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Letter from child to Mom & Dad about the kind of educational environment they want.

Despite the rumors, school improvement is hard. It's not about a single passionate leader. It's not about "fixing" teachers and teaching or parents and parenting. It's not about poverty. It's not about money. And it's not about standards. It's about all of them. And more.

Scores for the 2010-11 NYSTP 3-8 ELA and mathematics assessments will be available to schools and districts in the Verification Reports in the Level 2 Reporting (L2RPT) environment (see http://www.p12.nysed.gov/irs/level2reports/home.html) and on nySTART (www.nySTART.gov) on August 4, 2011. Data on these assessments will be released publicly by the Commissioner on August 8, 2011. School and district aggregated results are embargoed until the Commissioner's public release. Data under embargo cannot be discussed at public meetings or released to the public or the media.

In this changing environment, CEP researchers will do our best to keep you updated on each state's status. The map contains links to the online sources from which we drew our information about the most recent development in that state.

The DCPS school year is under way and many students are adjusting to an unfamiliar environment. They're not alone. A surprising number of both teachers and principals are also completing their first month at their new digs. What impact DCPS's high teacher and principal turnover has on students is less than clear, like most things with the school system. Mary Levy is a DCPS budget expert. Her work sheds light on some very dark places. In an extended interview, directly following her Sept. 7 testimony at a D.C. Council hearing on middle schools, Levy discussed DCPS's increasing de facto segregation, Teach for America, charter schools and more. She began by talking about the lack of transparency in the budget, which she says has gotten worse over the years, despite the internet.

Before relocating to Austin, I had spent eight years teaching math and/or science in Egypt, Mexico and Honduras at elite private schools that used American textbooks, American curriculum and were accredited by American institutions.  The majority of my students were not Americans, but graduated with a combination of diplomas: local, American and/or IB (International Baccalaureate). After graduation, nearly all attended college, mostly in the US, Canada and England, and a few remained in their own country for higher education. I proudly returned to the US, toting my international bag of creative, engaging teaching tricks, especially curriculum-based projects that I had created, ready to dazzle my American students. So, imagine my utter shock when resettling into American life, teaching at an Austin public high school, and discovering that the standards were actually lower. Moreover, my teaching creativity was all but stifled for the sake of "standardization" in the most controlling environment I had ever taught.

http://www.jstor.org/pss/10.1086/660009 This study examines how the neighborhood environments experienced over multiple generations of a family influence children's cognitive ability. 

"Private voucher schools are failing Milwaukee children with disabilities. When these voucher schools ignore their obligations to educate and accommodate children with disabilities, they force Milwaukee Public Schools to pick up the slack - while giving MPS fewer resources to do so. Voucher schools' large-scale exclusion of children with disabilities has led to a segregated environment with a disproportionate share of children with disabilities attending MPS."

U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) introduced the Facilitating Outstanding Classrooms Using Size Reduction (FOCUS) Act of 2011 [bill summary, PDF], which the Senator says would provide states with the resources they need to reduce class sizes across the early grade levels in order to provide students and teachers with an educational environment that encourages maximum student academic growth. Murray's bill will also put in place evaluation tools to assess the program's effectiveness.

When the La Cima Elementary Charter School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, gave out its family survey in February, administrators were thrilled that about 95 percent of families who responded were satisfied or highly satisfied with the three-year-old school. But that survey was not counted by the Department of Education in its annual progress report. The city uses a standardized environment survey that it distributes to parents and teachers every March, and La Cima refused to use it.

New York City's Department of Education recently released their 'progress reports' for all the middle and elementary schools for the 2010-2011 school year. For each school they have a complicated formula that assigns up to 60 points for 'progress', up to 25 points for 'achievement', and up to 15 points for 'school environment'. The scores are tallied and out of the 1100 schools, the bottom 3%, which is around 33 are labeled as an 'F.' When a school gets an F, they are on probation and could get shut down and turned into a charter school or other sanctions. Even if it doesn't get shut down, it is pretty embarrassing when schools get this grade, particularly when they know that they don't deserve this label.

The organization that claims to represent the voice and interests of K-12 students and their parents is the Parent Teacher Association, widely known as the PTA. The organization aims to provide "parents and families with a powerful voice to speak on behalf of every child while providing the best tools for parents to help their children be successful students." Founded in 1897 as the National Congress of Mothers, the PTA declared that it was "up to the mothers of the country to eliminate threats that endangered children." Today, its goal is a "quality education and nurturing environment for every child."