a strong voice for kids 2nd Congressional District
a strong voice for kids 2nd Congressional District
Dorothy Gotlieb met with the Alliance for Quality Teaching on the rules for principal preparation, and their suggestions are forthcoming. Their feedback was basically approving of what we came up with, but they had some additions they'd like to see and some tweaking done.
Regarding No Child Left Behind: (1) Notifying parents of how many teachers are "highly qualified" is the districts' responsibility. (2) CDE is being asked to provide the teacher training programs appropriate for NCLB. Gotlieb suggested using a national approval organization and promised that we would ensure that they meet Colorado's standards and that CCHE's checklist for approving public institutions would be included. CDE can't do the approval because we grant the licenses, and we don't have the necessary staff either. (3) The teacher recruitment website is coming along well.
The staff in the Office of Professional Services and Educator Licensure has been reorganized for efficiency and user-friendliness. They are working on the phone message, which has been somewhat confusing.
OPS/EL has been working with the Special Education unit on teacher quality and on SE endorsements, NCLB, and what might be coming up with the reauthorization of IDEA. Next year the unit will look at all the licenses and endorsements that we give. It is not our intent to force out anyone who is qualified to teach in this state. If we hear about issues, we should let Gotlieb know. Will meet with the regional managers on licensing issues.
Troops to Teachers - Gotlieb spent a day with the program. We are getting mostly male teachers, especially for hard-to-recruit subjects and areas. The program is on the campus of University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.
Gotlieb met with the director of a new online special education program being developed. Met with future teacher programs for high school students in the state, which are coordinating their efforts.
She is working on issues of alternative licensing and Teacher in Residence programs. The Alliance got a grant from Donnell-Kay of $50,000 to study the effectiveness of these alternative programs.
Rule changes for January and February include national teacher credential - master teacher. We will be expanding beyond just the National Board Certification.
On the issue of the assessment for teachers: We will be adopting new cut scores. Have heard innumerable concerns about PLACE from CCHE, teacher candidates, administrators, etc. For example, too infrequent test administrations, insufficient test sites, lack of test preparation materials, reciprocity to other states sacrificed, psychometric quality, and little validity in some subject areas such as agriculture; not enough content assessment - some have more pedagogy than others; length of time for scores to be returned; more trivial areas of content being emphasized; concern over lack of correlation with teacher quality. Have had requests to add Praxis along with PLACE. Both of these tests use out-of-state test bank questions. Praxis has offered to work with us to ensure that it meets our content standards. Praxis is given frequently in a variety of locations. Gotlieb insists that students complete their content area studies before doing their student teaching, so taking the test before student teaching ensures that the student teacher is knowledgeable in the content area. Our contract with PLACE is not exclusive. If we cancel the contract, we must notify them by February 1 in order for it to be voided by May 1. We will send it out now. This would allow us to put out a new RFP and opens our options. Praxis also provides a paraprofessional test, which is required by NCLB.
The institutions of higher education are planning to come up with a "final exam" in the content area and teaching proficiency for science. This could become an alternative to both PLACE and Praxis.
We have had online programs in Colorado since the SBE began a pilot project in 1995 with Monte Vista. We now have 16 programs with about 2600 students. Last year we had 705 students. These original students will receive the full PPOR from the district where the cyberschool is located, although the legislation passed this year provides all new students with the average statewide PPOR. Colorado has the highest number of cyberschools in a state. Suckla said that she visited with the superintendent of a cyberschool and was disappointed that they didn't seem to care how much the kids were learning or how much they achieved.
Some districts have not made a good faith effort to get their cyberschool students to take CSAP; they treat CSAP as an opt-in rather than opt-out. For example, one gave the test only in the district where the school is located, forcing students who live hundreds of miles away to go there for several days if they wanted to take the test. Also, they feel that they should be exempted from the SAR ratings. Some schools, however, are very diligent in this area and tell students that taking the CSAP is a requirement of attending the school. DeHoff suggested that we might look into requesting that there be legislation requiring that 95% of their students take CSAP or they won't get the PPOR. Orr mentioned that we haven't tied accreditation to money and that this would invalidate local control. Moloney said that we can use accreditation to achieve the level of compliance that we want. Stanford pointed out that the SBE chose to delegate the accreditation of local schools to the districts, and we might want to take back the accreditation of the cyberschools.
A group of the cyberschool directors met at CDE on Monday and agreed to collaborate to hold regional testing sites to administer CSAP.
When districts are evaluated for accreditation, the cyberschools will be evaluated according to the same criteria as the brick-and-mortar schools. CDE will be putting out some quality standards that parents can look at to evaluate cyberschools. Cyberschools will be required to report their CSAP scores, the quality of their teachers, etc.
CDE is about to administer a grant of $700,000 per year for two years from NCLB to provide supplemental courses to Colorado Online Learning .
The task force for online learning will meet for the first time tonight. Stanford is the SBE's appointee. The task force is charged to study 12 charges in 4 basic areas: quality, accountability, equity/access, and funding. There is a staff committee within CDE to resolve issues such as the start date (some don't start until October 1 when they're sure they have the funding), duplicate student counts, attendance, degree of parent and student contact (who is really keying in the work), and class size requirements.
There is a timeline of SAR data that must be collected from the districts. Many of the items require approval of the district superintendent. Staff at CDE has worked very hard to deal with every question and concern that has come up. By November 27, 2002, every superintendent will have a copy of their district's SARs. CDE guarantees that the schools will have everything before the information is released to the public. The Governor's press conference will be on December 5 at 11 a.m. Stanford pointed out that last year the concern was that superintendents were called by the press and asked questions regarding how they compared with other districts, but they had information only about their own district, whereas the press had all the districts. Also, we can let superintendents who have unsatisfactory schools know how many there were in total (a piece of information that the press has been especially interested in).
Polis asked why we aren't making the SAR information available as soon as we have it. DeHoff said that checking continues to go on until the SARs are finished being printed. Moloney said that the auditing process is ongoing as well. Last year errors were discovered while printing was taking place. The SARs will be mailed from the printer to the school districts beginning on December 2. The information will be embargoed until the press conference on December 5. CDE is confident that the SARs will be out by December 15, as promised. However, the law still says November 15, and Stanford asked if we might reach that date next year or should advocate for December. Karen Stroup said that she thinks we need to stick with the December 15. Stanford suggested that we consider December 1 and pointed out that since districts already must do a report to their communities by December 1, we should incorporate the SAR distribution conveniently with the other annual report.
The individual student identifier system has been put in place. In the recent test run, there was only a 2% error margin (of duplications), which is very low for the beginning of such a system. The state collects about 13 pieces of information on each student to identify and differentiate them (e.g., name, birth date, address, etc.).
So far, no districts have applied to be part of the pilot project on longitudinal growth that was included in the recent School Finance Act. It seems that it requires more work on their part. We will be considering the rules in January.
The Governor's proposal includes a 4% across-the-board cut; for CDE that amounts to 6% because the SARs and CSAPs cannot be cut. (Additional money still needs to be cut, which will likely be another 6% asked for in the next couple of weeks.) The cut does not reduce total program, categoricals, or CSDB. The proposal commits 5% from the general fund of the 5.3% increase in school funding. Owens proposes to take $51 million from the State Education Fund. The SBE had requested cutting the entire $1.5 million from the Irwin Schools of Excellence Award category, but OSPB refused to reduce it entirely; however, they did agree to let it take a 20% cut so that other categories, such as libraries, took only a 4% cut.
CDE received a $9.3 million grant to prepare teachers (both pre-service and in-service) to become proficient in the use of strategies and methods that develop English language learners' English proficiency and support their transition to U.S. culture and academic environments. The grant is the first of its kind ever awarded by the U.S. Department of Education; it is part of Title II of NCLB. Its focus is on developing English through teaching content (reading, math, science, etc.). Flora Camejos-Lenhart from CDE is the director and designer of the grant.
A press conference was held to announce the grant, followed by a performance of the Swansea Elementary ballet group.
The Legislature passed a bill changing how we fill vacancies on the Board. Some of our operating rules need to change to comply. There were a few other minor changes to fit current statutes (such as the procedures for reporting and conducting executive sessions). Suckla suggested that we add a rule forbidding Board members from working on campaigns for other board members; DeHoff told us to think about it and we'd discuss it next month.
Regarding new rules for the case of a tie vote for Chair and Vice Chair (since in January the Board will have 4 Republicans and 4 Democrats), we were presented with a number of different options that members came up with, as well as what other states with even-numbered boards do. DeHoff said that we'll decide at the December meeting as to what the new rules should be. He suggested that the Board meet after the swearing-in on Tuesday, January 14, to do the elections, so that the leadership will be in place for the Work Session and Regular Meeting on Wednesday and Thursday.
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