States brace for grad rate dips as formula changes (AP)

By HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH and DORIE TURNER, Associated Press Heather Hollingsworth And Dorie Turner, Associated Press – Wed Jul 27, 5:45 pm ET

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – States are bracing for plummeting high school graduation rates as districts nationwide dump flawed measurement formulas that often undercounted dropouts and produced inflated results.

Education wonks long have suspected the statistics used by some people to determine how their neighborhood high school is faring — or even where to buy a house — can be figured using various formulas that produce wildly different results.

Now, many states are facing a sobering reset: Some could see numbers fall by as many as 20 percentage points.

Liz Utrup, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Education Department, said graduation rate numbers will soon appear to decrease "across the board" as states move to a uniform calculation that requires them to track each student individually, giving a more accurate count of how many actually finish high school.

"Through this uniform method, states are raising the bar on data standards, and simply being more honest," U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said.

Most states are required to convert to the new calculation this year, but the number won't count as part of federal No Child Left Behind benchmarks until the 2012-13 school year. Schools that consistently miss those measures face sanctions.

All but two states — Idaho and Kentucky, which need more time to develop student tracking systems — will start submitting the new numbers to the federal government starting late this summer.

States that converted to the new formula already have seen drops ranging from modest to massive. Michigan had a nearly 10 percentage point fall when they made the switch in 2007. About half of states are not yet using the new calculation.

Florida's graduation rate remained about stable, at 79 percent, when it adopted the new graduation rate in the 2009-10 school year. It would have been nearly two points higher if it had continued under the old calculation.

States making the switch this year are offering estimates of expected dips and discussing the change in school board meetings. In Kansas, the graduation rate is expected to tumble from 89 percent to 80 percent, with one district in the state anticipating a 20-point drop. Georgia said its overall rate — now at 80 percent — could plummet about 15 percentage points.

"We're certainly concerned no matter what with that number under 100 percent," said Kelly Smith, superintendent of Belle Plaine schools in Minnesota, which is transitioning to the new formula this year. "The new system isn't changing what we're doing in our schools, and we need to get that point across."

Matt Cardoza, a spokesman for Georgia's Department of Education, said while he worries the public may think that high numbers of students are suddenly failing to finish school, the new formula could produce "a more accurate picture of how many of our students are actually finishing high school with a diploma."

Jay Greene, who heads the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, said he started studying graduation rates in 1999 because he determined many of them made no sense.

"The initial reaction was that I was mistaken, that I couldn't know," said Greene. "And I pressed the issue with reporters and at meetings and basically asked the question, `If it's true that you have a 1 percent annual dropout rate, how come you have twice as many ninth and tenth and graders as you have graduates?'"

Much of the blame for past problems went to something called the "leaver method," a popular calculation for determining graduation rates that also has gained a reputation for being the most generous. The method, used by about half the states last year, works like this: If a school had 100 graduates and 10 students who dropped out from their freshmen to senior year, 100 would be divided by 110, giving the school a graduation rate of 90.9 percent.

Schools weren't dinged if students took more than four years to graduate. When students disappeared, they often were classified as transfers, even though some of them had actually dropped out. Many schools weren't required to document that transfers showed up somewhere else.

"You have to be honest with the data," said David Doty, superintendent of the Canyon School District in Utah. "If the data doesn't mean anything, there's no point in using it anyway."

U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat, used the National Governors Association to push for graduation rate changes while he led Virginia from 2002 to 2006. His motivation, he said, was a desire to see how his state stacked up.

Virginia was boasting 90 percent or better graduation rates during Warner's drive for a uniform rate, but that dropped to 81 when the new formula was adopted in 2008.

Ultimately, the U.S. Department of Education settled on a formula similar to the NGA's: the number of graduates in a given year, divided by the number of students who enrolled four years earlier. Also, schools must document transfer students or they'll artificially deflate the graduation rate.

Schools weren't necessarily being subversive in the way they calculated their rates, said Ryan Reyna, senior policy analyst with the National Governors Association. Many states used imperfect formulas because they couldn't track students who moved, which is being fixed with the addition of new state-level systems that identification numbers to each student.

Experts hope the changes will draw attention to the dropout issue and lead to resources being focused on the problem. That is happening in Kansas and other states, where officials are developing a system of early indicators to alert schools that a student is at risk.

"We're going to take an honest look in the mirror and see how real our graduation rate is and where we need to cut the dropout rate," said former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, which has extensively studied the nation's hodgepodge system of graduation rates. "You've got to know how deep the hole is in order to develop a strategy for getting out of it."

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Associated Press writer Christine Armario in Miami contributed to this report. Turner reported from Atlanta.

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College Humor among first 3-D video offerings on Nintendo 3DS (Digital Trends)

Late last week, Nintendo Video service officially launched on the Nintendo 3DS, allowing users to start downloading and watching exclusive videos on the handheld gaming device. Now, just a few days later, the first crop of 3-D video has become available through the service, and it includes some choice segments from one of the Internet’s most popular comedy sites.

The animated short “Dinosaur Office” from CollegeHumor.com was one of several 3-D videos that became available recently, which also saw the arrival of more 2-D video via the Nintendo Video service and the recently launched Netflix on 3DS.

According to CNN, College Humor has created four more animated, 3-D shorts exclusively for the 3DS, and plans to make a regular series out of at least one of them. Nintendo also indicated that 3-D videos from rock groups OK Go and Foster the People are also expected to arrive on the 3DS soon.

We reported on the arrival of Netflix on the 3DS just a few weeks ago, a move that offers yet another way to use the streaming video service. Nintendo and Netflix promised to make a library of 3-D video available via Netflix in the future, too.

While sales of the Nintendo’s 3-D gaming device haven’t exactly met with the company’s expectations, the company appears to be betting that development of more games and other services that take advantage of the system’s unique capabilities will pay off in the long run.

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Memphis school board approves deal to start class on time (Reuters)

MEMPHIS, Tenn (Reuters) – The Memphis Board of Education voted unanimously on Tuesday to approve a financial compromise deal to allow city schools to start on time on August 8, averting a threatened delayed start.

The board had previously angered parents and teachers in the school district, Tennessee's largest, when it threatened to delay the start of school indefinitely until it received $55 million in city funds.

The compromise agreement, still subject to approval by the Memphis City Council, calls for the city to agree to approval of the proposed $884 million schools budget for 2011-2012 and a payment schedule that front loads the city's contribution.

The school system has approximately 103,500 students. Teachers will report to work on August 1, with students beginning classes a week later.

Negotiations between the school board, city council and Memphis Mayor A C Wharton reduced the amount needed to be paid immediately to $15 million by August 5 and a payment schedule for the balance.

The city council's education committee agreed to the deal last week and approval of the full council was expected next week.

Like other cities, Memphis is trimming city employees and payroll to cope with the recession. Council members earlier this year approved a $661 million city operating budget with 4.6 percent pay cuts for most employees.

The schools situation was complicated this year by the school board's decision in December to surrender its charter to force a merger of the city and nearby suburban Shelby County school systems. The outcome of that action depends on a federal court ruling that is expected within the next month.

(Reporting by John Branston; Editing by Cynthia Johnston)

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5 Things High School Seniors Should Be Doing Now (U.S. News & World Report)

If you are a rising high school senior, you probably thought you had all summer to get prepared for the upcoming college admission frenzy. But guess what? You're running out of time.

To avoid the time crunch in the fall, here are five things you can do now:

1. Examine school prices: I think it's reckless to apply to a school if you don't have some sense of what kind of price you would have to pay. Sticker prices, however, are often meaningless. At private colleges and universities, for instance, 88 percent of students receive some type of price break.

The good news is that it's becoming much easier to determine what the tab will be in advance by using federally mandated net price calculators. These calculators will provide you with a good idea of what the price will be at an institution based on your academic profile and your parents' finance data. With the exception of the super rich, I don't think anyone should apply to colleges without using these calculators first.

While the federal deadline to install these calculators on school websites is late October, lots of schools already have their calculators up and running.

[Read more about net price calculators.]

2. Check deadlines: Use a calendar to keep track of deadlines for applications and financial aid. When there is a choice, you'll have to decide whether to apply early decision, early action or regular decision. When you apply early, the school might require that you submit your financial aid application far in advance.

[Learn about overlooked ways to pay for college.]

3. Get started on the essay: Writing the college essay is one of the most nerve-wracking chores that face high school seniors. If you start now, you're more likely to be able to devote the time to do a superb job.

If you are applying to a school that uses the Common Application, you can obtain a list of the six essay questions by visiting the organization's website. My favorite is "Topic of your choice."

While you can often use the same essay for multiple schools, be prepared to answer a college's supplemental questions. A biggie goes something like this: "Why do you want to attend our school?" You won't be able to ace this question unless you really understand the college, and that requires research.

[See 10 tips for writing college admission essays.]

4. Don't overlook the supplemental materials: If you are an artist, musician, or actor, applying to colleges can be even more time consuming. You typically will have to send a resume noting your artistic background and accomplishments, as well as a portfolio that can be captured on a CD or DVD. If your portfolio isn't finished, start now.

[Get more tips about the college application process.]

5. Research: If you haven't begun researching schools, get started now. An easy first step is to request admission materials from school websites. In addition, spend time on the college's admission website, where you will often find academic profiles of the freshmen class, notable facts about the school, information on financial aid and scholarships. Plenty of schools will also offer virtual tour and opportunities for online chats.

[Find more statistics and details about colleges.]

Equally important, you should poke around online at a school's relevant academic departments.

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Save Our Schools March: a teacher revolt against Obama education reform (The Christian Science Monitor)

What if the education reformers are wrong?

That's the opinion of a growing number of educators who are convinced that the current direction of reform a€“ despite powerful backers that include President Obama, Bill Gates, and many influential academics and nonprofit leaders a€“ is harming public schools rather than improving them.

While teachers unions and a number of prominent education thinkers have been critical of the reform policies for some time, a more concerted effort is emerging to organize those critics. They plan to take to the streets in Washington on Saturday in hopes of galvanizing attention around their cause. The Save Our Schools March has attracted endorsements from well-known academics, educators, and authors.

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Passionate and articulate, many of them classroom teachers, the critics tend to zero in on the increasingly high-stakes role played by standardized tests, which can make or break the reputation of a school or teacher – even if the tests aren't very good.

"What we call 'accountability' now is just totally unreliable numbers that are meaningless in terms of the lives of children and the careers of teachers," says Diane Ravitch, a historian and former advocate of standards-based reforms who is now one of its most frequent and ardent critics. "All they're doing is terrorizing teachers."

Attaching so much importance to tests, say such critics, is leading to unintended consequences a€“ including cheating (with the recent scandal in Atlanta as Exhibit A), a narrowing of the curriculum, and the reduction of many schools into test-prep factories that ignore the higher-thinking skills needed for college and the workplace. Instead, they assert, more attention should be paid to poverty and the related factors affecting students' achievement, teachers should get better support and training, and evaluations should be more nuanced.

Although the Obama administration has been trying to address what it sees as shortcomings in the No Child Left Behind law, critics say that overall the administration is going in the wrong direction on reforms.

"This is impassioned educators pushing back for good or bad," says Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, who is generally an advocate of standards-based reforms. "I think it's clear that this isn't union power tactics."

In May, US Education Secretary Arne Duncan wrote an open letter to America's teachers for Teacher Appreciation Week acknowledging many of the concerns voiced by teachers. He concluded the letter, "I hear you, I value you, and I respect you."

Rather than appeasing teachers, it unleashed a storm of angry blogs, letters, and comments from educators who feel far from appreciated.

"The things you say here are, as Hamlet once said, 'words, words, words,' but there is no substance behind them," reads a typical comment about the letter, posted on the Department of Education's website. The teacher also says, "The education policies of this administration are the single reason why I will not vote to reelect Barack Obama in 2012."

Why such disgruntlement?

Certainly, some teachers are unhappy for professional reasons, seeing everything from their pay to, in some cases, their job security hinging on tests they don't believe in. Others rail against the constriction of their autonomy in the classroom.

Sabrina Stevens Shupe, an organizer of the march and a former teacher in the Denver Public Schools, recalls her frustration with a district that hired her for her creativity and praised her for the strides she was making on math with her fifth-graders, but then criticized her for not following the prescribed curriculum exactly a€“ even when she had seen it wasn't working.

"I was handed a book and was supposed to read verbatim each section," she recalls, with a district "support" person there to monitor her compliance. For reading, she was supposed to pair students up and have them read to each other, counting each other's words and mistakes – although in many cases, neither child understood what he or she was reading. "Comprehension didn't enter into it," she says.

Ms. Shupe's contract wasn't renewed at the end of the year despite only positive evaluations. Now, as a blogger and activist, she says she hears dozens of stories similar to hers.

"We need to be creating conditions that inspire people to do their best work, instead of punishment and reward systems that inspire lowbrow work and cheating," she says.

Still, despite the angry rhetoric heard on both sides, many leaders of the standards-based reforms insist there is more agreement than people realize.

"We all want the best for kids, and we all want more students, regardless of their circumstances, to graduate high school ready for postsecondary education. There is a very legitimate debate about how best to get there," says Jonah Edelman, cofounder and chief executive officer of Stand for Children, an advocacy group that has pushed for laws in many states that, among other things, hold teachers more accountable and make job security more dependent on performance.

Like many leaders identified with the accountability movement, Mr. Edelman emphasizes that the goal has never been just about test scores, but about how to get students learning. He bemoans any policy that encourages teachers to teach to a poor test or to cheat. But without some form of measurement, too many students will fall through the cracks, he worries.

"The answer lies in striking the right balance between effective assessment of and for learning, and accountability that is smart," Edelman says. "It's a little bit of a zigzag, but overall we're moving in the right direction."

Many of the reform movement's biggest critics are quick to say that it's not that they disagree with assessments; it's the top-down, high-stakes nature of the tests that they have a problem with as well as the minimal effort to get buy-in from teachers and parents for the policies.

Recently, the National Education Association approved, for the first time, a policy that student achievement should be a factor in teacher evaluation. But it simultaneously asserted that no system currently does so in the right way.

Anthony Cody, a longtime teacher and teacher coach in Oakland, Calif., and another organizer of the march, says he's seen many mediocre teachers get excellent test scores for kids and outstanding teachers get worse ones.

He remembers students complaining when a group of teachers was giving them challenging writing and thinking projects. The students asked them why they didn't just do what the prior year's teacher had done and say what would be on the test.

"We have managed to transmit from the highest level in the nation to these individual students in Oakland that what matters is the test score," says Mr. Cody. "These students are going to get to college and find their professors don't actually say, 'Here are the 50 questions that will be on the test.' "

A common refrain among disgruntled teachers is that the current policies aren't leading to the kind of schools that the top leaders would want to send their own children to. The Obamas, for instance, send their daughters to the private, progressive Sidwell Friends School a€“ not a place known for test prep or a narrow curriculum.

So where will the backlash against the reforms lead?

It's unlikely that the policies of accountability and testing are going to be stopped, given their momentum. But even some advocates of those policies say that more debate may ultimately be a good thing for education.

"There is a simple-mindedness, an arrogance, and a reflexiveness with which the reformers are pushing their agenda, particularly from Washington, and I think they've wound up giving classroom educators serious and fair cause for concern about how things like value-added evaluations or merit pay are taking shape," says Mr. Hess of AEI. "This pushback both helps call attention to the need to do this smarter and offers an opportunity to slow down and pursue these things with the deliberation and thoughtfulness they require."

MONITOR QUIZ: Think you know the US? Take our geography quiz.

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Implicated Atlanta school employees put on leave (AP)

ATLANTA – Atlanta Public Schools employees implicated in a widespread cheating scandal are getting notices that they've been put on paid administrative leave.

The notices sent out to teachers and others are among the steps the district must take as it begins to sort through each employee's case.

Superintendent Erroll Davis, who has been adamant that none of the employees will work in front of the district's students again, says he plans to start termination proceedings as quickly as he can.

A state report released earlier this month implicated educators in 44 schools for cheating on state tests. District officials say 41 of the educators suspected of cheating have already quit or retired.

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Information from: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/ap/ap_on_re_us/storytext/us_atlanta_schools_cheating/42405338/SIG=10krkhktm/*http://www.ajc.com

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Hershey schools in court over chocolate king's dream (Reuters)

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) – A school district in the town named for chocolate king Milton Hershey went to court on Thursday to argue that his sweet dream of funding education was ignored by a foundation that has instead spent millions on entertainment.

The Derry Township School District said in a document filed in Orphans Court of Dauphin County that the founder of The Hershey Chocolate Company had local schools in mind when he included money for educational purposes in a will written before he died in 1945.

Instead, the Milton S. Hershey Foundation has used over $9 million from 2003 and 2008 to pay for entertainment venues such as the Hershey Museum, Hershey Gardens and Hershey Archives, the school district said.

Barely a drop of the riches have gone to the school district, which has received a total of $25,000 since the 1960s, the court papers said.

The school district maintains that if Hershey's wishes were properly honored it would be receiving at least $300,000 and perhaps as much as $1 million per year. The district's annual budget is about $50 million, and the money could help to buy laptops for high school students and make physical improvements to the middle school, school officials said.

The legal struggle unfolded against the backdrop of a ubiquitous Hershey presence in the township, including street lights shaped like Hershey Kisses, gardens mulched with chocolate-smelling cocoa bean shells, and a luxurious spa at the Hotel Hershey that features cocoa facials and whipped cocoa baths.

The town is also home to the Milton Hershey School, a private academy that educates 1,800 children in social and financial need.

School officials said the 3,600-student public school district did not raise taxes recently because of taxpayer pressure to hold the line and receives only about 30-40 percent of its budget from the state.

Donald Papson, executive director of the foundation, said Thursday that it disagrees with the definition of deserving educational recipients in the court papers.

Papson also said that the school district gets an additional $1.8 million from a separate Hershey trust each year. He said the payments from the foundation to the district were dropped in 1967 when the state recalculated the education aid formula, and the board at that time felt the state money was sufficient for the district.

In a separate, unrelated investigation of another Hershey branch, the state attorney general is looking into how millions of dollars were spent for several land deals in the last several years. That probe began in 2010 when now Governor Tom Corbett was the attorney general.

(Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Greg McCune)

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