AM News: Lots Of Layoff Notices - But Not Many Actual Layoffs

California's 4th Year Of Teacher Layoffs Spur Concerns AP: Roughly 75 percent of teachers who received layoff warnings were either never laid off or laid off and called back to work, according to a 27-page report that recommended changes in the layoff process. ALSO Washington Post:  “Excessing” notices for 333 DCPS teachers

AP surges as tool for schools raising standards AP: In the next two weeks, 2 million students will take 3.7 million end-of-year AP exams – figures well over double those from a decade ago. Last year, 18 percent of U.S. high school graduates passed at least one AP exam (by scoring 3 or higher on a scale of 1 to 5), up from 11 percent a decade ago.

Tornado Recovery Offers Joplin Students New Lessons NPR: It's been nearly a year since a tornado tore through Joplin, Mo., destroying several school buildings. As the city rebuilds, some students have been attending a makeshift facility at the mall. Students, teachers and administrators reflect on a tumultuous year that has brought healing and hope.

Major groups beg Congress to rewrite NCLB Washington Post: A coalition of 10 major organizations of state and local government officials just sent a letter asking — or, rather, effectively begging — Congress to finally do its job and reauthorize No Child Left Behind.

LAUSD charter elementary with low test scores gets a reprieve Los Angeles Times: Academia Semillas del Pueblo, an LAUSD elementary charter school in El Sereno, teaches in three languages and has ambitious goals, but it narrowly escaped closure recently because of low test scores.

MORE NEWS ITEMS INSIDE

On Education: New Procedure for Teaching License Draws Protest NYT (Winerip): Student teachers at the University of Massachusetts are protesting a new national licensure procedure being developed by the education company Pearson and Stanford University.

Boston City Council members question $20m school relocation plan Boston Globe: City Council questions cost of school plan The Boston City Council is questioning the growing cost of a plan to relocate or expand seven popular schools this fall, casting a cloud of uncertainty over the changes. The cost has nearly doubled to $20 million since last November when the School Committee approved the plan, which also includes the opening of two new schools.

Room for Debate: Got a Computer? Get a Degree NYT:  Harvard and M.I.T. are going to offer free courses online, but not for credit. Why not?

Comments

[Bruce]

Many of those schools focused on increasing AP access would do better to focus more on the preparatory courses the students need to take in the years (especially tenth grade) before students enter AP. A good program for this is IGCSE, the International General Certificate of Secondary Education from Cambridge International Examinations. IGCSE is available in over 100 countries worldwide but only in a few American states (a few schools in Florida and Virginia, and one school in California, are the only American IGCSE schools that I know of). The world's most popular curriculum for 14- to 16-year-olds, IGCSE is commonly used in leading international schools to prepare for IB, and works well for AP as well. I used a modified IGCSE exam to assess students' preparation for my AP course at Locke; after the school was reconstituted and a much younger faculty was brought in, this practice naturally disappeared, and the school's AP passing rate plummeted.

[Sarah]

I agree, Bruce. I had 5 AP credits going into college, so it’s not like I couldn’t adapt, but the intellectual divide between AP and non-AP courses was jarring, to say the least. My 11th grade accelerated pre-calculus class, for example, taught virtually no skill applicable to AP calculus, and most students spent the first month struggling to catch up. Better preparatory courses would have been a godsend, without question.

[Sarah]

And about rewriting NCLB?
…
As if that’ll ever happen. It needs to happen, but I guess I've become disillusioned that the government will ever get education on the right track.

[Sarah]

I agree, Bruce. I had 5 AP credits going into college, so it’s not like I couldn’t adapt, but the intellectual divide between AP and non-AP courses was jarring, to say the least. My 11th grade precalculus class, for example, taught virtually no skill applicable to AP calculus, and most students spent the first month struggling to catch up. Better preparatory courses would have been a godsend, without question.

[Sarah]

Sorry for the duplicate. I again got the message that I hadn't typed the Captcha image correct, redid it and then the post showed up...

[Bruce]

ESEA needs to be rewritten, in my view without NCLB (which perhaps ought to be simply rescinded, or at least with the annual testing excised, in which case what's left?), but the passage of NCLB was a rare moment when both parties were able to cooperate (in other words, when the Democrats disastrously failed to prove an effective opposition party to the illegitimate administration of George W. Bush), and those days have been rare for quite a while now. As for your calculus studies, I always argued at Locke that AP for the masses actually lowered academic standards, since a large number of underprepared students entering such classes forces lots of remedial review and robs the fewer students who actually are prepared of weeks of instruction that could have increased their scores; while the absence of these ambitious, underprepared students leaves the remaining students in the standard courses in intellectual ghost towns.

[Sarah]

I still have mixed feelings on the AP classes I took. I was pressured heavily by teachers and guidance counselors to take AP because the high school I attended rarely failed to challenge me. While it looked good on a college application because I'd scored 5's on most of them (short of APUSH, where I got a 4, but then history isn't a favored subject), the only ones that the college accepted was AP Statistics, AP English and AP History. Because I'm in engineering, Physics and Calculus classes are "Physics for Engineering" and "Calculus for Engineering," so those two exams counted for nothing. I could have skipped them and taken a subject I love rather than the ones teachers told me I really needed to take.