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Education News in Alabama
By Sallie Owen
1. EDUCATION SUMMIT NEXT WEEK IN BIRMINGHAM You are invited to the 2008 Spring Education Summit from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Wednesday, April 9, at the Wynfrey Hotel. The theme is "Engaging Our Communities, the Key to Better Schools." The summit is jointly sponsored by the A+ Education Foundation, Leadership Alabama, the Mobile Area Education Foundation, and the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama. Here's the schedule: 9:30 a.m. Registration 10 a.m. What's So Important About Community? 10:30 a.m. Spotlight on Success — Yes We Can! Mobile Carolyn Akers, Mobile Area Education Foundation 11:15 a.m. You Can Do It! We Can Help — Tools For Your Community Moderated by Katherine Mitchell, Founder of the Alabama Reading Initiative Noon Lunch and Facilitated Discussion of Your Community 1:30 p.m. Moving Forward — What You Need 2 p.m. Adjourn HOW TO REGISTER The registration fee is $15. You may register by sending an email to la@leadershipal.org. The deadline to register is Monday, April 7. Feel free to extend this invitation to education champions in your community! We hope to see you there! 2. RESEARCH FINDING: A six-year study from the Annenberg Institute for School Reform finds that community engagement leads to stronger schools. Researchers found that community organizations can drive and sustain improvements in public schools, leading to results such as improved test scores and higher graduation rates. Find an executive summary and the full report "Organized Communities, Stronger Schools: A Preview of Research Findings" at http://snipurl.com/communities. 3. LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW SCHOOLS, SCHOOL SYSTEMS ARE DOING How many students are enrolled? How many teachers work in a school? Are highly qualified teachers distributed fairly across a school system? Are students in some schools more likely to have teachers who are qualified to teach that particular subject? What is your system's largest source of funding? Report cards for every public school and school system in Alabama are available online that would help you answer these questions and many others. Look up report cards for individual schools and whole school systems at http://snipurl.com/reportcards. Find a statewide summary and a report card glossary at http://snipurl.com/statecard. 4. PROPOSED EDUCATION BUDGET PROTECTS K-12 PROGRESS Alabama's public schools, which teach 740,000 of our state's children, have made historic progress. The best indicator of this is Alabama's best-in-the-nation gains in fourth-grade reading, as measured by the highly regarded National Assessment of Education Progress. Legislators are writing an education budget that will be at least $400 million smaller than the one Alabama is operating on now. Gov. Bob Riley proposed cuts designed to protect the progress made in K-12 public schools. Protecting K-12's progress shifts a greater share of cuts onto higher education. K-12 public schools have far more accountability to the public for both academic results and finances. And when appropriations run short, K-12 public schools have few options to make up the difference. During the financial boom times, higher education got record increases in state funding, but students and their families still faced record tuition hikes. 5. STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION UPDATE: The Alabama State Board of Education met in a work session on March 27. All were present except Sandra Ray and the governor. State Superintendent Joe Morton presented research supporting proposals to strengthen Alabama's high school graduation requirements. The biggest change would be making the "college prep" curriculum the default curriculum for all high school students starting with freshmen in fall 2009. This would be called the "First Choice" diploma, and students would be able to opt out if their parents agree. Morton highlighted these research findings:
ACCESS, Alabama's distance learning initiative will be key to implementing the stronger requirements. Among the ACCESS course offerings are the advanced math and foreign languages (French, Latin, Spanish and German) that the First Choice diploma requires. Students in every public high school in Alabama can take the web-based ACCESS classes, officials said. However, the video-conferencing classes are only available in high schools with specialized labs. The number of those labs is growing as funding permits. Two superintendents, who both said the stronger graduation requirements are doable, praised the way ACCESS has helped their students excel. "It is allowing me to customize a plan for every child," said Tarrant Superintendent Martha Rizzuto, referring to benefits for both struggling and advanced students. Perry County Superintendent John Heard said students realized that their Hoover classmates had the same questions they did. "They buckled down and learned more together," he said. "This has caused our kids to blossom and bloom." Heard quoted a student who said, "ACCESS is not the wave of the future — it is a solution for today." WE NEED YOU Spread the word Want to subscribe? The A+ Education Foundation, based in Montgomery, publishes Education News in Alabama twice a month. A+ is a nonprofit organization that advances policies, programs and initiatives in Alabama's K-12 education system that result in high achievement by every child. Past editions can be found at www.aplusala.org/ednews/index.asp Feedback is welcome. Send messages to comments@aplusala.org |
April 1, 2008 (A+ Education Foundation
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Montgomery, AL 36103
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