Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2002 21:39:15 -0700 Subject: PEN Weekly NewsBlast for August 30, 2002 To: "PEN Weekly NewsBlast" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> From: "Public Education Network" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Public Education Network Weekly NewsBlast "America's Favorite Free Newsletter on Improving Public Education" *************************************************************************** SPIRITUALITY IN LEADERSHIP: SCHOOLS THIRSTING FOR PURPOSE Often missing in the equations of school reform are the dimensions of spirituality and soul. In this brave issue of The School Administrator, several authors grapple with the issue of spiritual leadership in public schools. Deepak Chopra points out that leaders are the symbolic soul of the groups they lead and that great leaders respond from higher levels of spirit. Michael Fullan explores how the narrow conception of principal as instructional leader overlooks the importance of paying attention to the social/moral environment of the school. Rachael Kessler outlines a framework for nourishing the inner life of students in ways that honor the separation of church and state and the deeply held beliefs of families and teachers. As John Hoyle writes, "Spiritual leaders cannot allow children and youth to fail nor can they stand idly by and ignore competence. The leader is responsible for inspiring staff, teachers, and community to do what is right for each child. To ignore children failing and blaming it on the child's background or family is spiritless." http://www.aasa.org/publications/sa/2002_09/contents.htm ADVOCACY TOOLKIT: ENSURING THE SUCCESS OF ALL LEARNERS The time for advocacy on behalf of students is now. And the voice needed is yours. You may already be involved in efforts to change policies, programs, and perceptions to benefit learners. Such involvement is crucial for educators today, for when we do not create effective channels of communication with legislators, the media, and community members, others define the policy agenda. The consequences of such ill-informed efforts, even when well intentioned, can be devastating to children and learning. The stakes are simply too high for educators not to engage in advocacy efforts. This helpful toolkit offers tools including the basics for planning an advocacy campaign, tips for communicating with policymakers, and the nitty-gritty on communicating with the media. http://www.ascd.org/advocacykit/ FAILING SCHOOLS FIND HOLE IN LAW The wide disparity in identifying failing schools underscores the limitations of the impact of the No Child Left Behind Education Act of 2001 on the nation's schools, a weakness that could undermine President Bush's signature domestic policy initiative. While 8,652 U.S. public schools have been identified as "failing" under the law, the entire state of Arkansas, according to its officials, has no failing schools. Michigan, in contrast, lists 1,513 failing schools, the most of any state, a total that officials there attribute to rigorous standardized tests. "I think in the beginning, some people got carried away with saying how much this law would make a difference in education," said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "In the end, the states are going to be the ones who define what failure is. If a state stares the federal government in the eye and says, 'We have no failing schools,' there is not much that the federal government can do." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9106-2002Aug28.html WHEN SCHOOL CHOICE ISN'T School choice, as written into federal law, was intended to provide an escape for kids stuck in lousy situations, while at the same time spurring competition for reform. It came about as a compromise between advocates and foes of private school vouchers by creating parental choice, though only within public schools. In exchange for a significant increase in federal funding, the new education law demands that failing or persistently unsafe schools give parents new transfer options and cover the costs of transportation to another school. As it turns out, providing viable transfer options for parents is much harder than it sounds -- especially when the program is underfunded, poorly publicized to parents, limited to low-performing schools, administered by unenthusiastic school officials, and full of bureaucratic loopholes. Educators raise legions of logistical, financial, and educational objections to giving parents more say in choosing their children's schools. However valid they may be in some cases, in many others, the reasons offered appear to be more a function of lack of enthusiasm on the part of bureaucrats, and, more surprisingly, of parents. While it's worth rooting for almost any reform that truly provides better choices for students stuck in dysfunctional schools, it's hard not to conclude that the most efficient way to improve education for the millions of such children is by doing it the old-fashioned way: by fixing the schools they already attend. The sooner we recognize this and start doing more of what we know can improve achievement -- better teachers, higher academic expectations, summer school, smaller classes and schools -- the better. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0209.russo.html THE PARADOX OF STATE SCHOOL REFORM According to Hayes Mizell, higher expectations for teacher performance are appropriate, but meeting these expectations is not simply a matter of educators working harder or more efficiently, though there is no doubt that there are some teachers and administrators who need to do both. Even when states' policies are of high quality, there is a tremendous gap between educators' understanding standards and knowing how to help students perform at standard. Implicit in many of the states' policies is the assumption that if the state tells educators what to do, the educators have the knowledge and skills to do it. Most teachers and administrators do not know how to help all their students perform at significantly higher levels. For those who have been teaching for the past seven to ten years, their pre-service education did not prepare them for the realities of today's classroom nor for the levels of performance states now expect. The modus operandi of these teachers has been classroom survival framed by the expectation that some students would do well, many would get by, and some would fail. While acknowledging that newer teachers fare slightly better, Mr. Mizell explores how states must improve and increase professional development opportunities for educators so they are more effective in the classroom. http://www.emcf.org/programs/student/student_pub.htm THE DOLLARS AND SENSE OF EDUCATION Award-winning journalist Nat Hentoff wonders in this column whether the dream of integration and equal opportunity in public education have been permanently injured by the reality that schools attended by most minority students receive substantially less funding and have fewer qualified teachers, larger classes, and vastly inferior facilities than schools attended by more affluent white students in the surrounding suburbs. Mr. Hentoff argues for a clear, enforceable system of accountability for teachers and principals and concludes, "In every state, the common school cannot offer the opportunity for a meaningful future if every child does not have a chance to stand equally high with those from the mansions of the city." http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20020819-33401855.htm SEPTEMBER 11th: WHAT OUR CHILDREN NEED TO KNOW September 11th was one of the defining events of our age, of our nation's history and of these children's lives. Educators have an obligation in any such circumstance to provide the information, the analysis, the conclusions and the lessons that they believe their pupils need. What happened? Why did it happen? How should we think about it? What are we doing about it? What should we do about it? How can we keep it from happening again? What are the major lessons of September 11th that teachers should introduce to their young charges? In this report, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, with the help of 23 various authors, seeks to provide answers to those questions and to suggest what U.S. schools and educators should teach their students so that they will better understand 9/11, its precursors and its aftermath. By exploring questions and answers, it is hoped that our nation's schoolchildren will be better able to function as young citizens of a nation that has endured a wicked attack and is now engaged in a serious and protracted war. http://www.edexcellence.net/ 20,000 CHILDREN TO REPEAT A GRADE More than a quarter of Baltimore elementary and middle school pupils will have to repeat a grade in the coming school year, the first real indication of how sweeping new passing standards will affect families across the city. About 20,000 of 70,000 schoolchildren in grades one through eight failed to meet the standards, even after the majority of those pupils who were in danger of failing attended a five-week summer school. Although the implications of failing so many children are serious, board member J. Tyson Tildon suggested he was encouraged by the result because it meant thousands of children who couldn't read, write or do math would no longer continue to pass as they have for decades in the city. In a related matter, schools chief Carmen Russo acknowledged that it is unlikely the school system was able to meet the requirement of a new federal law that says every failing school must fill its vacant positions with certified teachers. The law attempts to reverse the inequities in systems where the best and most experienced teachers tend to end up at the best schools, leaving the failing schools with young staffs and a high turnover rate. http://www.sunspot.net/news/education/bal-te.md.schools28aug28.story?coll=bal-ho me-headlines SYSTEM SNUBS QUALIFIED TEACHERS According to veteran teacher, Patrick Walsh, to create the illusion of having "qualified teachers," states and individual school systems have tried to get the public to believe that "qualified" and "certified" are synonymous. Any parent who has seen some of the pathetic "certified" teachers, protected by tenure and the teacher unions, and allowed to draw taxpayers' dollars year after year, knows that state certification does not even rise to a minimum competency level. Walsh writes that if his school was able to recruit and hire the teachers it wanted without the niggling interference from state and local officials obsessed with a meaningless certification stamp, schools would get the kind of teachers our kids deserve, and come a bit closer to the president's ideal of having "a qualified teacher in every classroom." http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2002-08-12-oplede_x.htm COLOR LINE HELPS SHOW WHITE TEACHERS THEIR PRIVILEGED STATUS Seattle teachers took time to take a test of racial privilege, which included questions about apartment-hunting, harassment in stores, images on TV, paying with personal checks, traffic stops by police, even buying "flesh"-colored bandages. "It's a constant thing," special education teacher Linda Johnson said of the daily frustrations she and other black Americans face. The exercise was part of an effort by the Seattle public schools to do something about the "achievement gap," the persistent difference between the higher average scores of white students and the lower average scores of minority students on standardized tests and other measures of academic accomplishment. For example, on the 2000-01 Washington Assessment of Student Learning, white fourth-graders in Seattle scored an average of 82.3 in reading, while black fourth-graders scored 41.3; in math, the gap was 65.6 to 15. In 100 schools throughout the city yesterday, more than 5,000 teachers and administrators assembled for simultaneous "much needed" conferences on race and equity. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/84562_race28.shtml LOS ANGELES SCHOOLS TO BAN SODA SALES Following the lead of their counterparts in Oakland, Los Angeles school district officials expelled soda pop from campus in a unanimous vote meant to nudge pupils in the nation's second largest school system closer to good health. The policy, approved by the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education after nearly 3 hours of debate, means that no carbonated drinks can be sold during school hours beginning in January 2004. The district, the second largest in the country after New York City, consists of 677 schools and 750,000 students. Dozens of supporters applauded the vote after marching to the district's headquarters wearing neon green shirts with signs mocking soda advertisements. "Don't Do the Dew," said one, mocking Mountain Dew. "Obey Your Thirst, Drink Water" read another, satirizing Sprite. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2002/08/28/MN1447 62.DTL COMMUNITY SCHOOLS: A HANDBOOK FOR STATE POLICY LEADERS At a time when choice and testing dominate the education agenda, there is an increased need to apply some common sense and consider the critical role that community and family play in educating our children. In response to this need, The Coalition for Community Schools has released a primer to help guide state policymakers -- governors, state legislators, chief state school officers, and leaders of other state agencies-- through the vision of community schools. It describes specific actions that leaders can take to "grow" community schools in their states. The handbook also is useful to local elected officials and local decision makers as well. http://www.communityschools.org/pubs.coal.html SCHOOL VOUCHERS: A SMALL TOOL FOR A VERY BIG PROBLEM The Supreme Court decision upholding the school voucher program in Cleveland has generated a burst of hyperbole among hard-core voucher advocates, the most ideological of whom view the ruling as the first step toward dismantling public education as we know it today. Hijacking the language of civil rights, many advocates are portraying the Cleveland case as the second coming of Brown v. Board of Education, suggesting that vouchers will somehow rescue millions of black and Latino children who are trapped in failing schools all across the United States. According to Brent Staples, the idea that a voucher program so limited in scope somehow equals Brown is preposterous on its face. By desegregating public schools and colleges -- and integrating the professions as well -- Brown reshaped the civic climate and signaled the end of a Jim Crow rule that had dominated the country since the Civil War. The Cleveland voucher program is minuscule by comparison. Realists understand that it shows, at best, that vouchers are one tool among many in the school reform arsenal. Used in isolation, the voucher strategy will have minimal impact on the educational inequality that is crippling millions of minority children. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/05/opinion/05MON3.html MEN IN DEMAND AS EDUCATORS AND PROACTIVE PARENTS A growing body of research shows dads' involvement means their kids do substantially better in school. "Parent involvement in the school setting is basically a code word for mother involvement. Often, that's how dads see parent involvement," reports one expert. According to the National Education Association, just 26 percent of the nation's 3 million teachers are men. While the numbers are more balanced at the secondary level, educators are concerned about the scant 15 percent of elementary school teachers who are men. A June 2000 report -- from the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services -- showed that in two-parent families where fathers are highly involved, children are more likely to get top grades, more likely to enjoy school and less likely to get into trouble. http://www.freep.com/news/education/men12_20020812.htm FLORIDA SCHOOL PUTS A POSITIVE SPIN ON FAILURE Teachers and administrators at a Florida elementary school hope to convince students that the "F" their school received from the state's accountability system really means "fantastic" and "fun." Pep rallies and t-shirts declaiming "F = Fantastic" are just some of the strategies this failing school is using to boost everybody's sense of self-esteem. But are they also increasing the community's complacency? http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/education/orl-locmollie13081302aug13.story "TRICK OR TREAT FOR UNICEF" KICKS OFF ITS 52ND SEASON! Through "Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF," children in the United States have raised more than $115 million for their peers around the world. In addition to its fundraising component, "Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF" is a valuable service-learning vehicle used to educate American children about their global peers, the value of helping others and empowers them to make a difference. Order your FREE educational materials and orange collection boxes by calling 1-800-252-KIDS or visiting the website below. http://www.unicefusa.org/trickortreat/ YOUTH AND VIOLENCE: STUDENTS SPEAK OUT FOR A MORE CIVIL SOCIETY Young people describe teasing that goes beyond being playful, put-downs, and cruel gossip as very real violence to them and as triggers for the physical violence that almost half of them endure, according to a new study by Families and Work Institute and The Colorado Trust. Rather than blaming parents or schools as many youth violence experts have done, young people point to an overbearing culture that rejects diversity. The report is the first study to ask a nationally representative sample of kids: "If you could make one change that would help stop the violence that young people experience today, what would that one change be?" While blame and remedies for youth violence have focused on parents and/or the schools (and these relationships are indeed important), many young people have a larger focus: a seemingly inescapable culture that celebrates sameness, the one right way to be "in." They feel they need to join in, in order to protect themselves. Young people are advocating for accepting the basic humanity of all people while accepting differences -- not just in race, but in where people live, what they look like, and how much money they have. Relationships are important. Young people with better relationships with mothers, fathers, teachers, and friends are much less likely to experience violence, either as victims or as aggressors. http://www.familiesandwork.org/askthechildren.html |---------------GRANT AND FUNDING INFORMATION--------------| "Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy" The Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy's National Grant Program is designed to develop and expand family literacy efforts nationwide and support the development of literacy programs that build families of readers. Approximately 10 grants of up to $50,000 will be awarded. Eligible applicants must include all of the following components in their proposals: reading instruction for parents or primary caregivers, literacy or pre-literacy instruction for children, and intergenerational activities where the parents and children learn and read together. Application deadline: September 6, 2002. http://www.barbarabushfoundation.com/nga.html "The American Music Education Initiative" The National Music Foundation's American Music Education Initiative identifies, recognizes, and supports the creative educational accomplishments of teachers who use American music in their classrooms. Teachers of any subject area who use American music as part of their curriculum are invited to submit lesson plans. Finalists and Semi-finalists will receive grants of $500. Application deadline: September 16, 2002. http://www.nmc.org/amei.html "Braitmayer Foundation" The Braitmayer Foundation supports organizations and programs from across the U.S. that enhance the education of K-12 children. The Foundation is particularly interested in curricular and school reform initiatives, professional development opportunities for teachers, and local community efforts that increase educational opportunities for students. Grant requests of up to $10,000 should be submitted by November 15, 2002. http://www.braitmayerfoundation.org/guid.htm "2003 Fulbright Memorial Fund Teacher Program" The Fulbright Memorial Fund Teacher Program (FMF) is a unique opportunity for United States primary and secondary school teachers and administrators to participate in a fully funded three-week study visit to Japan. The FMF program, a program sponsored by the Government of Japan since 1997, has, to date, enabled 3,100 educators to travel to Japan and study the Japanese culture and educational system. This year, 600 more American educators will be selected to participate in the FMF program. In addition to overall professional qualifications, a primary factor in selecting award recipients is the teacher's ability to share his or her experiences with students and colleagues upon returning to the U.S. Application deadline: December 10, 2002. http://www.iie.org/Template.cfm?&Template=/programs/fmf/default.htm "FastWEB" FastWEB is the largest online scholarship search available, with 600,000 scholarships representing over one billion in scholarship dollars. It provides students with accurate, regularly updated information on scholarships, grants, and fellowships suited to their goals and qualifications, all at no cost to the student. Students should be advised that FastWEB collects and sells student information (such as name, address, e-mail address, date of birth, gender, and country of citizenship) collected through their site. http://www.fastweb.com/ "Federal Resources for Educational Excellence (FREE)" More than 30 Federal agencies formed a working group in 1997 to make hundreds of federally supported teaching and learning resources easier to find. The result of that work is the FREE website. http://www.ed.gov/free/ "Fundsnet Online Services" A comprehensive website dedicated to providing nonprofit organizations, colleges, and Universities with information on financial resources available on the Internet. http://www.fundsnetservices.com/ "Department of Education Forecast of Funding" This document lists virtually all programs and competitions under which the Department of Education has invited or expects to invite applications for new awards for FY 2002 and provides actual or estimated deadline dates for the transmittal of applications under these programs. The lists are in the form of charts -- organized according to the Department's principal program offices -- and include programs and competitions the Department has previously announced, as well as those it plans to announce at a later date. Note: This document is advisory only and is not an official application notice of the Department of Education. http://www.ed.gov/offices/OCFO/grants/forecast.html "eSchool News School Funding Center" Information on up-to-the-minute grant programs, funding sources, and technology funding. http://www.eschoolnews.com/resources/funding/ "Philanthropy News Digest-K-12 Funding Opportunities" K-12 Funding opportunities with links to grantseeking for teachers, learning technology, and more. http://fdncenter.org/funders/ QUOTE OF THE WEEK "If you think you're too small to be effective you have never been in bed with a mosquito." -Bette Reese (poet/author) ===========PEN NewsBlast========== The PEN Weekly NewsBlast is a free e-mail newsletter featuring school reform and school fundraising resources. The PEN NewsBlast is the property of the Public Education Network, a national association of 71 local education funds working to improve public school quality in low-income communities nationwide. 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