a strong voice for kids 2nd Congressional District
a strong voice for kids 2nd Congressional District
We reviewed recent legislation to see if we want to advocate on any bills. We decided to write a letter asking the Governor to sign the following:
SB 196 - State Land Board Investment & Development Fund.
SB 32 - December 1 Count Date for Preschool Students, which despite its name was changed to make November 1 the alternative count date for the Colorado Preschool Program and early childhood special ed. It no longer allows the Consolidated Child Care Pilots to waive the date of the count.
SB 91 - School Accreditation Data, which adds dropout rates to the accreditation indicators and has the SBE establish a formula to calculate dropout rates.
SB 139 - Statewide Online Education Programs, which pretty much now contains only the reauthorization of supplemental online services, with a $500,000 appropriation. Requires an RFP for the service provider, but that can’t be a school district. The provider must have demonstrated experience serving Colorado school distrticts. CDE still maintains oversight of the program.
HB 1024 - Income Tax Checkoff to Fund Before- and After-School Programs, would give CDE the responsibility to determine whom the grants are allocated to.
HB 1246 - Assessments for Students with IEPs, which allows the SBE to appoint most of the members to the task force.
The other bills we discussed were as follows:
HB 1216 - School Improvement Action Cycle, which ended up giving the local school district the job of restructuring persistently low-performing schools; if that fails after 3 years, the SBE gets to approve or disapprove the plan. However, if we and the district disagree, the two parties have to "work it out," which isn’t as strong as we would like it, in terms of the SBE having oversight on the improvement planning. Munn doesn’t think the bill will be signed. We could not reach consensus on it, so decided to remain neutral.
SB 19 - School District Reporting, codifies the EDAC (Education Data Advisory Committee), which already exists within CDE.
SB 50 - School Districts, allows school districts to adopt a resolution stating intent not to accept funding from NCLB, without being sanctioned by CDE in Accreditation. It has been allowed to become law without the Governor’s signature.
SB 71 - Charter Schools, was rewritten extensively, leaving only the requirement for a task force, but it was killed in the Senate.
SB 81 - School District Nutrition Policies, requiring districts’ nutrition policies to concur with federal law, was signed by the Governor.
SB 88 - Kindergarten Programs, requiring all districts to have a kindergarten, was signed into law.
SB 214 - K-12 School Accountability, was a rewrite of all the accountability systems, but it was reduced in scope; it now maintains the academic performance rating and contains most of the SBE’s recommendations for changing the SARs. It changes the labels of the ratings, calls for an outside evaluation of the accountability systems, requires some SARs to be printed in Spanish, and adds a task force to review the definitions of assaults/fights for how they are captured on the SARs. It now leaves accreditation alone, but encourages more longitudinal growth assessments to be added. DeHoff said that we should oppose the bill because the labels of "Priority" and "High Priority" are unclear. Munn, Polis, and I argued that we should support the bill because there are so many good features and we can live with these labels. DeHoff admitted that there is a lot in the bill that we wanted, but he said that the bill goes farther than what we asked for. Suckla said we "should call a spade a spade" in regard to labeling low-performing schools, and thus she opposes it. Since we were not in agreement, we decided to stay neutral.
HB 1027 - College Prep Courses in High Schools, now has CCHE notifying students who do poorly on the ACT. Polis said that it is "an end-run around school districts" by requiring them to provide remedial courses for subjects that are necessary for college admissions. We play no role in this and decided to make no comment.
HB 1088 - Education for Children of Incarcerated Parents, has been rewritten to require the Department of Corrections to ask incoming inmates if they have children in school and find out what schools, and then compile a list of resources to help those kids.
HB 1164 - Achievement Exams in High School, the bill eliminating the 10th grade CSAP, was killed in the Senate. We are glad!
HB 1217 - Calculation of Academic Longitudinal Growth, passed. We don’t think it’s in any danger of being vetoed.
HB 1237 - Statewide Physical Education Recognition Program, creates within CDE the Statewide Quality Physical Education Recognition Program to recognize and reward public schools and physical education teachers that are exemplary. A nonprofit recommends to the SBE who should be recognized and awarded.
HB 1238 - School Readiness Quality Improvement, is a good bill. It won’t need our help. (I would have a conflict of interest voting for the SBE to support this bill, since I am the state coordinator for this program, although when the bill takes effect next year, I’ll have to quit the job because it will become full-time, which I do not want to do.)
SJR 47 - School Finance Interim Committee, includes an SBE member on the task force. We will decide at the Retreat which SBE member will serve on it.
HB 1087 - International Education Advisory Council to State Board of Ed, requires the SBE to appoint the committee to advise us about international education.
We reviewed our Legislative Priorities which we had set back in September, and it appears that most of our desired changes occurred!
CDE’s budget, based on the Long Bill, SB 200, has been increased, happily in the area of management and administration.
The Harrison School District has been very cooperative working with CDE on their instructional audit in April. There were 18 CDE staff (and Peggy Littleton from the SBE) who worked as part of the team. There were at least 240 hours during April spent by team members in Harrison, an equivalent of $30,000. From all the information collected by Gary Sibigtroth, common themes were that leadership and governance are vital in success for the district moving forward, such as what the school board decides, stabilizing the district administration, coming up with a sustained change effort for the secondary schools, involving the community more, and providing inservices to help principals be consistent and instructional leaders. District governance issues include hindrance of strategies for things like moving the most experienced teachers to the schools with the greatest need. The district has many highly qualified teachers. District communication with the community needsw to improve, helping parents understand standards and high expectations from student requirements. Strategies are needed to close the achievement gap.
I asked if we will have to replicate this kind of effort in other districts. Roscoe Davidson said that every district’s needs are different. In the Sheridan School District, the district leadership was more open initially to making changes. We try to be helpful first, before using our power as a regulatory agency. Another district that might need some help and is suffering from a lot of conflict is Fort Lupton. Also, the Centennial and Estes Park districts need help. Suckla mentioned that the Centennial school board is very divided and we Board members should keep our distance at this time, in case we have to step in and take action.
Bill Windler said that the U.S. Department of Education will allow us to submit amendments over the next several days. We are asking USDOE to clarify their concern about notification by districts regarding Highly Qualified Teacher requirements. Windler gave us a long list of entities that have worked in cooperation with CDE on the implementation of NCLB. I mentioned that CSAN (Colorado State Accountability Network) should be in the list, having done a substantial amount of parent involvement work. CDE is contracting with Omni Research to evaluate the current implementation strategies of NCLB. Windler reviewed the history of why we created the HR1 Hub Committee, to advise CDE in drafting its NCLB application. He said that various parts of subcommittees continue to consult with CDE in various areas, such as ELL. Federal statute requires states to have a State Committee of Practitioners to advise CDE on how NCLB activities will be implemented throughout the state. Title I Part A drives most of the work, since it is the part with AYP and the part giving the bulk of the federal funding. The SCP has been working, and we were given a list of its members and a sample agenda. Only 3 states (including Oregon and Kansas), not Colorado, do take advantage of the flexibility for the additional 2% for special education "gap" students. Texas excluded 10% of its special education students from AYP and was fined thousands of dollars. Other states have been fined for not aligning their state assessments with their state standards, and other items of non-compliance. Trish Boland works with the SCP. There is an opportunity for ex-officio members on the SCP. The Front Range Title I Directors meet monthly and have consulted with CDE on issues of Title I. There is a large group, with many subcommittees, who are an advisory group to CDE on ELL. Windler suggested that for us to propose amendments to our plan for next April 1, we use the SCP, and allow it to pull ideas from the Hub Committee and all the other groups.
Roscoe Davidson presented a list of the members of the HR1 Hub Committee and all of the 10 subcommittees. He then proposed a plan for the reporting of AYP, to incorporate it into the Accreditation process, to "frame" what AYP really represents. He suggested that we focus on the percentage of "targets" met, so districts and schools can focus on the ones they didn’t make. Based on that, he suggested that we differentiate the success in meeting targets with designations such as "Commended for Achievement" and "Requiring Improvement" and use these with Accreditation indicators.
Dorothy Gotlieb gave us a list of all the groups she has worked with on HQT (Highly Qualified Teachers). Over 90% of our teachers are HQT All teachers will meet the HQT definition by the required 2005-2006 school year except emergency licensed teachers. There are some unresolved issues with Special Education teachers at the secondary level. Colorado was found to be out of compliance in a couple of areas that amounted to terminology, which the SBE has fixed in rules changes. Not everyone is happy with Colorado’s HQT policies, but everyone has been informed about it, and she insists that "we are open to hearing any concern, any comment" on this topic. Rural areas have the highest and lowest rates of HQT. The National Council on Teacher Quality gave Colorado an A+, the only state to receive that grade on our HQT, and the next highest state received a B+.
Moloney said that we had 163 people involved with the Hub Committee. I expressed dismay that on Suckla’s agenda for this meeting, there was no report from the Hub Committee, just from staff. Staff said that the minutes from that meeting are not available (and my notes were not allowed for consideration). I strongly stated the importance of the information from that meeting be part of this discussion. I asked to read my list of the recommendations that came from the Hub Committee, from my notes, but Suckla did not let me. (Later I just passed them to her in writing.)
DeHoff said that a great deal of controversy exists about our HOUSSE policy (Highly Objective State System of Evaluation, which is to qualify veteran teachers to be HQT). Gotlieb said that we don’t really have a HOUSSE; she said that our generic interpretation of the HQT requirements serve us sufficiently, except for the two areas she mentioned in her report above, which she says we still need to work on.
I asked again whether we are going to submit to NASBE a list of our state’s recommendations for changes to NCLB. Suckla said that she doesn’t want NASBE’s list to "drag us down." She said that in anticipating this question, she had drafted a letter to NASBE, which she expects I won’t like. I explained that what NASBE wants is just input from all states to come up with a list of things that everyone agrees on; if we don’t submit a list, we have no participation in what is and is not on the list. I also said that we got the Position Paper last month with ideas, and it was my impression that today we were going to look at that list and made some decisions. Middleton agreed that we should send our thoughts to NASBE, probably incorporating the suggestions in the Position Paper. DeHoff said that everyone agrees on changing the definition of AYP and the inclusion of ELL. Suckla agreed to have everyone submit their suggestions to revise her draft letter, and then she will rewrite it and send it.
Munn said that we shouldn’t be afraid to recommend changes, even if they don’t appear to conform with the law, if we think they are the right things to do. DeHoff said that there are two issues here, changes to our state implementation plan and recommendations for changes that should be made to the law. We agreed that for the proposed process for future planning and implementation activities, for submitting the plan by next April, we remove the statement: "Only those recommendations consistent with statute or federal rule will be accepted for consideration."
Munn expressed concern that he has never before today heard about the SCP. No other SBE member (including me) indicated that they had either. He asked how the members got onto it. Trish Boland said that the department put out inquiries for membership through all of its regular communications, such as The Buzz. She said that she is willing to have SBE members on it. She said that finding a local school board member and a parent to serve on it is very difficult, since these people have a heard time attending day-time meetings regularly.
Polis said that he’s frustrated with this process; there are two issues involved. He said that we’ve spent a lot of time discussing the procedural issues of the state plan. He suggested that the Board spend an hour coming up with recommendations for NASBE. [This never happened.]
Orr brought up the question about whether we have to comply fully with NCLB, since we’re not being fully funded. But, on the other hand, he questioned how we determine what full funding is.
To conclude, Suckla said that we need to seek input from staff, SBE members, and others to define "areas of need" on changes to our state implementation plan. We need to identify the needed HR1 subcommittees to work on those areas. She wants minutes of Hub Committee meetings to come to the Board. She questioned whether SBE members should be on these subcommittees, because we could influence their decisions, rather than having them come to us. Munn said that there is a concern about a CDE staff member chairing the subcommittees; Suckla recommended that the subcommittees be co-chaired by a CDE person and a non-CDE person. Polis and I said that we want SBE members to be able to serve on the subcommittees. At our Retreat, we will all bring our areas of concern, and we will decide what the subcommittees should be. Windler brought back the issue of the SCP’s role, which he wants to be central and do the filtering. Middleton said that she thought the Hub Committee was the central filtering committee. Middleton asked if we could make nominations for the SCP from our Congressional Districts (the members listed as being from her CD, the 7th, were all actually in the 4th CD). Suckla said that we will decide at our June Retreat what the process will be and who will be on what.
ORR: Has been getting phone calls about problems in the Campo School District; they will have to shut down their school, which has 200 kids (the school is the entire district). He offered to go down to help mediate, if the school board and community would ask him.
LITTLETON: Recently went to an exhibit of glass sculpture at the Belaggio in Las Vegas; saw how the artist makes his glass sculpture. Went to a Reading First meeting and a planning meeting for the next Reading Conference. Visited the Odyssey project, which implements best practices in Reading.
MIDDLETON: Was the only SBE member who didn’t receive an invitation to the PEBC (Public Education and Business Coalition) luncheon. Went to the Small Schools conference and was on a panel there; got feedback about CSAP and NCLB and the need for more school funding. Two of her Chambers of Commerce had annual events; at both, the importance of education was a repeated theme. Served on a panel at the Gender Equity conference. Attended the Shakespeare Day put on by DPS 5th graders. Attended a meeting of the bAurora Economic Council, where they discussed Referendum C and the importance of adequate funding for K-12 and higher education
DEHOFF: Went to NASBE Study Group in Princeton on Value-Added. Sanders gave a presentation, and there was one about England’s longitudinal growth assessment system. Attended a meeting that ECS had here on charter school districts. Collegiate Academy, which he helped found, celebrated its 10th anniversary. Attended the PEBC luncheon. Went to the VIP night at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science to see the new Lewis & Clark exhibition. Will be on Independent Thinking this Friday night. Went to part of the Gender Equity Conference. Met with Douglas County School District on their idea for becoming an independent school district .
MUNN: Spent a lot of time working this past month working with legislators on HB 1216. Attended Bright Beginnings, helping parents prepare their kids for school.
HUDAK: I attended the PEBC lunch, and reported that there were some very interesting facts about former Commissioner Cal Frazier mentioned when he received an award; also, Monte Moses, the state and national Superintendent of the Year, gave a good keynote speech, which mostly included criticism of NCLB. I attended the last meeting of the Special Ed. Advisory Committee, which had a touching good-bye celebration for retiring director Lorrie Harkness. Also, they discussed the noteable change in IDEA’s reauthorization from the "discrepancy model" of identifying special education students to the "RTI" model (Response to Intervention). I also went to the Gifted and Talented State Advisory Committee (in place of Polis), which had two questions for us: Would SBE members be willing to rotate attendance at advisory committee meetings? Can the GT/SAC have a regularly scheduled annual meeting with the SBE at a Work Session? I reported their other input: Please consider having a GT/SAC member on all task forces we create. The impact of NCLB on gifted children is discouraging; it is narrowing the curriculum. I attended the Diversity Conference sponsored by COSPRA (Colorado School Public Relations Association), which was very information. Karen Gerwitz, our Director of Board Relations, has just become President of COSPRA. Finally, I reported that I testified at the Legislative Legal Services Committee on SB 183, to try to preserve the SBE’s rules on tuition for out-of-district choice placements of special education students, the topic of HB 1255, which was vetoed by the Governor. Fortunately, the committee decided that they could not deny our rules for this year, but that is only because their bill was for rules passed during 2004.
POLIS: [I didn’t record what he said.]
SUCKLA: Has had 500 calves born on the ranch this spring. Went to the Western Slope Superintendents meeting, where she took some criticism about NCLB and things done within CDE. Vody Herrmann made an excellent presentation about school finance. CASE is working with McCREL to do an administrator training. Had a presentation on the pending litigation on adequacy of school funding. Went to the Southern Superintendents meeting, which covered very different topics from the Western Superintendents meeting.
The Year of Math is coming to a close. CDE staff hadn’t anticipated dealing with literacy as well, but they did because of the changes made to the CBLA (Colorado Basic Literacy Act) rules. Looking at those two subjects concurrently brought some interesting realizations. Jo O’Brien and staff visited with over 800 Coloradans in regard to the Math Standards. CDE has produced a "white paper" entitled "The State’s Prime Numbers," which we received a draft of. The bottom line is that there is an essential lack of concern about the importance of knowing math. On the other hand, people feel reading and writing are essential. The "third world" has pumped up its math instruction, but America hasn’t. Math literacy is essential for success in education and the workforce. There is statewide agreement that the "what" of our math assessment frameworks are "on target." But there is great variability in local delivery of math instruction. We have uniformly disappointing math results. Our state is in the top 20 of all states on the NAEP math test, 12th in the nation on 4th grade math, but we have no more than 34% of students proficient. On CSAP, the highest achievement, in 2004, was 58.6 percent proficient or advanced, in 5th grade. It goes down every grade from there. Schools with weak math results neither emphasized math not believed that math can be achieved by most students. People believe in arithmetic but think that only people with a "knack" can do higher math. In schools with strong math results, math is incorporated both explicitly and through inquiry every day. In schools where there was a belief that students could do more than arithmetic, they ensure that teachers know the standards, have a keep knowledge of math, and monitor students progress frequently.
Core deficits (what is agreed that kids cannot do in math) are as follows: arithmetic, concepts, and problem-solving. There are 4 essential prerequisites necessary for doing math, which is the previous three, plus reasoning ability. Practitioners in the field requested help with articulation of math instructional priorities at each grade level, examples of schools with good math results, and early assessment tools. CSAP cohort groups were compared over 3-year periods, and it showed that poor math performance correlates with free/reduced lunch (i.e., poor) students, but there are exemplary exceptions. These schools have 90-minute math blocks, direct instruction, established teacher performance expectations, and small-group interventions during and after school. Two outstanding examples are Wyatt-Edison Charter School in Denver and Jefferson Middle School in Rocky Ford. These schools also have teacher collaboration on the instruction of math. There are a number of statewide math support systems for schools.
The most important elements for success in math instruction are the following: making sure teachers are clear on the math topics in the standards; being clear on what specific proficient student work looks like at each grade level; ensuring that the school and teachers believe students can achieve in math; using current research in math cognition and learning; ensuring that students are fluent in arithmetic; ensuring that students understand why math operations function the way they do (concepts); ensuring math reasoning (using logic); teaching problem-solving techniques; diagnosing what students understand; and recruiting good math teachers.
Our math standards were analyzed in comparison with national and other state math standards. The recommendation is for us to keep the language of our six standards the same; they are current and appropriate. Massachusetts and Minnesota are the top math performers, and our math standards match theirs. The math benchmarks indicate no substantive omissions or errors, but the 6th standard will be revised to replace "fluency" for the current language of "understanding," and to say "algorithm" instead of "method."
CDE has built our own math page on our website, Coloradomath.net, with links to various research, examples of good instruction, data on our assessments, and links to best practices.
We should encourage people to attend the Math Summit on June 7, for people in the field to hear about the proposed changes to the standards. At our July meeting, we will have a hearing on the proposed changes and will probably adopt them thereafter.
NASBE elections: We decided that our state should vote for Randy DeHoff for Western Area Director of NASBE. (He’s the only candidate.) For President-Elect, since DeHoff and I agree on the same candidate, the rest of the Board agreed that our state should support him.
Paperless Board Meetings: At our June Retreat, we will have a demonstration of our new system for paperless board meetings. There will be a wireless system to "broadcast" the Board Book in the Board Room during meetings. There will be a website with all the information on it. We will save a great deal of money that has been spent on copying.
The June Retreat: Karen Stroup needs to know our decision items for next year’s budget. We should discuss who will serve on the School Finance Interim Committee. We need to do our annual staff evaluations (of our two employees, the Commissioner and the Director of Board Relations). We need to discuss conferences and travel to be allocated for Board members during the next fiscal year. We will discuss our ideas for NCLB changes. Suckla asked us to write a short paragraph about where we would like to see education in Colorado in the next 5 years.
Procedures for Exclusive Chartering Authority Hearings: We don’t have the most updated revision based on changes that the SBE had asked for in these procedures. We already adopted procedures for our June 6 hearing, and the question was whether to have those apply or revise them further at tomorrow’s meeting. The problem with changing them at this late date is that all the applicants (and challengers) were told of the rules the way we approved them. We decided that therefore those will apply, but we might approve some changes for future hearings.
HB 1246 became law without the Governor’s signature today.
"The Chalkboard" will be the title of the new internal CDE monthly newsletter, and the winners of the naming are being taken out to lunch at Strings tomorrow. One of us will be profiled in each issue. Its purpose is to improve internal communication within CDE so staff members are more aware of what: one another is doing.
CoLAB: Christine Baca had been the liaison to this advisory committee, so we need a replacement; DeHoff volunteered.
Libraries and Head Start: I received a request from someone on the Jeffco Library Board if we would support writing a letter to our Congressional delegation requesting the inclusion of library funding in the Head Start reauthorization. I had the State Library bring us a draft of a letter which we might send. We agreed that the letter can be done.
Food in school lunches: Suckla asked if the Board would approve of looking at the CDE policies on where food that is served in our schools comes from. She has concerns about Mad Cow Disease and where the beef comes from; she thinks we should require that beef in school lunches come from the United States only. She wanted to know if we are interested in her pursuing information on this topic. She says that this is a huge issue. Middleton said that we need to find out what the cost implications of any change might be. The Board agreed for Suckla to get some more information on what policies exist for the source of food items in school lunches.
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