Thursday, November 30, 2006

New Report Finds Parental Involvement Crucial to Student Success


The authors of the No Child Left Behind Act focused on four cornerstones as they started to draft the bill: assessment, disaggregating data; accountability; and parental involvement. This last pillar is crucial to student success, said Senator Johnny Isakson (R-GA) Wednesday at the release of a national report by Appleseed.  The report, "It Takes a Parent: Transforming Education in the Wake of the No Child Left Behind Act," is based on research from 18 school districts in six states on practices in parental involvement. The report found that effective parental engagement is one of the most important factors in students' success in school, but that it is often overlooked.  Other findings include: there is a lack of clear and timely information for parents about their children and schools; limited English proficiency and poverty are among the biggest barriers to parental involvement; and school leaders often do not value parental involvement as an accountability strategy. Arthur Coleman, partner and co-leader of Holland & Knight's education policy team - which performed most of the research and drafted the final report - said parental involvement is hard to measure but that good benchmarks for accountability can be set. The report provides five areas in which improvement is needed to increase parental involvement and for policymakers to consider going into reauthorization: quality of information provided to parents; proactive, targeted engagement strategies; community support; professional development on the issue; and better implementation and stronger accountability.   For more information, visit
www.appleseednetwork.org

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

What Does More Data on School Violence Really Mean for Schools?

Source: NASSP

Legislation introduced by Congress last week aims to help administrators make better decisions about school safety but could leave schools vulnerable to additional sanctions under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

The Accurate Crime Trends (ACT) for Schools Act (H.R. 6322) would require the attorney general to determine the feasibility of expanding the National Incident-Based Reporting System to include information on the occurrence of school-related crime in elementary and secondary schools. According to the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY), the NIBRS would use existing crime reporting infrastructures to collect specific K–12 crime data and would not place any new requirements or burdens on school leaders. She argues that principals need timely data on real incidents of school crime to identify trends and develop meaningful strategies to prevent school violence.

NCLB requires that students be allowed to transfer to another public school if their current school is found to be “persistently dangerous” or if they are the victim of a violent crime while at school. Principals must collect and self report a certain amount of data under the Uniform Management Information and Reporting Systems requirements of the law, but there is no federal system to report and track data on school crimes at the K–12 level.

The recent string of school shootings has led federal officials and school safety experts to further examine the Unsafe School Choice Option. In general, they’ve found that the law punishes schools that already have violence-prevention policies in place, diverts state and local officials’ attention away from their own safety initiatives, and produces few real results.

Will more data on school-based crime help or harm our efforts to ensure that schools are safe and secure? How is labeling a school "persistently dangerous" really going to help the principal protect his or her staff members and students? These are the questions that NASSP hopes you can help us answer by posting your comments below. 

Sunday, November 12, 2006

Reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act

(1) Legislation in Need of Improvement: Reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act to Better Address Barriers to Learning  –   http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/pdfdocs/nclbra.pdf

(2) For Consideration in Reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act . . . Promoting a Systematic Focus on Learning Supports to Address Barriers to Learning and Teaching   http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/pdfdocs/PromotingaSystematicFocus.pdf

Friday, November 03, 2006

Intelligent Vote

http://www.intelligentvote.com/

Just in time for the midterm elections, comes a site designed to help you get better acquainted with your elected officials.

The current focus of the site is the 'Should I Re-Elect my Congressman' page. Using a series of 29 issues voted upon by congress and/or senate, the page calculates the percentage with which your choices align to your current elected official in both branches. You begin by imputing your state, and choosing your Congressperson's name for a list (if you don't know the name of your representative, the site will help you locate them by entering your full nine-digit zip code in an off-site link to the House's page).

Once you've determined your representative, you can go to work on the list of issues. Each bill has a rather uninformative title such as, 'Income Tax Cuts' and 'Stem Cell Law,' and a link that sends you to a more detailed abstract of the proposed law, which will likely be necessary for all but the most politically savvy among us. You can fill out as many or as few of the issues as you would like, but as always with lists like this, the more boxes that you tick, the more accurate of a result you're likely to get.

When you've finished checking the boxes, the site displays your voting alignment with your Congressperson and two Senators. For example, mine came back: "You voted in agreement with Hillary Clinton on the bills that you selected, 67 percent of the time out of 22 bills." By clicking View Details, you get an issue-by-issue break down of how your votes aligned with each elected official, an invaluable detail, considering that very few of us consider a vote on on-line gambling and one on gay marriage to be of the level of importance.

Due to the nature of the decision making process—using congressional and senate voting records as a way of evaluating candidates, excludes challengers. You may agree or disagree with your current representative on a certain percentage of issues, but that doesn't guarantee that you'll be more or less in line with them than a representative from another party. It also neglects the painstaking thought process representatives (at least theoretically) put into the voting process, boiling issues down into easy-to-swallow abstract byte. Intelligent Voter also neglects to include third parties in its rather small collection of political links on the home page, though the real root of this criticism should perhaps be sited as a con against our current two-party system, and not necessarily the site.

Activism Network 3.1.2

Activism Network 3.1.2

http://www.activismnetwork.org/developers/

Getting together with old friends and new online is relatively easy these days, what with all the various social networking sites out there. Not many of the sites give users the leeway to create their own activist networks, but this application does just that. With this application, visitors can create different online event resources, email updates, and profiles, all of which can be used for a wide range of organizational purposes. Additionally, the site offers documentation for the program and examples of groups that are currently using the program. This version is compatible with computers running Windows 2000 and newer.