a recent class, Queen dons dark shades, sets his laptop to play a driving hip-hop beat and starts rapping about solving equations as he grooves up and down the aisles. "Let's talk about slope intercept. I don't mind if you interject, Just don't disrespect. I say, you have a question for me? What's y equals mx + b?" Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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