Education News in Alabama

March 1 , 2007 (archive)

By Sallie Owen

SESSIONS WANTS EXTRA READING HELP FOR OLDER STUDENTS

Schools have achieved “exceptional results” with the Alabama Reading Initiative for beginning readers, said Sen. Jeff Sessions, who wants the same benefits for older students. And Sessions wants to help students throughout the country.

Sessions, R-Mobile, wants the federal government to create a targeted grant program called Striving Readers for adolescent literacy. “I believe it can be a catalyst for the programs that were developed here,” he said during a Montgomery news conference. Here’s one article from the event.

The senator said helping these older students would keep them in school, so they can be graduates instead of dropouts. His proposal is similar to Reading First, which has helped raise Alabama reading scores in the early grades.

Sessions is a supporter of the Alabama Reading Initiative (ARI), which the state funds for every K-3 student. This is the first school year that ARI has been funded statewide for those four grades.

Montevallo High School in Shelby County has experienced success using the ARI approach with older students. The school was profiled in a recent issue of Working Toward Excellence from the Alabama Best Practices Center, available in PDF.

BUILDING SCHOOLS OF THE FUTURE

Schools being constructed today will educate children who have not yet been born, for jobs that don’t yet exist.  That was the eye-opening message that Allyson Knox, representing Microsoft Corp.’s Partners in Learning program, delivered to Alabama superintendents last week. The Alabama Best Practices Center has a grant from Partners in Learning for its 21st Century Learning Project.

Knox’s presentation was so compelling that the Linden City School Board watched it at their meeting Monday. Here’s the six-minute video clip that superintendents saw first, and these PowerPoint files feature some of the same material plus a high-tech high school in Philadelphia.

At the same meeting, State Superintendent of Education Joe Morton presented calculations showing that K-12 schools deserve 75-80 percent of a proposed state bond issue for school construction. Higher education leaders have said K-12 schools need only 60 percent.

There are proposals for the state to borrow as much as $850 million, though legislative leaders told superintendents that the bottom line is likely to grow. K-12 schools have $4.3 billion in facilities needs.

AMSTI GROWS, GAINS NOTICE

Leaders of the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) recently announced that 154 schools were selected through a competitive process to join the program. That means that 2,741 educators from those schools will spend two weeks this summer learning how to teach math and science more effectively. Teachers will get ongoing support during the school year as well as access to kits for teaching various concepts. Kits can include lab materials, graphing calculators, chemicals, global positioning devices, and weather monitoring instruments.

To get a better feel for AMSTI-style teaching, check out this story about Calera Elementary. "The coolest thing is when we convert Celsius to Fahrenheit," said one third-grader.

This link lists schools selected to join AMSTI, which is expanding as fast as funding will permit. Please visit AMSTI's site for more information.

The December/January issue of Educational Leadership cites AMSTI for following best practices and for using a rigorous evaluation to gauge the program’s effectiveness. Thus far, test scores show that students in AMSTI schools learn more than their peers in non-participating schools.

Educational Leadership is the flagship publication of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

WORTH REPEATING

“What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child,
that must the community want for all of its children.
Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely;
acted upon, it destroys our democracy.”

—John Dewey, educational philosopher, “The School and Society,” 1907. Quoted in “Why We Still Need Public Schools: Public Education for the Common Good” from the Center on Education Policy.

RESEARCH FINDING:
STUDENTS LEARN MORE WITH TAP REFORMS

An evaluation of the Teacher Advancement Program, or TAP, finds that “TAP teachers produce higher student achievement growth than similar teachers not in TAP schools.” TAP schools also outperformed a control group 57 percent of the time in math and 67 percent of the time in reading.

TAP, based at the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching operates in more than 130 schools in 14 states (including Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Texas) plus the District of Columbia. It was established to “attract, retain, develop and motivate talented people to the teaching profession.”

The program combines four key reforms to strengthen the teaching profession: additional career paths for classroom teachers (i.e., mentor teacher, master teacher), professional development within the school day, instruction-focused accountability and performance-based compensation.

The report, available as a PDF, also undercuts a frequent criticism of performance-based pay for teachers. The compensation system did not hinder teacher collaboration, according to a majority of respondents.

Elements of TAP are reflected in recommendations from the Governor’s Commission on Quality Teaching. The commission wants the state to pilot financial rewards for teachers who take hard-to-fill jobs and teachers whose students learn the most. The pilot, if funded by the Legislature, would involve three to six school systems in Alabama.

Information about the Governor's Commission on Quality Teaching is available from A+.

STATE UNVEILS NEW TOOL FOR TEACHERS

The Alabama State Department of Education recently debuted a redesigned Web portal for educators, students and parents. Alabama Learning Exchange, or ALEX, provides free teacher Web pages, more than 10,000 online resources, and lesson plans aligned to specific learning objectives in the Alabama Course of Study. Teachers can share additional lesson plans, and there are ways for teachers to collaborate with their colleagues around the state.

TWO CHANCES TO LEARN ABOUT PRE-K

Prekindergarten can greatly increase a child’s chance for success in life, and Alabama needs more high-quality programs, according to the Alabama School Readiness Alliance. A+ is a founding partner of the alliance.

Anyone who wants to know more can sign up for the Alabama Pre-K Conference, March 15-16 in Montgomery, or one of the six regional conferences organized by the state Children’s Policy Council. Information about both opportunities is available here.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT ON ARTS EDUCATION

A few spots remain available for “Do You Hear What I See? An Interdisciplinary Study of Sound through the Lenses of the Arts,” a SuperSaturday workshop from the Alabama Institute for Education in the Arts. The workshop is March 10 in Montgomery, and Thursday, March 1, is the last day to register. Call 334-396-2432 for more information.

AIEA is also accepting applications for its 2007 Summer Professional Development Institute, scheduled for Montgomery during the last week of June. Teachers will choose to study visual art, theatre, music or dance. A leadership track is available for administrators. E-mail mlockett@artseducation.org to receive an application, or call 334-396-2432.

Research indicates that arts education is linked to stronger academic achievement and improved social development for students.

SCHOOL-REFORM EXPERT VISITS BIRMINGHAM

The Greater Birmingham Mathematics Partnership is inviting the public to hear Richard Elmore’s talk “Improvement of Instructional Practice: From Individual to Collective Models of Teaching” at 3:30 p.m. March 7 in Samford University’s Benjamin F. Harrison Theatre. For more event info, please visit this site or e-mail stoves@math.uab.edu.

Elmore, a sought-after national speaker, is the Gregory R. Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education and director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education.

He has written extensively about school improvement, and often asserts that changing a school’s structure alone is not enough. Educators must also change their practices for learning to improve.

STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION UPDATE

The Alabama State Board of Education met Feb. 22 in Montgomery for a work session. Such meetings are designed to prepare for upcoming meetings, and no votes are taken. Board members David Byers and Gov. Bob Riley were absent.

Staff members from the Alabama State Department of Education briefed board members on facilities needs, which total $4.3 billion statewide. Funding has been identified for about $2.3 billion of that, leaving about $2 billion worth remaining. The governor and legislators are discussing a bond issue that could fund part of that.

The database of facilities needs (for projects costing $50,000 or more) is available online, broken down by school system.

Individuals from the Healthy Students, Healthy Schools Network Team outlined efforts so far to examine how to curb risk behaviors by young people in Alabama to reduce the spread of HIV.

Board members also heard about an upcoming review of reading textbooks to see which ones offer the best resources to teachers and reflect what research shows are the most effective ways to teach reading. This review is designed to help the state textbook committee and serve as a “consumers guide” for local systems.

As part of a larger effort to ramp up teacher recruitment, the state has launched TeachinAlabama. The site features an online job application so teachers can apply simultaneously with all school districts or selected school districts.

EXAMPLES OF EXCELLENCE

• The Character Education Partnership named Shades Cahaba Elementary, a Homewood City school, one of 10 National Schools of Character. The school “refers to its six rules for living and learning as the Shades Cahaba Way, has discovered that the six tenets are so ingrained in community culture that merchants can easily recite them,” the partnership says. Many kindergarteners arrive at school already knowing the six rules, which were cited for excellence in promoting core ethical values. The program was also cited for its measurable results. More information – including lesson plans and how to apply for the 2007 awards – is available here.
• The Character Education Partnership also honored Chestnut Grove Elementary in the Promising Practice category. The school, part of the Decatur City system, created the Chestnut Grove Essentials, which the partnership said are a good way of teaching core values. The Essentials are behaviors (such as saying “ma’am,” “sir,” “please” and “thank you” or good decision-making) that are taught and reinforced constantly in multiple ways. CEP highlighted 126 schools in this category.
• Chestnut Grove is a member of the Alabama Best Practices Center’s Powerful Conversations Network.
• Valerie Gribben, a 2004 graduate of Loveless Academic Magnet Program High School, was named to the USA Today All-USA College Academic Team  based on her achievements in the classroom and beyond. That means Gribben is among the top 20 undergraduate students in the country. She is a novelist and a pre-med student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She also founded Healing Words, an organization that coordinates volunteers who read aloud to hospital patients. LAMP is a Montgomery County school, and here’s the story from her hometown newspaper.
• USA Today also honored graduates of other public high schools in Alabama. On the second team were Michelle McGaha, who graduated from Albertville High (Albertville City schools), and Jennifer Phillips, a graduate of Vestavia Hills High (Vestavia City schools). McGaha and Phillips are both students at the University of Alabama.
  
  On the third team were Inn-Inn Chen, who graduated from Hoover High (Hoover City schools) and studies at Georgia Tech, and Jacquelyn Zimmerman, who graduated from Grissom High (Huntsville City schools) and now studies at Louisiana State.
  
  Honorable mentions went to Auburn University student Alex Tucker, who graduated from Houston County High (Houston County schools), and UA students Katie Boyd, Hoover High, and Kristi Wilcox, Hillcrest High (Tuscaloosa County schools).

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The A+ Education Partnership, based in Montgomery, publishes Education News in Alabama twice a month. A+ is a nonprofit organization that advances policies, programs and initiatives in Alabama's K-12 education system that result in high achievement by every child.

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