Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Saturday, September 26, 2009
A Race WORTH Running (AND ONE WE MUST NOT LOSE!)
1:00 pm
September 24, 2008Contact:
Gary G. Naeyaert
517-281-2690
2,500 ADVOCATES HOLD EDUCATION REFORM RALLY AT STATE CAPITOL
Change agents urge legislature to pass bills to close the achievement gap and secure “Race to the Top” funds
Lansing, MI – More than 2,500 students, parents, teachers and education activists held a rally on the lawn of State Capitol Building this morning.
Education reform priorities pushed during the rally included the need to fix failing schools, provide alternative routes to teacher certification, and expand quality public school options, especially in underperforming areas.
“It is a moral imperative that we close the academic achievement gap in Michigan,” said Michael Tenbusch, Vice President for Education Preparedness at the United Way of Southeastern Michigan.
“These reforms are not only the right approach for our students – they could bring millions in federal education funds to the state,” he continued.
Most observers believe passing these types of bills are necessary before Michigan will be competitive in $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” federal incentive program.
“Each and every American citizen is entitled to have equal access to a high quality education,” said Kevin Chavous, one of the nation’s leading education reform activists, during his stirring keynote address at the rally.
Students released over 1,000 “Kids Need Great Schools” balloons after Chavous’ remarks, and each balloon represented hundreds of minority and at-risk students behind grade level and stuck in failing schools.
“Every child can learn, and all kids deserve great schools. The status quo isn’t getting it done, so we need to work together and find new ways to help kids achieve,” said Rachele Downs, Vice President, CB Richard Ellis Detroit and member of the Leadership Detroit Education Support Committee.
“We agree with President Obama that students must take responsibility for their own education, and empowering parents as true partners in public education should be a much higher priority,” said Sharlonda Buckman, Executive Director of the Detroit Parent Network.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
EARLY Childhood Learning (Dollars-But WHAT does it Look Like?)
Initiative Focuses on Early Learning Programs
By SAM DILLON
Tucked away in an $87 billion higher education bill that passed the House last week was a broad new federal initiative aimed not at benefiting college students, but at raising quality in the early learning and care programs that serve children from birth through age 5.
The initiative, the Early Learning Challenge Fund, would channel $8 billion over eight years to states with plans to improve standards, training and oversight of programs serving infants, toddlers and preschoolers.
The Senate is expected to pass similar legislation this fall, giving President Obama, who proposed the Challenge Fund during the presidential campaign, a bill to sign in December.
Experts describe the current array of programs serving young children and their families nationwide as a hodgepodge of efforts with little coordination or coherence. Financing comes from a shifting mix of private, local, state and federal money. Programs are run out of storefronts and churches, homes and Head Start centers, public schools and other facilities. Quality is uneven, with some offering stimulating activities, play and instruction but others providing little more than a room and a television.
Oversight varies by state, but most lack any early childhood structure analogous to the state and local boards of education that govern public schools. A result is that poor children, even many who have access to government-financed early care or learning programs, tend to enter kindergarten less prepared for school than those with wealthier parents.
To qualify for grants, states would have to demonstrate that they have established or improved what the bill calls a “governance structure” for their networks of child care centers and prekindergarten programs.
The structure would include quality standards; a curriculum of sorts, appropriate for young children; a mechanism for reviewing programs and assigning quality ratings; minimum training requirements for providers; a plan for reaching out to parents; and a system for collecting data on children and families. The Departments of Education and Health and Human Services would jointly administer the Challenge Fund.
Sharon Lynn Kagan, a professor at Teachers College who has traced the history of American child care programs back to the early 19th century, wrote a paper last year advocating federal aid to states in building a more coherent and robust early-childhood infrastructure.
“No one bill can solve everything,” Professor Kagan said, “but this will move us more than any other piece of legislation toward higher quality in early education, not just more spaces for children.”
Since the campaign, Mr. Obama has raised expectations among early learning advocates with his endorsements of public investments in the careful nurturing of young children, especially the disadvantaged. In the economic stimulus bill, Congress last spring appropriated more than $4 billion in new financing for child care and education efforts, including Head Start, the federal program that serves about 900,000 preschoolers.
Still, not all early learning advocates are satisfied that the administration is doing all it could to integrate early learning efforts into the nation’s broader public education system.
The Department of Education is already administering a separate $4.3 billion competition among states to reward and encourage improvements to elementary and secondary schools. In August, scores of early learning groups and advocates wrote letters to the department criticizing proposed rules for that competition, known as Race to the Top, as largely ignoring early childhood education.
“We don’t see how our country can race to the top when all kids are not at the same starting line” when they reach kindergarten, said Marcy Young, project director for the Pre-K Now program at the Pew Center on the States, one group that criticized the rules.
One reason the administration focused on elementary and secondary schools in the Race to the Top competition and early childhood in the Challenge Fund is that the two are at contrasting levels of development, administration officials said, with the public schools needing initiatives to improve teacher effectiveness, for instance, and early childhood needing basic structures of governance.
Sara Mead, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, said, “I haven’t talked with anybody who isn’t excited about the prospects for this Early Learning Challenge Fund.”
“But there is disappointment in some parts of the early childhood community that it’s not more focused on adding slots,” Ms. Mead said.
One reason advocates are especially concerned about slots for children is that after a decade in which states had taken the lead in expanding access nationwide, several with deep budget troubles have recently eliminated or reduced services for tens of thousands of children.
Illinois, for instance, cut the budget for its Pre-K for All program to $305 million this fiscal year from $338 million last year, eliminating slots for about 9,500 children, according to statistics provided by Albert Wat, a project manager at Pre-K Now.
In Ohio, lawmakers did away with a program known as the Early Learning Initiative, the budget for which last year was $125 million, Mr. Wat said. The action eliminated access for 12,000 children, he said.
“In some states, we’re seeing a disaster,” said Steve Barnett, co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.
But despite the tightest budgets in decades, nearly 30 states have chosen to protect or increase financing for early learning programs.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Let the FORCE be With Them!
Meeting: YAPO CLC Future Entrepreneurs (@ YAPO CLC)
Saturday, August 22, 2009 9:00AM
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Sunday, August 09, 2009
Informs OUR Understanding
http://www.midropoutsummit.org/
Michigan Conference Proceedings
http://www.midropoutsummit.org/SummitProceedings.aspx
Michigan Conference (Videos)
http://mistreamnet.com/vidflv.php?who=mdedrop1n01
ONE-D Drop-Out Conference (Update Brochure)
http://www.uwsem.org/_collateral/pdf/oned/TurnaroundUpdate0508.pdf
Saturday, August 08, 2009
Monday, July 06, 2009
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
YAPO CLC Board of Directors Meeting AGENDA Wednesday, July 1, 2009 5:30PM
YAPO COMPUTER LEARNING CENTER
an authorized Neighborhood Network Center
Meeting Agenda
July 1, 2009
26 Leanne Lane
Pontiac, MI 48340
(248) 338-7346/(248) 338-4771 (fax)
- Call to Order
- Roll Call
- Adoption of Agenda
- Approval of Yapo CLC Board of Directors’ Minutes-6/3/09
- Executive Director’s Report
- President/Treasurer’s Report
- Old Business
a) D&O Insurance
b) Solicitation License
c) Employee Manual
- New Business
- MSUE-SET – Presentation by Jim Ross
- Announcements
- Adjourn
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Youth for Tomorrow Banquet Invitiation
Hello all,
Attached is your personal invitation to Youth of Tomorrow's 4th Annual Engineers of Tomorrow Banquet. The banquet is for our students to showcase the challenging projects that they have worked on during the Engineers of Tomorrow program. There is no charge to get in and you can bring as many people as you would like. We will have great food, great projects and a great speaker to create an environment of positive synergy. This is going to be our best banquet ever!!
Best Regards,
Marc D. Alexander
President & CEO
Youth of Tomorrow
P.O. Box 431065
Pontiac, MI 48343-1065
Phone: (888) 799-2819 ext. 709
Fax: (888) 799-2819www.yoft.org
From: The Great Lakes Information Technology Report (GLITR)
I met Scott Skelton, a Belleville senior in mechanical engineering, who has two Web businesses -- HighPerformanceOutlet.com for high-performance auto parts, and BookDealFinder.com, a search engine for college textbooks.
Also at the lunch: James Cooper, a Rochester Hills senior in electrical engineering, working on a vending machine concept for taverns; Caymon Love, a senior in industrial engineering who is client project manager at TechWorks, helping Sheridan sort through those 50 potential companies; Kristina Kamensky, a recent graduate in mechanical engineering, special projects manager at TechWorks; Matt Gaidica and Brad Birdsall, whose PrimeStudios offers Web and graphic design and Web application work (see www.primestudiosllc.com); Marc D. Alexander, president and CEO of Youth of Tomorrow, which offers youth career exploration experiences; and entrepreneurial adviser Homayun Navaz, a professor of mechanical engineering, founder of the new chemical engineering degree at Kettering and its new aeronautical engineering minor. Navaz is in the process of starting a business called Coolificient, which will offer manufacturers of commercial coolers software and equipment to make their coolers far more energy efficient.
All in all a great morning and early afternoon. And now it's on to the final stop of the spring tour, our state's capital, Lansing, and its burgeoning tech scene.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Thursday, April 23, 2009
The Crucial Role of Design
Commentary
Why We're Still 'At Risk'
The Legacy of Five Faulty Assumptions
Our new president has looked into the abyss of our current economic, energy, environmental, and health-care policies and promises to challenge the fundamental assumptions on which they are based. He admonishes us to join him in thinking and acting boldly.
We can only hope he feels the same way about education policy.
After nearly 25 years of intensive effort, we have failed to fix our ailing public schools and stem the “rising tide of mediocrity” chronicled in 1983 in A Nation at Risk. This is mainly because the report misdiagnosed the problem, and because the major assumptions on which current education policy—and most reform efforts—have been based are either wrong or unrealistic.
Most of the people running our public education systems and leading the reform movement are knowledgeable, dedicated, and experienced. But they are so committed to a strategy of standards-based accountability that different ideas are marginalized or stifled completely.
One could write a book about each of the five major assumptions on which education policy rests, but in this limited space, a few brief paragraphs will have to suffice.
Assumption One: The best way to improve student performance and close achievement gaps is to establish rigorous content standards and a core curriculum for all schools—preferably on a national basis.
Standards-based accountability has been the national school reform strategy for nearly two decades. It is essentially a “get tough” strategy made tougher by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. By all measures, it has not lived up to its promise, and the reason is that it is based on the premise that if we demand high performance and educational excellence, schools, teachers, and students will somehow “just do it.” It is a strategy that basically expects schools to be highly structured institutions with uniform practices and policies, where a common version of education is delivered to all students.
Standardization and uniformity may work with cars and computers, but it doesn’t work with humans. Today’s student body is the most diverse in history. An education system that treats all students alike denies that reality.
The issue is not whether standards are necessary. Schools without standards are unacceptable. Society should indeed hold high expectations for all students, but those expectations should reflect the values of the family and society—doing one’s best, obeying the rules, and mutual respect—and not simply the archaic academic demands of college-admissions offices. We should be preparing young people for life, not just for college.
Standards don’t prepare students for anything; they are a framework of expectations and educational objectives. Without the organization and processes to achieve them, they are worthless. States have devoted nearly 20 years to formulating standards to be accomplished by a conventional school model that is incapable of meeting them. We will make real progress only when we realize that our problem in education is not one of performance but one of design.
Assumption Two: Standardized-test scores are an accurate measure of student learning and should be used to determine promotion and graduation.
The standards-based-accountability strategy, not surprisingly, has led to the alarming overuse of standardized tests, even in the opinion of some test-makers and psychometricians.
Some measures of accountability are necessary in any endeavor that spends public money and is responsible for an important societal mission. But is testing all students virtually every year really necessary to determine whether the system is working effectively and the money spent well? If test scores are the accepted indicator, schools have not been meeting the needs of students for the past couple of decades. So why spend more money and time on constant testing to tell us what we already know—especially when standardized tests do a poor job of measuring real learning, don’t assess most of the characteristics valued by parents and the larger society, and contribute almost nothing to the process of teaching and learning.
If the purpose of standardized testing is to measure student achievement so teachers can help individual students learn better, it fails miserably. Standardized-test scores tend, instead, to say more about a student’s socioeconomic status than about his or her abilities. If testing is to have a positive effect on student achievement, it should be formative testing that is an integral part of classroom teaching and learning.
The most disturbing aspect of today’s standardized testing grows out of the "get tough" strategy’s emphasis on high-risk tests. Using standardized-test scores to determine promotion and graduation is unconscionable. A recent Texas study confirms the negative impact of high-risk testing on students. The report notes that 135,000 high school students drop out each year, and that “the state’s high-stakes accountability system has a direct impact on the severity of the dropout problem.” Teachers complain that they are compelled to devote valuable instructional time to preparing students for the test. They argue that the demand of ubiquitous accountability testing tends to narrow the curriculum. And they say that by teaching to the test, as they are expected to do, they are forced to turn education into a game of Trivial Pursuit.
Except in school, people are judged by their work and their behavior. Few of the business and political leaders who advocate widespread use of standardized testing have taken a standardized test since leaving college. It is probably a safe bet that the majority of them, even after 16 years of formal education, could not pass the tests they require students to pass.
"But I took those courses years ago," they say. "I can’t remember all that stuff." Exactly.
A common justification for standardized testing is that it’s the best proxy for student achievement we have until something better comes along. The performance-based assessment used in many charter schools (and now statewide in Rhode Island and New Hampshire) is better.
Assumption Three: We need to put highly qualified teachers in every classroom to assure educational excellence.
A great idea! If we could do that, we’d be a long way to solving our education problem.
But it won’t happen for decades, if ever.
As a host of studies over the past 25 years have revealed, the teacher pipeline is broken at several points. We don’t attract enough of the brightest young people into teaching; we don’t prepare them well for the job; many find their working conditions and compensation unacceptable; and teachers are not treated as professionals.
Highly effective teachers are more crucial to the success of standards-based accountability than anything else. Without enough of them, the strategy can’t work. As any reasonable person would have anticipated, we missed the NCLB goal of having a highly qualified teacher in every classroom by 2006. Improving teaching is as difficult as improving student achievement.
More accountability is again seen as a major part of the solution: more-rigorous certification, tougher teacher evaluation, and higher teacher pay. But certification guarantees a high-quality teacher about as much as a driver’s license guarantees a good driver. Tougher evaluation would help get rid of ineffective teachers, but it’s hard to see how it would produce more good teachers. Higher pay is fine, but it is no more likely to improve teaching any time soon than raising pilots’ pay would make flying safer.
If we want effective teaching, we should change the ways schools are organized and operated, and shift the teacher’s primary role from an academic instructor to an adviser, someone who helps students manage their own education.
A rational system would redesign itself and make organizational and procedural changes that optimize the positive influence of good teachers and minimize the negatives. Creating opportunities for teachers to work together, to teach in teams, to share in professional development, and to be more involved in educational decisionmaking are ways to bring out the best in teachers.
Again, there are examples on the ground that such an approach works.
Assumption Four: The United States should require all students to take algebra in the 8th grade and higher-order math in high school in order to increase the number of scientists and engineers in this country and thus make us more competitive in the global economy.
This assumption has become almost an obsession in policymaking arenas today. Requiring every student to study higher-order math is a waste of resources and cruel and unusual punishment for legions of students. It diverts attention away from the real problem: our failure to help kids become proficient readers and master basic arithmetic.
The United States must indeed produce more scientists and engineers to compete in a global economy. But it is fallacious to assume that we can accomplish that by requiring every student to take algebra in the 8th grade and higher-order math through high school. It is like believing that by requiring high school students to take a few courses in painting, we will make them all artists.
Most young people who go into science and engineering are well on their way by the time they start high school, because they become hooked on science or math in the early grades and do well in mathematics in elementary and middle school. Some will go on to become scientists and engineers; others will not. To expect otherwise is unreasonable.
If the nation wants more scientists and engineers, then educators need to find ways to awaken and nourish a passion for those subjects well before high school, and then offer students every opportunity to pursue their interest as far as they wish.
Assumption Five: The student-dropout rate can be reduced by ending social promotion, funding dropout-prevention programs, and raising the mandatory attendance age.
Arguably, the dropout rate is the most telling evidence of public school failure. Nearly a third of entering high school freshmen drop out. The percentage is higher for blacks, Hispanics, and English-language learners. And in many urban districts, the dropout rate borders on the horrendous.
Most students drop out of school for legitimate reasons, and trying to talk them out of it with “just stay in” programs, or forcing them to attend for an additional year or two, makes no sense. The “get tough” strategy of high standards, rigorous curricula, and more testing has not lowered the dropout rate and, as the Texas study cited shows, probably increases it.
Dropping out of school is not an impulsive decision. The process begins long before high school, often by the 4th or 5th grade, when courses begin to be content-heavy and students can no longer get by with the ability to “decode” English, but must be able to understand what they read. If scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are reliable measures, only about a quarter of 4th graders can read proficiently, and the percentage declines in the 8th and 12th grades.
Students who fail early and often come to accept failure as inevitable and are on the path to dropping out as soon as they can. Probably a third of students who plan to drop out have made up their minds by the 8th grade and mark time until they can legally leave school.
To reduce the dropout rate, we must first understand and accept why students choose to leave school. The reasons most often given are boredom, personal or family problems, and inability to understand and do the work required. A smaller percentage of students drop out because they find school to be a waste of time; these often are young people with the ability to succeed in school but who find that what is offered in the classroom doesn’t interest or challenge them. (Some years ago, a survey of students asked what word they would use to define school. “Boring” won hands down.)
The key to graduating is learning; the key to learning is motivation. There are innovative public schools that graduate most of their students because they personalize education, encourage students to pursue their interests and build on that enthusiasm, and offer multiple opportunities to learn instead of a one-size-fits-all education.
President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan should open a second front in this war on mediocrity and failure.
We need to continue making every effort to improve the existing public schools. They will enroll most of our young people for many years to come.
Simultaneously, we should pursue a parallel strategy of creating new, innovative schools and giving them the autonomy and resources to explore new ideas. These new schools can be a much-needed research-and-development sector for the conventional system.
Secretary Duncan should support a national effort patterned after Renaissance 2010, the program he launched in Chicago to replace failing schools with new, diverse models different from conventional schools and from each other.
It is neither wise nor necessary to bet the future on a single reform strategy, especially when hundreds, perhaps thousands, of schools are demonstrating every day that there are other and more successful ways to help children learn and succeed.
But we can pursue two strategies only if we act to assure that the dominant strategy does not smother the fledgling movement in its crib.