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April 2005 Edition Spring is finally here! We have exactly two months to visit schools before they close. Take advantage of the lovely weather! Find out if the schools in your area are hosting career fairs and get yourselves invited!!! We have the curriculum and materials to share that will make your visit both informative and fun. To submit information on your organization, or career development curriculum, please email Linn Nguyen at lnguyen@teamster.org or Sharlene Mentor at smentor@teamster.org If you missed previous issues, please visit: http://www.ibtstw.org/listsubscribe.asp Thank you! Education
Department Staff
What's in This Edition THIS MONTH: Conferences & Meetings Nationwide
Conferences and Meetings Nationwide ~~~~> International Conference on Educational Measurement and Assessment April 12-14 Audience:
K-12 educators and educational assessment professionals City:
Montreal Contact: Leading
the Way to Better High Schools Location: Venue:
Denver School of Science and Tech Conference
will focus on leadership in school reform. There will be over 20
sessions focused on a variety of practical leadership and
instructional improvement strategies from experts. aera.net Resources to Build Your Curriculum ~~~~> Department Of Transportation (DOT) Student Summer Employment Program – APPLY NOW If you know local high school or college students who are looking for summer jobs, they might want to apply for one or more of DOT’s summer positions. DOT has summer jobs related to clerical work, office automation, engineering, general program analysis, writing, etc. These are student-level positions (grades 1 through 7 mostly) but the base wage is great compared to fast food or retail. Remember office experience looks great on a resume. ANNOUNCEMENT: DOT is accepting on-line applications for the 2005 DOT Student Summer Employment Program. Please direct interested students or their parents to the DOT Careers In Motion Website (http://careers.dot.gov/stuopp.html.). Students can access all the vacancy announcements and apply on-line. If there are additional questions about the announcements, please contact Cindy Westray (202/366-1099) or Lysette Gray (202/366-2022).
Graduate School Assistantship Open to Labor Studies Students Email: pfc@psu.edu.
Yale College will eliminate the financial contribution that low–income parents have to make toward their children’s education, President Richard C. Levin announced today. Families with incomes below $45,000 will no longer be required to pay any portion of the cost of their children’s education, Levin said, and families with incomes between $45,000 and $60,000 will see their required contribution reduced significantly. “We want to attract the most promising students from all economic backgrounds to Yale,” Levin said. “These financial aid enhancements will make Yale even more affordable to students in need of aid and underscore Yale’s strong commitment to the broadest access.” Yale College admits all students without regard to their financial circumstances, a policy called “need–blind” admissions, and meets the full demonstrated financial need of all admitted students. Yale adopted its need–blind principles more than 30 years ago. More than 40% of Yale undergraduates qualify for need–based scholarship grants from Yale. The average grant for 2004–05 from Yale funds is over $22,000 and the top grant is more than $39,000. The new financial aid enhancements announced today will be effective for the 2005–06 academic year and will apply to all returning Yale College students, as well as to the entering class of freshmen. For those families in the $45,000–$60,000 income range, the largest reductions in the parents’ contribution will go to the families with the lowest incomes, reflecting their greater need for financial aid. Families with higher incomes will receive proportionately smaller reductions in the contribution required of parents. Families in the middle of the income range will see their required contribution reduced by about 50%. In addition to eliminating or reducing the parents’ contribution for low–income families, Yale College will provide international students on financial aid with funds to pay for one trip home each year. Yale currently meets the cost of one trip home for those students during their four–year undergraduate careers. Several years ago, Yale extended full need–based financial aid benefits to all international students, and the additional funding for visits home will make Yale even more welcoming to international students. Levin said the changes in financial aid would be coupled with enhanced outreach efforts by Yale to make prospective students and their families aware of Yale’s aid policies. “We will be expanding significantly our efforts to reach out to students who may believe their family’s financial circumstances rule out the possibility of a Yale education,” Levin said. “We want these students and their guidance counselors at schools around the country to learn what Yale has to offer. This commitment to expand our outreach and recruitment is based on the success of our current efforts, which includes the involvement of current Yale students.” Today’s announcement follows another announcement earlier this year that Yale will provide undergraduates on financial aid with grant support for Yale–sponsored summer study and internships abroad. The provision of financial aid for summer programs abroad supports Yale’s goal of having all undergraduates have at least one international experience abroad involving study, research or volunteer service. The annual Yale College financial aid budget is expected to grow to more than $52 million for 2005–06. In addition to the parents’ contribution, if any, Yale expects all students to contribute to the cost of their education. Yale has in recent years reduced the amount of the students’ expected contribution by more than one–third. For more information, please visit http://www.yale.edu/opa/campus/news/2005/20050303_aid.html
~~~~> Cusp A film by
Ruth Sergel There is an electric moment for girls on the cusp of adolescence, as they leave behind the bold egoism of girlhood for the shaky self-consciousness of their teens. Cusp is a portrait of Alice, a spirited 12-year-old, hitting the wall of early adolescence. Her fierce struggle to retain her sense of self, despite the onslaught of other voices, denotes the unique experience of a girl coming of age. As Alice teeters on the edge of adolescence, her connection to her mother begins to seesaw and the tensions of sixth grade social order begin to dramatically play themselves out. Alice is left as an anthropologist of her own culture, bravely attempting to understand her initiation into the world as a young woman. A provocative depiction of a girl’s struggle to form her own identity, Cusp sensitively captures the difficult journey out of girlhood and the even more painful entry into the teen years. For more
information, please visit Women Make Movies:
http://www.wmm.com/catalog/pages/c551.htm ~~~~> Study Blasts Leadership Preparation Teachers College Head Calls for New Degrees A far-reaching study set for release offers a damning assessment of the programs that prepare most of the nation’s principals and superintendents. Led by Arthur E. Levine, the president of Teachers College, Columbia University, the report says most university-based preparation programs for administrators range in quality from “inadequate to appalling.” “Our country needs skilled education leaders more than it has ever before, and our schools of education aren’t preparing those people,” Mr. Levine said last week. “And there are ways that they could change that would prepare those people.” The critique is part of a larger study of education schools spearheaded by Mr. Levine, a nationally known expert on improving higher education who became the college’s president in 1994. The Education Schools Project claims to be the most extensive study ever of such institutions. Based on four years of research, the report on administrators’ preparation involved teams of investigators who visited 28 schools of education to evaluate their program content, policies, students, and funding, among other characteristics. Twenty-five of the institutions offered degrees in educational administration. Researchers also carried out national polls of education school faculty members, deans, students, and alumni. The study charges that administrator programs have been dumbed down by low admissions criteria, irrelevant coursework, unskilled faculty members, and incoherent curricula. In particular, the report derides the rigor of the growing number of off-campus programs created by education schools. So low, in fact, is the report’s appraisal of administrator preparation that the lone exemplar it holds up is in Britain. Among Mr. Levine’s recommendations are the creation of a professional-track graduate program, akin to the Master of Business Administration; the elimination of the Doctor of Education, or Ed.D., degree now held by many superintendents and other administrators; and an end to the financial incentives built into salary schedules that encourage teachers to earn master’s degrees in educational administration simply to earn more money. Insider’s View Despite such moves, Mr. Levine’s study found that more than 80 percent of education school deans believed that their administrator-preparation programs were good or excellent. Given that the forthcoming report was written by the head of one of the nation’s best-regarded colleges of education, some observers said such complacency could be short-lived. “When the president of Teachers College makes these criticisms, it can’t be dismissed as the mischief of outsiders,” said Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington. “It will inevitably force people to engage these criticisms differently than they’ve engaged them in the last 10 or 15 years.” Other reports expected from the Education Schools Project will examine the quality of teacher preparation and the work of education scholars in academia. The project is supported by about $2 million from the Annenberg, Ford, Ewing Marion Kaufmann, and Wallace foundations. (The Wallace Foundation also underwrites coverage of leadership issues in Education Week.) While education schools in general get low marks in the report, their courses of study for aspiring administrators were found especially lacking. Poor to Fair Reports President Arthur E. Levine of Teachers College led a
four-year study that found serious flaws in the way school
administrators are prepared. It is part of a bigger study of
education schools. A key problem is lack of focus, the report argues. Instead of a coherent curriculum designed to teach people to lead efforts to improve instruction, it describes most programs as “little more than a grab-bag of survey courses” with little connection to the realities of running a school or district. Many students enrolled in such programs don’t complain, Mr. Levine said, because they’re earning a master’s only for the bump in salary. Even the parts of the training programs meant to offer practical skills were found woefully inadequate. All but one of the 25 institutions in the study that offered degrees in educational administration included a clinical experience, such as an internship. But only two required that such experiences take place outside the school or district where the student worked. “Almost all allowed them to occur in their current job,” Mr. Levine said in the interview, “regardless of the quality of the school they were in or of the person they were allegedly mentoring under.” Critics have long accused universities of using education schools as cash cows, generating more in tuition from a steady stream of students than the institutions actually spend to educate them. With the expansion of off-campus programs in educational administration taught mostly by part-time professors, the report warns, the problem is getting worse. Fifteen of the 25 schools visited for the study had started satellite programs. One unnamed university had just five full-time faculty members serving 500 students in educational administration around its region. The bulk of the instruction was provided by 22 part-time, adjunct professors, many current school administrators. Some experts in educational administration agreed last week with the report’s assertion that the proliferation of off-campus programs is troubling. Too often, programs focus more on convenience than quality, said Kent D. Peterson, a professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who mentioned one program that touts “convenient parking” in its advertisements. “There’s nothing wrong with having satellite campuses or adjunct professors,” he said, “so long as those satellites are taught by adjuncts who are integrated into the program and have the opportunity to improve their instruction.” But aside from agreeing with the worry about off-campus programs, others noted last week that most of the report’s criticisms aren’t new, and in fact echo a national panel’s report in the late 1980s calling on states to shutter poorly performing educational administration programs. “It’s become rather a tiresome story to say that leadership-preparation programs are in dire straits, and that there’s been little movement,” said Michelle D. Young, the executive director of the University Council for Educational Administration, a group that includes 75 institutions and is based at the University of Missouri-Columbia. “That’s not the case for the programs I’m working with.” Education schools, she said, have devoted increasing energy to evaluating their programs and using that information to improve. They also have built stronger connections with school districts to ensure that they’re giving candidates the skills they will need on the job. A handful of states have raised the bar for the training of administrators. In Louisiana, all of the education schools have been given until this summer to update their administrator-preparation programs or face having them “decommissioned,” so their degrees would no longer qualify candidates for a state license. And in many states, education schools seeking state approval are judged against the standards of the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium, drafted in 1996 under the auspices of the Council of Chief State School Officers. But Mr. Levine said his research left him largely unimpressed by such efforts. “I spoke with a lot of people who told me they had redesigned their curriculum and aligned their programs to ISLLC standards,” he said. “And I saw no difference.” Examples do exist of strong programs, he said, citing those at the University of Wisconsin and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. But his report reserves its highest praise for the National College for School Leadership, launched in 2000 in Nottingham, England, by the Labor government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The national college was conceived as a state-of-the-art training center for school leaders throughout England. Aimed at serving administrators throughout their careers, it offers professional development based on research into the link between leadership and student learning. The college does not, however, grant degrees. Alternatives Loom Instead, he said, prospective administrators should be able to earn a Master of Educational Administration, which would be the field’s equivalent of an M.B.A.—a professional degree based on a widely agreed-upon course of study in management and education. Mr. Levine said he holds out hope that education schools can make the needed improvements, although alternatives are gaining in popularity. Last month, for instance, Maryland agreed to give administrator licenses to graduates of a program in Baltimore to be run by New Leaders for New Schools, a New York City-based nonprofit organization that trains aspiring principals through yearlong residencies. ("New Leaders Group to Train Principals in Baltimore," March 2, 2005.) Similar programs have cropped up in Boston, Memphis, New York City, and Philadelphia. Some are run by New Leaders, and others are being organized by the school districts themselves. “No longer are states willing to accept weak programs in the same fashion,” said the Teachers College president. “To ignore this warning is to allow leadership education programs in America to fade away. They will be replaced.” ~~~~> Board Studies Release of Individual NAEP Results By Sean Cavanagh Faced with persistent apathy among high school seniors toward the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the board that oversees the federal test is considering potentially significant changes aimed at making NAEP more understandable and relevant to the public. Those steps would involve revamping the test’s structure and the way it is promoted to students. Also under consideration is releasing certain test results for individual schools and students—feedback that NAEP, which is focused primarily on national, state, and demographic trends, does not now offer. Worries about lackluster student participation on the assessment known as “the nation’s report card” go back for years. But such concerns have gained new urgency as the rate of schools and students at the 12th grade level agreeing to take the test has dwindled to its lowest point ever. That indifference lingers at a time when President Bush is calling for an expansion of NAEP by proposing that states be required to administer its tests in reading and mathematics to a sample of their 12th graders. Currently, states are only required to participate in NAEP at the 4th and 8th grade levels, while the 12th grade test is voluntary. Mr. Bush has proposed boosting NAEP’s $95 million annual budget by $22.5 million in fiscal 2006 to pay for the expanded 12th grade testing. That step would provide state-by-state data on student performance for high school seniors. Only a national sample exists for that grade now. With those objectives in mind, members of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for NAEP, on March 4 heard recommendations from an advisory committee that has studied ways to increase 12th grade participation on the test. The recommendations were presented at the governing board’s quarterly meeting, held here in the Texas capital. “Principals, teachers, and students know little to nothing about NAEP, its mission and purpose,” said board member David W. Gordon, the superintendent of California’s Sacramento County Office of Education, who served on the advisory committee. “A lot of what we put out to people by way of encouragement [to take the test] is really apologetic. … That has to change.” The recommendations will be studied by separate governing board committees over the coming months, and then could be considered by the entire 26-member board. One potentially sharp departure from current NAEP policy is a recommendation to give individual students and schools some form of feedback on their performance on the exam. NAEP now produces test results only at the state and national levels, and on a few occasions for some school districts, but not for individual students and schools. Out of Obscurity Not allowing students and schools to see their NAEP scores creates a disincentive to take the assessment, or to take it seriously, the committee suggested. That was also a finding of StandardsWork Inc., a Washington consulting firm hired to study ways to improve seniors’ participation. One option offered by the committee would be to give students passwords to a secure Internet site, from which they could learn their test scores. Mark D. Musick, the president of the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Education Board, praised the governing board for considering changes to NAEP, though he added that implementing many of them would be tricky. “This is worth trying,” Mr. Musick, a former governing board chairman, said in an interview. “I hope technology makes it possible to do it.” There could be consequences for doing nothing, he said. The participation rate for high school seniors and their schools on the 2002 NAEP dipped to 55 percent, its lowest point ever. From 1988 to 2000, that proportion hovered around 65 percent. Such poor participation puts “the credibility of NAEP at risk,” the committee warned. But other questions remain about the legality of releasing school and student information. The law that governs NAEP says the federal government may not use the assessment to “rank, compare, or otherwise evaluate individual students or teachers.” Another provision says that “all personally identifiable information” about students and schools must remain confidential. Peggy G. Carr, an associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the arm of the Department of Education that administers NAEP, said one legal option would be to have students and schools seeking access to test results complete public-records requests, which would obligate the NCES to release that information. Because NAEP gives different sets of questions to different students, the NCES would most likely have to provide those students with feedback on their success on individual questions, relative to that of other students quizzed on the same items, rather than an overall test score. As a carrot for high school seniors, the committee suggested giving them material rewards for taking part, such as food, educational materials, or a chance for a scholarship. But students’ tastes can be hard to predict. Committee members said they had heard stories of test-takers “littering the hallways” with the current certificates of appreciation awarded for NAEP participation. The StandardWorks study said NAEP would have more appeal to students and schools if it were promoted as a public service to the nation, or as a matter of school or student pride. “We need to make a much more compelling case to students,” said Mr. Musick, who described the message as “ ‘Do your best for your country’—and look, ‘Here’s how you did.’ ” Gauging Preparation The board is also considering a fundamental overhaul of the 12th grade exam by having it focus on evaluating the preparedness of high school seniors for college, the workforce, and the military. That new emphasis would mesh with the goals of an increasing number of policymakers and organizations across the country, most recently the National Governors Association, that are showing a keen interest in high school improvement. The advisory committee also suggested giving students the 12th grade NAEP in the fall, rather than in the spring, as is now the case, so that students would be more likely to participate and take it seriously before they’re overcome by “senioritis.” Moving the test to the fall of 12th grade, however, would raise questions about whether NAEP was truly testing students’ knowledge through graduation, as opposed to 11th grade, said Gerald E. Sroufe, a senior adviser for the American Educational Research Association in Washington. While he commended the governing board for exploring ways to make NAEP more relevant, Mr. Sroufe noted that part of the test’s appeal is its independence from assessments administered by states, which are the focus of hours of preparation by students and schools. “NAEP is not a high-stakes test. It is an indication of national progress in education,” Mr. Sroufe said. “That’s its value, and that’s what we should hold on to.”~~~~> U.S. Department of Education Offers Many Resources on WebsiteWant to access information on
programs and services offered by the U.S. Department of
Education? Go to http://www.ed.gov/index.jhtml.
This website can be very helpful to students, parents,
teachers, school administrators, and anyone interested
in education. ~~~~> Kids For Community: The Online Center For Youth Volunteer Opportunities in New York CityKids for Community is all about youth volunteerism.
Explore Kids for Community and see how you can make a difference! http://www.kidsforcommunity.org/
End of Issue To learn more about the Teamsters, a vital part of every community in the U.S. and Canada and our School-to-Career network, please log onto http://edu.teamster.org/edu.asp or http://www.ibtstw.org You are receiving this email because you subscribed to the Teamsters Skills For Tomorrow listserv network. If you wish to unsubscribe, please click on the following link. http://www.ibtstw.org/listunsubscribe.asp
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