But the United Federation of Teachers objects to some of the limits on teachers’ freedom of speech, according to an email Jonathan received from UFT Director of Staff LeRoy Barr:

The DOE is disputing the right of our members to wear political buttons in schools. Our view is that there is a long line of First Amendment cases that hold that as long as individuals (including public employees) are not causing disruption or engaged in active electioneering or proselytizing, they have a right to exercise their freedom of speech at work, which includes wearing political buttons.

Wearing an Obama or McCain button in class certainly wouldn’t convey a neutral posture, but what about a button on one’s jacket, worn only outside of school, if a student happened to ride the same bus? And is the Chancellor’s Regulation legal, or, as the UFT asserts, would case law support a teacher’s right to freedom of speech in the workplace, as long as it doesn’t disrupt teaching and learning?

The Washington State ACLU doesn’t provide a clear answer in an overview of teachers’ free speech rights:

A court ruled that a New York teacher could not be fired for wearing a black armband in protest of the Vietnam War because the armband had caused no classroom disruption, was not perceived as an official statement of the school, did not interfere with instruction, and did not coerce or “arbitrarily inculcate doctrinaire views in the minds of the students.” On the other hand, in another case a court upheld a dress code that prevented teachers from wearing political buttons in the classroom because school districts have legitimate authority to “dissociate themselves from matters of political controversy.”

The first case mentioned, regarding the anti-war armband, is James v. Board of Education of Central District. The appellate court distinguished the case from an earlier one, Tinker v. Des Moines, which established the right of students to wear symbolic armbands, as long as it does cause disruption, “because a teacher may have a far more pervasive influence over a student than would one student over another.”

The court said it must balance the protection of “impressionable children from such dogmatism,” with the need to protect the teacher’s first amendment right to free speech, and concluded that since the teacher did not proselytize, and students did not claim to be bothered by the armband, it would be considered protected speech. Furthermore, the court declared, “It would be foolhardy to shield our children from political debate and issues until the eve of their first venture into the voting booth. Schools must play a central role in preparing their students to think and analyze and to recognize the demagogue.”

The second case mentioned, regarding political buttons, seems to be California Teachers Association v. San Diego Unified, which took a clear stance in support of a school board’s right to require neutrality during work hours:

The Teachers Association challenged a school district policy that prohibited political buttons at work sites during work hours. The Court said that schools retain authority to stop speech that might reasonably be perceived to associate the school with any position other than neutrality on matters of political controversy. [xii] The decision permitted the school to ban teachers’ buttons inside the classroom. However, it allowed teachers to wear the buttons outside the classroom, where there were no elements of power or influence over the students.

I’m still waiting to find out what prompted the UFT’s email — was it election season in general, or a specific incident or new deveopment?

Teachers and legal experts, feel free to weigh in on this one in the comments.

Photo of UK walking bus courtesy of Brake.

From the UK’s Schoolgate Blog comes a bus that doesn’t use any gas:

Many schools and local authorities already run walking bus routes, in which volunteers collect children from designated ‘bus stops’ and follow a timetable for the journey to and from school.

…

There is a certain elegance to this initiative because it ticks all the boxes – environment, congestion and healthy living. It has the added bonus of being fun. “The children love it, come rain or shine they are there – for them it is a social occasion,” [a walking bus coordinator] says.

What can make a walking school bus different from groups of children simply walking to school together is the designated stops, regular timetable, and the presence of adult volunteer “conductors” at the front and back of the “bus.”

Wednesday, October 8 is Walk to School Day in the United States; in the city, only the Bronx Academy of Promise Charter School in the Bronx and P.S. 1 in Staten Island are listed as having organized events.

Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley, argues that research backs up bilingual programs, which provide instruction in both English and the child’s native language:

Even a Bush administration review of controlled classroom experiments — seeking to identify what works in language teaching — found stronger achievement gains for students enrolled in quality bilingual programs, compared with English-immersion classrooms. Yet a skilled bilingual teacher is crucial, one who understands the knowledge and social norms that children acquire at home, and how to build from the first language to advance rich oral language and then written literacy. It’s a no-brainer for students attending schools in Europe and East Asia.

Fuller notes that Barack Obama favors transitional bilingual programs, which aim to move children to English-only instruction as quickly as possible, but provide support in the native language along the way. This is different from dual language programs, which promote written and oral fluency in both languages. Of course, as commenters at the Campaign Stops blog point out, the quality and language background of the teacher matters immensely if either type of bilingual program is to work, and in schools with a wide range of native languages spoken, bilingual instruction may not be realistic.

Fuller adds that other Obama proposals, like quality preschool programs and recruitment of excellent teachers, can also help close the achievement gap for these students. He emphasizes the importance of education for Hispanic voters in a number of swing states, and writes that John McCain has had “little to say to Hispanic parents” about education.

In response, Lance T. Izumi, senior director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, uses Sixth Street Prep, a high-achieving southern California charter school, as anecdotal evidence that English immersion is better for students:

Sixth Street emphasizes review and practice, constant assessment of skills and a no-excuses attitude. Furthermore, and here’s where Mr. Obama should take note, according to Linda Mikels, Sixth Street’s principal, the school’s instructional approach for English learners is “full immersion.” English immersion emphasizes the near-exclusive use of English in content instruction. … “It’s working,” she observed, “it’s working for us.”

Izumi accuses Obama of trivializing the issue when he said in a July public appearance, “You need to make sure your child can speak Spanish.” Here’s Obama’s full statement, and Salon provides even more context:

Now, I agree that immigrants should learn English. I agree with that. But understand this. Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English — they’ll learn English — you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about, how can your child become bilingual? We should have every child speaking more than one language.

Will they learn English? Research by the Pew Hispanic Center research suggests they will. A 2007 article reported that 88% of adult children of Hispanic immigrants speak English fluently, and the number rises to 94% in the third generation. Only 23% of first-generation Hispanic immigrants speak English fluently, but those who arrived as children (only about 4% of new arrivals, according to a different Pew report) are more likely to achieve fluency, according to the study. So, while there is clearly much more work to be done — educators are not worried only about English fluency, but also mastery of grade-level content knowledge, high school graduation, and access to college education — this calls into question the ubiquitous anecdotes about families where English is never learned.

For grades 3-8, schools would earn points towards meeting Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) for each student scoring proficient or above (a level 3 or 4 on state tests), but would also earn full points for level 1 and 2 students whose growth indicates that they are on track to become proficient within a four-year period.

A simplified example of how the growth model would determine whether a student is on-track to proficiency.

The graph above provides an oversimplified example. The blue line represents the cutoff score for proficiency at each grade level. Bill and Ted each start out 100 points below proficient. In 4th grade, Bill has gained enough that he is now only 70 points below proficient. As you can see by the red line, if he continued to grow at this rate, he would reach proficiency easily by 7th grade. Therefore, Bill is deemed to be on-track to proficiency, and his school would get full credit towards Annual Yearly Progress for him.

Ted, on the other hand, is still 95 points below proficient in 4th grade. He made more than a year’s growth, but if he continues to grow at this rate, he will not reach proficiency by 7th grade. Ted’s school would not get full-credit towards AYP for him.

Of course, in real life, students don’t grow at exactly the same rate every year. The model addresses this by recalculating the gap between the student’s score and the proficiency cutoff each year, and dividing by the years remaining to set a proficiency target for the following year.

For example, Bill and Ted both started 100 points below proficient, so they would have had the same target for 4th grade: to close that gap by 25 points (100/4). Bill easily met his target, and is now only 70 points below proficient, so his new target would be to close the gap by 23.3 points (70/3). Ted, on the other hand, still had a gap of 95 points by the end of 4th grade, so his new target would be 31.7 points (95/3).

When a child moves to a new school, growth targets are recalculated based on 4 years.

The growth model is designed to be more to schools by recalculating a child’s growth targets when he or she moves to a new school, giving the school a full four years to bring that child to proficiency. In the graph above, Chris is not on-track to proficiency in 3rd or 4th grade, but when he moves to a new school, his growth accelerates. It still isn’t enough to bring him to proficiency by 7th grade, but because he’s in a new school, his progress is projected out over four years (even if his new school doesn’t go up four more grades), and he’s deemed on-track to proficiency. His new school gets full credit towards AYP for him.

Meanwhile, for high schools, students who entered with level 1 or low level 2 scores would be counted as on-track to proficiency if they score between 55 and 64 on the Regents exams before grade 12. This is an interim model since scores of 55-64 are being phased out for graduation eligibility. In addition, high schools will have an additional year to help certain subgroups of students, including some English Language Learners and students with special needs, to reach proficiency.

More to come on the “plus” part of New York’s “proficiency plus” proposal.

Front page of a lab on diffusion and osmosis.

An article by Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn at Edutopia paints a picture of computers providing modified activities to fit students’ different learning styles — one student learns a sentence in Mandarin by playing a game, another through a memorization activity:

Both students are learning to put together sentences that they’ll use in a conversation together in front of the rest of the class — some of whom are using the same learning tools as these two, but many of whom are learning Mandarin in other ways tailored to the way they learn.

But decades of computers-in-schools efforts haven’t led to this kind of transformation of teaching and learning, the article points out. Right now, the courses offered by the Florida Virtual School, a leader in on-line learning, don’t seem all that different from traditional courses — while assignments offer some choice to students, and lessons link to websites with additional content, I saw no evidence of the kind of learning-style-oriented instruction described in the Edutopia article. Another purveyor of on-line courses, Apex Learning, claims to differentiate instruction through multimedia, but the site doesn’t provide demonstration or description of how this works.

The solution is to implement innovative technology models “where the alternative is no class at all,” let them improve over time, and slowly build more widespread demand, say Christensen and Horn.

Where do they envision on-line learning filling gaps in educational offerings? Among “nonconsumers,” students in small schools that don’t offer advanced classes, who need to retake a course, or who seek a flexible schedule, they write. This sounds a lot like the Department of Education’s plan to allow high school students to complete graduation requirements on-line, pending a waiver of the state’s seat-time requirement. And the NYCiSchool, which opened this fall, promises college courses and 37 AP choices, thanks to on-line offerings, and hopes flexible scheduling will allow students to participate in internships and field experiences.

I see the promise for advanced students who can move through material faster on their own than in a traditional classroom, for students who want to graduate quickly and enter the workforce, and for some overage students, but I wonder how students who have struggled with academics would fare in on-line courses. Is there enough contact with a teacher to ensure that students stick with the class, manage their time, and complete assignments?

To address this problem, a Florida Virtual School demo shows that students must complete a timeline of when they will complete assignments for a course, depending on whether they wish to move at a regular or accelerated pace; this timeline is then treated as a contract between student and teacher. The learning management system also includes tools for on-line discussion.

But even though the unfolding financial crisis is proving to be “bad news for some of our funders,” including Lehman Brothers, AIG, and Merrill Lynch, the fund’s director says she thinks the fund will be able to maintain a high level of giving.

“It’s too early for us to know what the implications will be,” said Lara Holliday, the fund’s director. “Certainly this is going to affect us somehow … [but] so far we haven’t seen anything happen.”

In fact, the fund so far this year has outpaced last year’s earnings, Holliday said. And the fund’s upcoming Shop for Public Schools week, during which retailers donate a portion of their revenues to bolster school libraries, attracted more companies than ever this year.

Holliday said she doesn’t anticipate donors backing out of the commitments they’ve already made.
Nor does she think the uncertain financial climate calls for the fund to change its approach. “We’re just going to stick to our original strategy” of pursuing a diverse portfolio of donors, she said. Certainly, with the city’s budget crunch cutting into school funding, “our schools are going to need them,” she said.

“We’re just going to keep doing our work and hope for the best.”

New brain research shows that cognitive control areas of 8-year-olds’ brains respond more to positive feedback than negative feedback, while in 12-year-olds’ brains, and those of adults, these areas respond more to negative feedback.

Crone herself was surprised at the outcome: ‘We had expected that the brains of eight-year-olds would function in exactly the same way as the brains of twelve-year-olds, but maybe not quite so well.  Children learn the whole time, so this new knowledge can have major consequences for people wanting to teach children: how can you best relay instructions to eight- and twelve-year-olds?’

But don’t drop all positive feedback once your children turn twelve: the article notes that brains of all ages have a separate area that responds specifically to positive feedback.

How does this fit in with Alfie Kohn’s warning that praise can kill kids’ intrinsic motivation, I wonder?

Learning about the KIPP schools.

Signing up to learn more at the Education Expo.

The Striking Viking Story Pirates kept kids entertained while their parents visited the Expo.

LinkEducation and the Department of Education’s Office for Family Engagement and Advocacy teamed up to organize the First Annual Education Expo at NYU on Saturday. Hundreds of visitors learned about opportunities ranging from arts, writing, yoga, and environmental programs for schools to charter school leadership fellowships and new technology for teachers.

And if you missed the daily news round-ups, they archive under headlines.

Ira Schwartz of the New York State Education Department presented the proposal, stressing that a growth model allows the state to more carefully assess the work of schools by looking both at the number of students meeting absolute proficiency standards and the rate of growth of students who have not yet reached proficiency.

Adapted from NYSED presentation. Statements in quotes are from Ira Schwartz about each type of school.

By combining these measures, he said, the state could differentiate between schools with low absolute scores where students made significant growth, and schools with both low scores and low growth. The same distinction could be made for schools with high absolute scores, separating schools that continued to push students to higher levels from those where individual students do not make much progress.

The state hopes to use a growth model both to “make more refined… decisions” about whether schools have made Annual Yearly Progress (AYP), and to go beyond AYP to measure the growth of students who have already reached proficiency. Schwartz noted that while the use of a growth model for determining AYP status must be approved by the U.S. Department of Education, the second part of the proposal, going beyond NCLB to look at the growth of proficient students, does not require federal approval.

Schwartz’s presentation mentioned New York City’s Progress Reports as an example of a locally-developed initiative that takes student growth into account, which sparked criticism by some educators in the room.  “I hope they’re not using New York City as a model of success for this,” one principal said during the question-and-answer period.

And Leo Casey, who spoke for the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), emphasized that any accountability model must be fair and complete, accurate, and transparent — no “statistical hieroglyphs,” in order to be meaningful to teachers and families. “If grades and accountability careen all over the place, from F to A and A to F, educators will experience them like the weather,” he said. Casey concluded that although there are still areas needing work, the state’s proposal is an improvement over the current system.

Upcoming posts will detail the state’s proposals for elementary and middle schools, high schools, and for measuring the growth of already proficient students.

From a psychometric point-of-view, New York State achievement test scores offer a reasonably adequate tool to measure progress of one learner from one year to the next. TRUE FALSE

Explain why you agree or disagree with the following statement by Chancellor Klein: School grades “are giving parents and the public clearer information than they’ve ever had before about the strengths of their schools. They have also become a tool schools use to pinpoint the specific areas where they need to improve.”

If you took last year’s quiz, compare your scores and see if you’ve made any progress. (Via Eduwonkette)

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the DOE presentation last week was the suggestion that the citywide Anderson Program could relocate to empty space in the building currently occupied by MS44 and the Computer School. [On Wednesday] I learned that Anderson’s leadership — both the principal and the PTA board — think that a relocation could work. This was probably the most productive part of the meeting. While there are still many concerns, not least parent worries about safety in the MS 44 building, the proposal does allow Anderson and PS 9 crucial room to grow. PS 9 parents also say they would welcome the Center School as a good fit, in terms of both size and philosophy. Most Center School parents remain adamantly opposed to any move.

Regarding the rezoning proposal itself, perhaps the best I can say is that it’s at too early a stage for comment.

According to Freeman, representatives from nearly every elementary school on the Upper West Side attended Wednesday’s meeting, although no one from PS 84, 145, or 191 spoke. In addition, she said, no one attended from MS 44, the West 70th Street middle school where the DOE has proposed moving the ultra-selective Anderson School.

Two teachers flank UFT President Randi Weingarten at yesterday's press conference

The campaign is a response to the growing number of teachers without assignments — there are more than 1,400 — and a sustained attack on those teachers by The New Teacher Project, an organization the DOE has hired to recruit, screen, and place new teachers in the city’s schools.

Joining Weingarten were eight ATRs — for the most part, teachers who were excessed when their positions were eliminated because their schools closed or were downsized — who say they have tried desperately to land a regular teaching position without success.

“All I want to do is teach,” said one teacher who lost her job last year when the school for pregnant and parenting teens where she taught was closed. Contradicting the chancellor’s claim that many teachers in the reserve choose not to look for work, the teachers at the press conference all said they had applied for dozens of jobs, both through the DOE’s centralized hiring system and outside of it, and had rarely even been offered an interview.

Instead of helping teachers whose positions were eliminated find new jobs, the DOE has created financial disincentives for principals to hire experienced teachers, who command higher salaries, and incentives to keep use ATRs as staff as long as possible, because the DOE picks up a portion of their salaries, Weingarten said.

As a result, she said, more than a thousand experienced teachers are spending their school days as substitutes and hall monitors. Their positions are not secure and they can be moved from school to school and open position to open position at any time, destabilizing schools and demoralizing teachers.

Margaret Bianculli, an excessed teacher who works at Beach Channel High School in Queens, said students and other teachers think about her, “Why were you taken out of your classroom? You must have done something wrong.”

Gregory Hinckson, also working as an ATR at Beach Channel, where he taught math for six years, said students who had hoped to have him as a teacher this year have asked him why he no longer has his own classroom. “The kids are the ones suffering greatly because of this,” he said.

Scorsone, who now mentors the latest crop of candidates through the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) Teacher Center, was a kindergarten teacher looking for a new challenge.

National Board Certification seemed like a good fit. “The hook was that I read that the standards were written primarily by teachers, for teachers. When I read those standards, I got goosebumps. …[F]or the first time, the complexities of teaching were described.”

This year, 53 New York City educators are starting the process of becoming board certified. Altogether, 137 National Board Certified teachers have come from New York City, 99% through the UFT National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) Project, Scorsone told me. Candidates working with the UFT NBPTS Project meet twice monthly to work on their applications and get help from mentors and from each other.

“The more experienced you are, the more underground, in a sense, your teaching goes,” Scorsone said, explaining that the application process helps teachers “deconstruct what [they] do and why [they] do it, then put it back together through synthesis.”

Teachers seeking National Board Certification must submit three portfolios of classroom practice, documenting their teaching through written reflection, videos of their interactions with students, and samples of student work, plus a fourth portfolio called “documented accomplishments,” which highlights the work they’ve done beyond the classroom — whether reaching out to parents or attending professional development programs — that has positively impacted their students.

In addition to submitting portfolios, candidates report to an assessment center to complete six 30-minute computerized exercises evaluating their content knowledge.

They have a year to submit their application entries and up to 2 years to retake sections, if necessary; the process is rigorous and many candidates do not succeed on their first attempt. Scorsone said that 50 to 70% of candidates achieve National Board Certification by the end of the second year.

What makes a good candidate? Scorsone said teachers must have “lifelong learner skills: determination, follow-through, commitment,” and good reflective writing ability. Rather than focusing on getting the certification, the most successful candidates approach the application as a year-long professional development process, she said.

Miss Malarkey, who wrote that the new parking policy seems like “another slap at the veteran teachers,” is thinking about what to take out of her over-sized handbag, which will ring true for those who’ve carried science supplies, rolls of chart paper, or stacks of student journals on a bus or train:

The neighborhood I work in is not great. There have been muggings and purse snatchings near the school, and I feel vulnerable walking, weighted down by all my stuff.

Jonathan, who teaches in the Bronx, is concerned that the old system of more permits than spaces was more fair than the favoritism going on at many schools now that the principal and union chapter leader distribute permits. And some schools aren’t easily accessed by transit, he points out:

I am a big fan of public transport. I use it, where it is practical. The tyranny of the upper east side rich poking at middle class schlubs who need to drive is infuriating.  Meeting in Manhattan? Of course I jump on the train. Meeting on the other side of the Bronx? What, are you kidding?

Mimi agrees that permits are not being distributed fairly:

There ARE a very limited number of passes being distributed. Our administrators (some of whom live a ten minute walk from school) snatched those up and left the teachers (some of whom live a 45 minute drive away) with nothing.

So, in sum, …those of us who actually need and legally use our parking passes will be denied. In the middle of the fall. After we have made decisions about our employment based on our proximity to work and subsequent commute.

Will teachers who live in the suburbs leave the city schools to work closer to home?  On a Teachers Network chatboard, commenter Rae is thinking of leaving:

There were only 3 permits left after the principle dispersed them to the higher ups. As one of the only options to arrive to work, it seems as a permanently certified teacher, I will be forced to leave the system and find a job here in Long Island.

While others on the chatboard questioned the practicality of leaving a job over parking, at least one commenter agreed with Rae — and over and over I read that administrators and union leaders are keeping permits for themselves.

While there have been parking abuses by teachers, the new placard distribution system is broken, both at the school level and at the city level, where the number of spaces seems to have little to do with school size, availability of a parking lot, or proximity to transit. I leave it to UFT leadership and to Streetsblog’s parking experts to propose a more rational solution.

Nolan chairs the education committee and moderated the roundtable; she was joined by Assembly Members Carmen Arroyo of the Bronx and Daniel O’Donnell of Manhattan.

Source: New York State Graduation Rates 06-07 Presentation

Although overall graduation rates have increased statewide, they have declined among English Language Learners; the city’s four year graduation rate for ELLs was 23.5% in 2007. And 76% of New York State’s ELLs live in the city. Yet among those education committee members who did not attend the roundtable were Barbara Clark of Queens; Ruben Diaz, Jr., Aurelia Greene, and Michael Benedetto of the Bronx; and James Brennan, Karim Camara, and Alan Maisel of Brooklyn.

Assemblyman Camara’s office said he was not notified of the roundtable until the last minute. A spokesperson for Assemblyman Benedetto said that he had “other commitments” but could not be more specific, and Assemblyman Maisel also cited scheduling conflicts.

Maisel told me, “I spent 30 years of my life in the public schools as a teacher and a principal and this has been a problem for a long time…. Obviously there’s a lot more that needs to be done to improve [ELL graduation] rates.”

Other Assembly members have not gotten back to me since I contacted them yesterday.

Is low attendance at such events a pattern? It’s hard to tell, according to ReformNY, the blog of the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law:

Committee attendance for meetings or hearings is virtually unknown because, even if recorded, it’s not readily accessible to the public. This is part of a larger problem of a general lack of transparency and accountability in the state legislature. As the process exists today, constituents are left in the dark about the working habits—or lack thereof—of their representatives. Like you and I were subject to in school, attendance should be taken and should be published on the web immediately.

More on the substance of the roundtable to come.