Information for US Teachers

AACTE Weekly News Briefs | September 22, 2009
. . . delivered to your inbox so you can enjoy up-to-date news on colleges of education, teaching and the classroom, legislation, STEM teacher issues, grants, and upcoming events. Please click on linked headlines for full story.

AACTE ANNOUNCEMENTS

2010 AACTE Awards Entry Deadline: October 2
Don't miss the chance to gain national recognition for your program! Submit your application for the 2010 AACTE Best Practice Awards by October 2.

Early Bird Registration Open for 62nd Annual Meeting & Exhibits
Come to Atlanta for AACTE's 2010 Annual Meeting & Exhibits! Register by October 30 and save $70.

NATIONAL NEWS

Defining 'College Ready,' Nationally
From Inside Higher Ed
The Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association have released common standards for core curriculums in mathematics and reading and writing that could create a set of widely embraced national (but not federal) standards for what high school students need to know to be "college ready" or to have the skills to enter the work force. (Comments are invited through October 21.)

Leading Education Associations Propose Comprehensive Approach to Measuring School Turnarounds
From Reuters
The Learning First Alliance, a partnership of 17 major national education associations including AACTE, has released principles for tracking efforts to turn around the nation's lowest-performing schools. Principles for Measuring the Performance of Turnaround Schools outlines how education agencies and communities can determine whether turnaround efforts are leading to both swift improvement and sustained change in persistently struggling schools.

Panel Urges Attention to Adolescent Literacy
From Education Week
A new report from the Carnegie Corporation of New York's Council on Advancing Adolescent Literacy calls for a "re-engineering" of the nation's approach to adolescent literacy, saying nothing short of a "literacy revolution" is needed to keep students in school and ensure that they are able to learn the complex material that college and careers will demand of them.

Initiative Focuses on Early Learning Programs
From The New York Times
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.

Which Came First – The Technology or the Pedagogy?
From THE Journal
Why is a generation of teachers more knowledgeable about technology than any before it arriving in classrooms with little understanding of how to teach with it? The "technological pedagogical content knowledge" or TPACK approach is a dramatic change from earlier methods that focused on the tool, not the instruction.

Schools Look Abroad to Hire Teachers
From The New York Times
Some American school districts have turned increasingly to overseas recruiting to find teachers willing to work in their hard-to-staff schools, according to a new report by the American Federation of Teachers. The report used government data to estimate that 19,000 foreign teachers were working in the United States on temporary visas in 2007, and that the number was rising steadily.

House Votes to End Subsidies to Student Loan Firms
From The Washington Post
The Democratic-led House approved a bill Thursday that would overhaul college lending and spend tens of billions of dollars on student grants, community colleges, school construction and early childhood education.

Principals Linked to Retention
From the Augusta Chronicle (GA)
Recent research shows the quality of principals has more to do with teacher retention – and student performance – than any other factor, including pay. The reasons teachers stay were identified in a recent study published in the Journal of Teacher Education by three researchers from Georgia State University.

NEWS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY

Study Examines Fla. ABCTE Candidates' Impact on Achievement
From "Teacher Beat" (Education Week Blog)
Mathematica Policy Research has a report out looking at a small group of Florida teachers who earned their teaching credentials through the American Board for the Certification of Teacher Excellence program. Students taught by the 25 English language-arts teachers studied did not have statistically different achievement results on the state test than those students taught by a "matched" comparison group on non-ABCTE teachers with similar characteristics. But students of the 18 ABCTE teachers scored lower than their counterparts in math by about 25 percent of a standard deviation.

Louisiana Regents Study Measures Effectiveness of New Teachers
From the Louisiana Board of Regents (Press Release)
Nine teacher education programs learned how well they prepare their graduates to teach students mathematics, science, social studies, language arts and reading during an August 27 presentation to the Board of Regents. Louisiana has gained national attention as one of the first states in the country to link student achievement to teacher preparation programs.

Harvard to Offer a Doctorate in Education Leadership
From The Boston Globe
The Harvard Graduate School of Education will offer a new, tuition-free doctoral degree in education leadership, its first new degree in 74 years. It will be taught by faculty from the education school, Harvard Business School, and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The program aims to train graduates for senior leadership roles in school systems, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and the private sector, school officials said.

ASU Creates K-12 Charter Schools
From The Arizona Republic
Wanting a research pipeline and college-prepared students, Arizona State University officials are creating their own K-12 charter schools. Universities around the country are doing the same, and the University of California-Davis, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Stanford, University of Chicago and others have started high schools in recent years – all focused on steering disadvantaged kids toward the university gates.

Obscure Database Is Key to U.S. Educational Funds for California
From the Los Angeles Times
California's chance to receive hundreds of millions of federal educational dollars may rest heavily on an obscure and long-neglected piece of education infrastructure: a statewide data system that tracks students, teachers and administrators year to year.

Klein Pressures Principals to Hire Reserve Pool's Teachers
From The New York Times
With more than 1,500 existing teachers on the city's payroll without permanent job placements, the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, has told principals that if they do not fill those jobs by the end of next month, they will lose any money they had allocated for their teacher vacancies.

OTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS/REPORTS

International Reading Association Calls for Final Comment on Draft Standards
The International Reading Association has posted a final draft of its revised Standards for Reading Professionals, to take effect in fall 2010 with program review for the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. Comments are due by November 1.

Progress Monitoring Within an RTI Model
From the RTI Action Update
In the context of an RTI prevention model, progress monitoring is used to assess student progress or performance in those areas in which they were identified by universal screening as being at-risk for failure. It is crucial that schools and districts support data-driven approaches and make training available to all teachers.

Reminder: Second Closing Date for TQP Grant Competition
The U.S. Department of Education has announced a second closing date for the Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) grant program competition: October 6. This date was set up to accommodate applicants affected by the technical amendments that Congress passed in July. Two amendments impacted the TQP grant program – extending the 12-month teacher residency program to 18 months and allowing 5th-year initial licensing programs to participate in the prebaccalaureate activity. However, all eligible partnerships may apply in this round of the competition.

Fulbright Applications Available for 2010-2011
October 15, 2009: Application deadline for Fulbright Classroom Teacher Exchange Program
January 15, 2010: Application deadline for Distinguished Fulbright Awards in Teaching
Visit www.fulbrightteacherexchange.org for application forms and more information on both programs.




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