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Archive for January, 2012

MIAMI – In its initial review of No Child Left Behind waiver requests, the U.S. Education Department highlighted a similar weakness in nearly every application: States did not do enough to ensure schools would be held accountable for the performance of all students.

The Obama administration praised the states for their high academic standards. But nearly every application was criticized for being loose about setting high goals and, when necessary, interventions for all student groups — including minorities, the disabled and low-income — or for failing to create sufficient incentives to close the achievement gap.

Under No Child Left Behind, schools where even one group of students falls behind are considered out of compliance and subject to interventions. The law has been championed for helping shed light on education inequalities, but most now agree it is due for change.

Indiana’s proposal to opt out of the federal law’s strictest requirements was criticized by the Education Department for its “inattention” to certain groups, like students still learning the English language. New Mexico’s plan, a panel of peer reviewers noted, did not include accountability and interventions for student subgroups based on factors like achievement and graduation rates. In Florida, the department expressed concern that the performance of some groups of students could go overlooked.

The concerns were outlined in letters sent last December by the administration to the 11 states that have applied for a waiver. Since then, state and federal officials have been talking about how to address the concerns; some states have already agreed to changes.

The letters were obtained by The Associated Press for all of the states except Tennessee and Kentucky, which declined to provide them until an announcement is made on whether a waiver is granted. The Education Department has previously said it expected to notify states by mid-January.

“Our priority is protecting children and maintaining a high bar even as we give states more flexibility to get more resources to the children most in need, even if that means the process takes a little longer than we anticipated,” said Daren Briscoe, a department spokesman.

Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, said federal officials are in a challenging spot.

“The current law means that each group of kids, whether they are children with a disability, or African-American, or poor kids, have attention paid to them, because the schools are accountable for each and every group,” said Jennings. “But what the states are asking is that they all be lumped together.”

The Bush-era law is aimed at making sure 100 percent of students reach proficiency in math and reading by 2014, a goal states are far from achieving. As that year draws closer, more and more schools are expected to fall out of compliance, subjecting them to penalties that range from after-school tutoring to closure.

While there is bipartisan agreement the 2002 law needs to be fixed, Congress has not passed a comprehensive reform. President Barack Obama announced in September that states could apply for waivers and scrap the proficiency requirement if they met conditions designed to better prepare and test students.

The 11 states that applied for the first round of waivers were Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico and Tennessee. Many more states are expected to request waivers in the second round — meaning all eyes will be on the first approvals.

The Center on Education Policy analyzed all the waiver requests and found that in nine of the 11 states, almost all decisions on penalties and interventions would be based on the performance of two groups: all students and a “disadvantaged” group that would replace the current system of separate categories of students according to race, ethnicity, income, disability and English language proficiency.

Those separate categories are at the heart of what No Child Left Behind aimed to correct — vast achievement gaps between white, black and Hispanic students, between the affluent and low-income — and what most agree is the problem with the law: If any one of these groups of students does not meet the state’s annual benchmarks for proficiency in reading and math, the school is labeled as “failing.”

In a letter sent Jan. 17, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., urged Education Secretary Arne Duncan to require strong accountability measures and ensure civil rights and educational equity gains under No Child Left Behind are not lost.

“We fear that putting students with disabilities, English language learners and minority students into one `super subgroup’ will mask the individual needs of these distinct student subgroups,” they said.

In the feedback provided to states by a panel of peer reviewers in December, many states were praised for plans to institute college and career-ready standards and develop teacher evaluation systems that take into account student growth — two hallmarks of the Obama administration’s education policy. The panel’s concerns varied, but meeting the needs of all groups of students was one consistent theme.

In New Mexico, for example, the U.S. Education Department expressed concern about a lack of incentives to close achievement gaps and hold schools accountable for the performance of all students. In a follow-up letter sent late in January, subgroup accountability was still an area of concern.

Hanna Skandera, secretary designate for the New Mexico Public Education Department, said the state’s original plan did include breaking down data on student performance by subgroup on each school’s report card. But after conversations with the U.S. Education Department, schools will be adding information on whether they are on track for progress and growth in meeting annual targets. If a group falls behind, schools will be subject to intervention measures.

“We had high level reporting,” Skandera said. “Now we’re going to provide another layer so everything is crystal clear to parents across the state.”

Minnesota’s initial feedback included concern about “the lack of incentives to improve achievement for all groups of students and narrow achievement gap between subgroups.” Sam Kramer, federal education policy specialist for the Minnesota Department of Education, said most of that criticism was focused on the state’s graduation rate. In its initial submission, the state did not take into account the graduation rate of different subgroups in its annual targets.

After receiving the letter, the state switched to a system that will take into account how subgroups of students did in meeting those graduation targets.

Kramer said he thinks Minnesota will be better able to meet the needs of disadvantaged groups of students under the new system.

“No Child Left Behind was very good at diagnosing the problem,” Kramer said. “It was very good at shining a light on the differences between subgroups.”

It was less effective, he said, at offering successful ways to help improve.

“We are going to be able to go in and be flexible and reactive to the specific needs of those subgroups,” Kramer said.

Pedro Noguera, an education professor at New York University, said the struggle by school districts to lift the performance of different groups of students is a signal of a deeper problem that won’t be solved by waivers.

“We need to make sure the districts and schools feel some pressure to make sure that all the students they are responsible for are being educated,” he said. “However, they need to focus on different kinds of evidence, and not merely performance on a standardized test. That’s where they don’t get it.”

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SALT LAKE CITY – A 19-year-old University of Utah student likely suffered a medical episode before she fell from a popular Park City ski resort and died, an official said Monday.

The woman dropped about m 30 feet from the High Meadow lift at Canyons Ski Resort just before noon Sunday, resort spokesman Steve Pastorino said.

“There was no malfunction of the lift,” Pastorino said. “Other than a brief delay, the lift was not taken out of service.”

Ski patrol arrived on the scene within one minute of the fall, and the woman was pronounced dead a few hours later, he said.

The woman, who authorities haven’t named, was with friends on the lift at the time of the incident. The resort said she was a college student.

Pastorino said it wasn’t immediately clear if the woman and her friends had been using the lift’s safety bar when she fell.

The High Meadow lift serves the mid-mountain area largely leading to beginners’ slopes, and ranges from roughly 15 to 50 feet off the ground.

The investigation was being handled by the Summit County Sheriff’s Office, which was expected to release additional details later Monday.

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COMMENTARY | According to the Associated Press, President Barack Obama is upset with colleges and universities that have been raising their tuition rates, forcing an increasing number of students into debt as college degrees are worth less in a down economy. He has threatened to cut federal dollars for these schools and transfer the money to schools that offer good education for a reasonable price.

That rising tuition is a problem is undeniable. With the weak job market oversaturated with college graduates, degrees are worth less and less while remaining indispensable — twentysomethings cannot hope for a shot at a middle class lifestyle unless they nab a diploma. Knowing that high school graduates cannot hope for middle class security without a term of stay at college, colleges have teens by the short hairs: They can charge more each semester, and everyone has no choice but to pay.

And if all colleges raise their prices similarly, it makes no point to contemplate a transfer. Students might as well grin and bear it as they write checks, grimly hoping the economy improves and their degree is worth something by the time they walk across the graduation stage.

Despite being able to engage in abusive tuition-raising at will, institutions of higher education are consistently protected by the fact that hurting schools will hurt students. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., a critic of Obama’s tough talk, said shifting federal dollars from universities hurts the students it is meant to help.

Aye, the old rock-and-a-hard-place dilemma: You can’t put the squeeze on universities today to get them to change their tuition-raising ways so nothing changes tomorrow. Every time you get ready to teach a well-deserved lesson to those in corrupt ivory towers, you are lambasted as a tyrant who is harming innocent kids. To avoid looking like an anti-education Neanderthal you must spare the fiscal rod and spoil the college president child.

The catch-22 scenario afflicting attempts to rein in tuition abuse at colleges and universities is also seen in other areas, particularly military spending. If you try to cut military spending you risk being attacked as an unpatriotic coward who is risking the lives of brave American soldiers by denying young men sufficient body armor and weaponry. Therefore, you can never deny the Pentagon the funds it desires, lest you be seen as willing to send young Americans to their deaths.

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NEWARK, N.J. – The state’s largest city must produce a list of documents related to a $ 100 million pledge to its public schools from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, a judge ruled Friday.

The ruling stemmed from of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of a group representing Newark schoolchildren that is seeking more transparency about the donation. The Associated Press and other news outlets also have made such requests.

State Superior Court Judge Rachel Davidson’s ruling requires the city to produce the list, believed to enumerate about 50 pages of emails pertaining to the donation, by Feb. 10. The city could seek to block the publishing of some of the emails on the list, according to ACLU New Jersey attorney Ed Barocas.

The city, in a response letter to an AP request for the documents in 2010, said that any conversations between Democratic Mayor Cory Booker and Zuckerberg were “not made in the course of the Mayor’s official duties” and therefore were exempt from open-records laws.

Were Booker found to have been acting in his capacity as mayor, the letter continued, the city didn’t have the records requested. But it added that if the records were found, their release was barred under executive privilege.

The ACLU, in its lawsuit, argued that privilege can be claimed only by the governor, not by a sitting mayor. It argued that the public has a right to know how the grant funds are to be used and who is making the decisions on their allocation.

“We don’t want to make it seem that there was necessarily something nefarious going on,” Barocas said Friday. “All we ask is for this to be transparent. The public should be aware what, if any, agreements were made prior to or as part of the grant of the money.”

City attorney Anna Pereira declined to comment Friday, citing the ongoing litigation.

In court filings, the city has said that the Facebook grant is being administered not by the city but by two not-for-profits that it doesn’t fund, operate or exercise any control over. The city’s schools were placed under state control in 1995 after instances of waste and mismanagement, including the spending of taxpayer money by school board members on cars and restaurant meals.

Newark’s public school system is the state’s largest, with 75 schools and a student population of about 40,000, according to its website. The schools have been plagued for years by low test scores, poor graduation rates and crumbling buildings.

The $ 100 million pledge to the schools was announced in the fall of 2010 by Booker, Zuckerberg and Republican Gov. Chris Christie as they appeared together on Oprah Winfrey’s syndicated talk show.

Zuckerberg described the gift as a “challenge grant” to Booker, who has sought to raise $ 100 million more to match what Zuckerberg promised to contribute over five years. Zuckerberg’s social networking website, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is estimated to be worth more than $ 50 billion.

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WASHINGTON – Public university presidents facing ever-increasing state budget cuts are raising concerns about President Barack Obama’s plan to force colleges and universities to contain tuition prices or face losing federal dollars.

Illinois State University President Al Bowman says the reality is that deficits in many public schools can’t be easily overcome with simple modifications. Bowman says he’s happy to hear Obama call for state-level support of public universities but adds that, given the decreases in state aid, tying federal support to tuition is a product of “fuzzy math.”

Obama spelled out his proposal Friday at the University of Michigan.

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ROY, Utah – The two teens had a detailed plot, blueprints of the school and security systems, but no explosives. They had hours of flight simulator training on a home computer and a plan to flee the country, but no plane.

Still, the police chief in this small Utah town said, the plot was real.

“It wasn’t like they were hanging out playing video games,” Roy Police Chief Gregory Whinham said Friday. “They put a lot of effort into it.”

Dallin Morgan, 18, and a 16-year-old friend were arrested Wednesday at Roy High School, about 30 miles north of Salt Lake City, after a fellow student reported that she received ominous text messages from one of the suspects.

“If I tell you one day not to go to school, make damn sure you and your brother are not there,” one message read, according to court records. “We ain’t gonna crash it, we’re just gonna kill and fly our way to a country that won’t send us back to the U.S.,” read another message.

While police don’t have a motive, one text message noted they sought “revenge on the world.”

The suspects say they were inspired by the deadly 1999 Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colo., and the younger suspect even visited the school last month to interview the principal about the shootings and security measures.

However, one suspect told authorities it was offensive to be compared to the Columbine shooters because “those killers only completed 1 percent of their plan,” according to a probable cause statement.

The teens had so studied their own school’s security system that they knew how to avoid being seen on the facility’s surveillance cameras, authorities said.

Whinham said the “very smart kids” had spent at least hundreds of dollars on flight simulator programs, books and manuals, studying them in anticipation of carrying out their plan to bomb an assembly at the 1,500-student high school.

While authorities said the suspects believed they could pull it off, experts said, it would have been a long shot.

Royal Eccles, manager at the Ogden-Hinckley Airport, about a mile from the school, said it would have been nearly impossible for the students to steal a plane or get the knowledge to fly one using flight simulator programs.

“It’s highly improbable,” Eccles said. “That’s how naive these kids are.”

Whinham said authorities searched two homes and two cars and found no explosives, but added that police continue to search other locations. The chief said it appeared that “a key component of their plan was not developed.”

“I wouldn’t want to say that they don’t have it or that they weren’t ready for it,” he said. “I’m just saying that we haven’t found anything that says they were ready for it yet.”

Whinham said it appeared the suspects, who have no criminal history, also had prepared alternate attack plans, but he declined to elaborate. He also declined to say whether any firearms were found during their searches.

“Most houses have firearms in them,” he said. “This is the state of Utah.”

While authorities have said they have not found any explosives, they charged Morgan on Friday with possession of a weapon of mass destruction.

The basis for the charge wasn’t immediately clear, though one of the elements of that offense is conspiracy to use a weapon, not necessarily possessing one. Prosecutors say they are considering additional charges.

Morgan has been released on bond, pending a court hearing Wednesday. The 16-year-old, whom The Associated Press isn’t naming because he’s a minor, remained held pending further court hearings.

Whinham said he knew both suspects personally, given the small size of the suburban Utah town of roughly 36,000 people. He said he had met with both of the suspects’ parents and they were “devastated.”

The 16-year-old suspect’s father declined comment Friday, and no one answered the door at Morgan’s home.

The plot “was months in planning,” said Whinham, who also noted Morgan told investigators the 16-year-old had previously made a pipe bomb using gun powder and rocket fuel.

In Colorado, Columbine Principal Frank DeAngelis confirmed Friday he met with the 16-year-old suspect on Dec. 12 after the teenager told him he was doing a story for his school newspaper on the shootings.

DeAngelis said he frequently gets requests from students doing research on the shootings, and the request from this one wasn’t unusual.

“He asked the same questions I get from many callers and visitors asking about the shooting,” DeAngelis said. He said the student wanted details about the shooting, the aftermath and the steps taken since then to protect the school.

Police said the student told them Roy school officials would not allow him to write the story.

DeAngelis said he was shocked when he got a call from Utah police on Wednesday asking if he had met with the youth. He said the interview raised no red flags but that he would do things differently with future requests.

“This was definitely a wake-up call. This is the first time this has happened,” DeAngelis said.

Police credit the suspects’ schoolmate with helping foil their plan, though Whinham said the school didn’t have any assemblies set, and the suspects revealed no specific dates to pull off the attack.

Sophomore Bailey Gerhardt told The Salt Lake Tribune she received alarming text messages from one of the suspects and alerted school administrators.

“I get the feeling you know what I’m planning,” read one of the messages, according to court records. “Explosives, airport, airplane.”

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Associated Press writer Steven K. Paulson in Denver contributed to this report.

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ANN ARBOR, Mich. – President Barack Obama called Friday for an overhaul of the higher education financial aid system, warning that colleges and universities that fail to control spiraling tuition costs could lose federal funds.

The election year proposal was also a political appeal to young people and working families, two important voting blocs for Obama. But the initiative faces long odds in Congress, which must approve nearly all aspects of the president’s plan.

Speaking to students at the University of Michigan, Obama said the nation’s economic future would depend in large part on making sure every American can afford a world-class education.

“We are putting colleges on notice,” Obama said. “You can’t assume that you’ll just jack up tuition every single year. If you can’t stop tuition from going up, then the funding you get from taxpayers each year will go down.”

Obama first announced the outlines of the financial aid proposal during Tuesday’s State of the Union address. His plan targets what is known as “campus based” aid given to colleges to distribute in areas such as Perkins loans or in work study programs. Of the $ 142 billion in federal grants and loans distributed in the last school year, about $ 3 billion went to these programs. His plan calls for increasing that type of aid to $ 10 billion annually.

He also wants to create a “Race to the Top” competition in higher education similar to the one his administration used on K-12 to encourage states to better use higher education dollars in exchange for $ 1 billion in prize dollars. A second competition called “First in the World” would encourage innovation to boost productivity on campuses.

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SALT LAKE CITY – A Utah high school student bragged to police that he was smarter than the Columbine killers and was plotting with an older student to set off a bomb during a school assembly and escape in a stolen plane, court documents say.

Dallin Morgan, 18, and the 16-year-old boy were pulled out of school Wednesday and arrested after authorities learned of the plot, Roy police spokeswoman Anna Bond said Thursday.

The students prepared by logging hundreds of hours on flight simulator software on their home computers, and they planned to take a plane at Ogden Hinckley Airport after the bombing, Bond said.

The juvenile hinted at the plan in text messages to a friend, writing that both suspects wanted “revenge on the world” and “we have a plan to get away with it too.”

He hinted at the plan by writing “explosives, airport, airplane” and added, “We’re just gonna kill and fly our way to a country that won’t send us back to the US,” according to a probable cause statement police filed to make the arrests late Wednesday.

The Associated Press isn’t naming the 16-year-old because he is a minor.

The juvenile told investigators he was so “fascinated” by the 1999 Columbine High School massacre that he visited the Littleton, Colo., school and interviewed the principal about the shootings that killed 13 people. Roy police said the principal, Frank DeAngelis, confirmed that the boy made his visit Dec. 12.

Morgan was being held on $ 10,000 bail at Weber County jail on suspicion of conspiracy to commit mass destruction. The juvenile was in custody at Weber Valley Detention Center on the same charge. Prosecutors were weighing possible additional charges.

Both students had “absolute knowledge of the security systems and the layout of the school,” Bond said. “They knew where the security cameras were. Their original plan was to set off explosives during an assembly. We don’t know what date they were planning to do this, but they had been planning it for months.”

School officials said there were no imminent plans to hold a school assembly.

Local and federal agents searched the school, two vehicles belonging to the suspects and their homes but found no explosives. The FBI is examining the suspects’ computers, police said.

The parents of both students “woke up in the middle of a nightmare,” Bond said. “They’ve been very cooperative.”

The other Roy High School student who received text messages tipped authorities to the plot Wednesday, said the school’s safety specialist, Nate Taggart.

The student “came forward and had some suspicions but not a lot of information — enough that it gave administration the ability to make some connections and identify the students involved,” Taggart said.

The school has about 1,500 students.

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Associated Press writer Michelle Rindels in Las Vegas contributed to this report.

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ROY, Utah – Utah authorities say two Roy High School students have been arrested on conspiracy charges after authorities uncovered a plot to use explosives during a school assembly.

Eighteen-year-old Dallin Morgan was arrested Wednesday and booked into the Weber County Jail, and a 16-year-old boy also was taken into custody.

School administrators and police say they learned the students had collected maps of the school and documents about security systems. Officials say the students had a detailed escape plan that included using an airplane from the Ogden Hinckley Airport and used flight simulator software to prepare.

Local and federal agents searched the school, two vehicles and two homes, but found no explosives. The FBI is also examining computers.

School is in session Thursday.

Roy is 35 miles north of Salt Lake City.

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ALEXANDRIA, Va. – The first major nutritional overhaul of school meals in more than 15 years means most offerings — including the always popular pizza — will come with less sodium, more whole grains and a wider selection of fruits and vegetables on the side.

First lady Michelle Obama and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced the new guidelines during a visit Wednesday with elementary students. Mrs. Obama, also joined by celebrity chef Rachael Ray, said youngsters will learn better if they don’t have growling stomachs at school.

“As parents, we try to prepare decent meals, limit how much junk food our kids eat, and ensure they have a reasonably balanced diet,” Mrs. Obama said. “And when we’re putting in all that effort the last thing we want is for our hard work to be undone each day in the school cafeteria.”

After the announcement, the three went through the line with students and ate turkey tacos with brown rice, black bean and corn salad and fruit — all Ray’s recipes — with the children in the Parklawn Elementary lunchroom.

Under the new rules, pizza won’t disappear from lunch lines, but will be made with healthier ingredients. Entire meals will have calorie caps for the first time and most trans fats will be banned. Sodium will gradually decrease over a 10 year period. Milk will have to be low in fat and flavored milks will have to be nonfat.

Despite the improvements, the new rules aren’t as aggressive as the Obama administration had hoped. Congress last year blocked the Agriculture Department from making some of the desired changes, including limiting french fries and pizzas.

A bill passed in November would require the department to allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now. The initial draft of the department’s guidelines, released a year ago, would have prevented that. Congress also blocked the department from limiting servings of potatoes to two servings a week. The final rules have incorporated those directions from Congress.

Among those who had sought the changes were potato growers and food companies that produce frozen pizzas for schools. Conservatives in Congress called the guidelines an overreach and said the government shouldn’t tell children what to eat. School districts also objected to some of the requirements, saying they go too far and would cost too much.

The guidelines apply to lunches subsidized by the federal government. A child nutrition bill signed by President Barack Obama in 2010 will help school districts pay for some of the increased costs. Some of the changes will take place as soon as this September; others will be phased in over time.

While many schools are improving meals already, others still serve children meals high in fat, salt and calories. The guidelines are designed to combat childhood obesity and are based on 2009 recommendations by the Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences.

Vilsack said food companies are reformulating many of the foods they sell to schools in anticipation of the changes.

“The food industry is already responding,” he said. “This is a movement that has started, it’s gaining momentum.”

Diane Pratt-Heavner of the School Nutrition Association, which represents school lunch workers, said that many schools won’t count pizza as a vegetable even though they can. Students qualifying for subsidized meals must have a certain number of vegetables and other nutritious foods on their lunch trays.

“Most schools are serving fruit or vegetables next to their pizza and some schools are even allowing unlimited servings of fruit or vegetables,” Pratt-Heavner said.

Celebrity chef Ray said she thinks too much has been made of the availability of pizza and French fries. The new rules will make kids’ lunch plates much more nutrient dense, she said.

“The overall picture is really good,” she said. “This is a big deal.”

The subsidized meals that would fall under the guidelines are served as free and low-cost meals to low-income children and long have been subject to government nutrition standards. The 2010 law will extend, for the first time, nutrition standards to other foods sold in schools that aren’t subsidized by the federal government. That includes “a la carte” foods on the lunch line and snacks in vending machines.

Those standards, while expected to be similar, will be written separately and have not yet been proposed by the department.

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Online:

USDA school lunch rules: http://www.fns.usda.gov/cnd/Governance/Legislation/nutritionstandards.htm

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Find Mary Clare Jalonick on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mcjalonick

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