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Wednesday, August 24, 2011

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Leticia Juarez

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SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. (KABC) -- They call it "Operation Student Recovery."

Volunteers from the San Bernardino City Unified School District went door to door Wednesday morning trying to find out why some 300 students missed the first week of school.

Three weeks ago, the school year started with several no-shows.

"Sometimes we find that there are some family situations that are making it difficult to go to school, and we'll brainstorm with the families to figure out some alternative possibilities," said Dr. Kennon Mitchell, assistant superintendent of student services.

Forty teams with the district hit the streets and went door-to-door armed with packets of information on alternative education programs.

A few years ago, Geovani Galeano learned the hard way just how easy it was to fall behind.

"You have friends that like to push the issue, like, 'Come on, let's go. Let's go. It's just one day,'" Galeano said. "One day accumulates, and by the time you know it, you don't know what anybody is learning in school no more."

School officials helped him enroll in a continuation program. He went on to earn his high school diploma in 2006.

There is also child care support for student-parents, which was the case for one student who had not yet returned to school.

"We find that sometimes kids don't know all the options available to them and all the alternative pathways to graduation," Mitchell said.

By the end of the day, volunteers visited more than 300 homes in an effort to get kids back in the classroom.

'Show Me' Your Facebook Friends, Internet Filters...

'Show Me' Your Facebook Friends, Internet Filters


EDUCATION WEEK

August 6, 2011 12:05 AM
By Ian Quillen

A recently passed Missouri law that restricts social networking relationships between teachers and students—even long after that student has left the classroom—is making local and national headlines.

The Huffington Post is reporting that the law, which was passed in mid July but has gained national attention this week, was created to ensure administrators and parents can monitor communication and prevent situations that may put students at risk, but not to prevent social networking between teachers and students on public sites like Facebook and Twitter. Yet some fear it will prevent just that, and our own Facebook research (meta much?) shows you all are divided on whether such interaction is appropriate.

The Kansas City Star says teachers are up in arms about a law they say over-reaches its intended purpose. And the Christian Science Monitor asks if it could prevent teachers from embracing the very tools that have been promoted as crucial to creating modern classrooms.

Despite the length of the document, formally named The Amy Hestir Student Protection Act after a woman who was repeatedly sexually assaulted by a middle school teacher, the Huffington Post says its essence boils down to these two paragraphs:


No teacher shall establish, maintain, or use a work-related internet site unless such site is available to school administrators and the child's legal custodian, physical custodian, or legal guardian.

No teacher shall establish, maintain, or use a nonwork-related internet site which allows exclusive access with a current or former student.
This isn't the first and won't be the last regulation restricting social networking use in an educational content, though it may be the first to do so on a statewide level. (If you know of others, we'd love to hear about them). But I can't recall one I've seen that goes so far as to prevent relationships into the indefinite future. According to my understanding, the law could so far as to outlaw a private virtual relationship between a teacher and a student who may have long since grown up and joined adulthood. (I'm proud to call old teachers like Mr. Bock, Mr. Mick, Mr. Himes, and Mr. Raygor Facebook friends, though Mr. Raygor's football rants need to stop.)

It's important to note that the law makes a differentiation between work- and nonwork-related sites. In other words, a teacher would presumably be allowed to run a class website, or even operate a class forum in a public website, so long as that site is accessible to anyone who wishes to use it, including administrators and parents.

That's actually less draconian than some recently passed restrictions, including one in the 130,000-student Prince George's County (Md.) school district that bans the posting of any school-related photos by students on public social networking sites. But the toughest part for educators to swallow may be that it takes control away from local districts, who are being pushed to take ownership of their own Web policy by ed-tech advocates.

Filtering Folley

Meanwhile, the Missouri Research & Education Network, or MOREnet, a statewide consortium that includes filtering software among the services it provides to about 100 districts, said it will deactivate a feature that had blocked non-sexual content geared toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) communities, according to a press release from the ACLU.

This is the first news in a while from the ACLU's national "Don't Filter Me" campaign, a letter-writing effort that threatens legal action against districts who block non-sexual LGBT content, based on the assertion that access to such content for should LGBT allies groups must be permitted based on the federal Equal Access Act.

And it illustrates that, just because filters can appear to be blocking material based on a political or social slant, it may not always be intentional. In this case, the Netsweeper filter provided by MOREnet had the option to filter for a category called "alternative lifestyles" that not only blocked sites supporting LGBT rights and education, but also those aimed at vegetarians and vegans.

Chicago Study Finds Mixed Results for AVID Program

Edweek.org.

May 6, 2011 

By Sarah D. Sparks

Individual interventions intended to improve academic skills, such as the

popular Advancement Via Individual Determination, or AVID, program, may

not secure a student’s path to graduation and college without a schoolwide

structure to support it, according to a study from the Consortium on Chicago

School Research.

In a report set for release in the fall and previewed at the American

Educational Research Association convention in New Orleans in April,

researchers analyzed how AVID, a study-skills intervention for middle-

achieving students, played out in 14 Chicago high schools. They found AVID

participants in 9th grade gained little advantage that year over peers not

taking part in the program, and remained off track for graduation and college.

The study highlights a potential pitfall for the dozens of student-based

interventions aiming to scale up nationwide through private support and

programs like the federal Investing in Innovation, or i3, program: As

programs move out of the schools for which they were originally

developed, their success becomes increasingly dependent on

individual schools’ context and capacity.

“We’re not really trying to say, does AVID work or doesn’t it, but what has

been its impact in the Chicago context,” said Jenny Nagaoka, the Chicago

Consortium’s associate director and postsecondary-studies manager, and a

study co-author. “It’s not a transformative experience for the AVID student; it’s

not doing enough to change the trajectory of these students for graduation.”

After adjusting for academic and socioeconomic differences between Chicago

students who took part in the AVID program and those who had never had

access to it, researchers found AVID seemed to have little impact on

students' GPAs.

SOURCE: Consortium on Chicago School Research

Ms. Nagaoka and her CCSR colleagues Melissa R. Roderick, a senior

director, and Melanie LaForce, a research analyst, studied 14,031 students

who attended 9th grade from 2004-05 to 2007-08, including 2,521 AVID

students. The students came from 14 schools with stable 9th grade AVID

programs with student data from both before and after the programs’

implementation...

Unlike other studies of the program, the CCSR researchers tried to control for

the fact that AVID chooses students who are already highly motivated to

achieve.

Ms. Nagaoka used a method known as “propensity matching.” She paired

students who attended after AVID was implemented with 7,357 9th graders

who attended the same schools in 2002 and 2003, before AVID, and

compared the performance of students with access to the program with that

of nonparticipating students who had similar academic and socioeconomic

profiles.

Ms. Nagaoka found that students participating in AVID had average

weighted grade point averages of 2.32 in English and 1.9 in

mathematics on a 4-point scale. Those averages were slightly better

than nonparticipating students’ GPAs of 2.06 in English and 1.75 in

math, but not good enough for the participants to be considered on

track for graduation. No significant effects were seen on students’

gains on state tests in reading, math, or science.

Robert P. Gira, the executive vice president of the San Diego-based AVID,

said the Chicago study was too short-term to be conclusive, because student

academic gains from AVID build over a student’s high school career. “We

expect 9th graders to be making some progress, but the real payoffs start to

happen two to three years later,” Mr. Gira said.

Ms. Nagaoka said the research team is also conducting long-term studies of

AVID in Chicago schools.

Doug Rohrer, a psychology professor at the University of South Florida, in

Tampa, found the CCSR study more rigorous than prior AVID research.

In a September 2010 analysis, the U.S. Department of Education’s What

Works Clearinghouse found only one of 66 AVID studies met its quality

standards. Based on that study, the clearinghouse found AVID had “no

discernible effects on adolescent literacy.”

Mr. Rohrer said school leaders should consider their entire school

improvement approach in selecting an intervention for their own campus.

“The critical question in my mind,” Mr. Rohrer continued, “is whether AVID is

better than requiring students to go to another class, such as an extra dose

of math or writing. Learning how to take notes is a fine strategy, but it

might not help you in Algebra 2 if you haven’t learned Algebra 1.”...

Girl sexually assaulted at Moreno Valley Mall

Girl sexually assaulted at Moreno Valley Mall

Does School Culture (and school lawyer culture) contribute to bullying in schools?

Sept 6 2001 San Diego Union Tribune article Grossmont School District failed its students is the lead in to the Santana High (Orange County, CA) tragedy says attorney Kenneth Hoyt." Shooter, Andy Williams exhibited signs and symptoms of a very troubled person... When you have a student who is missing excessive days and whose grades have dropped remarkably, these are red flags and there needs to be some intervention (I.E. A SCHOOL COUNSELOR. to take action) We believe that the school should have had procedures in place (Like the recommended number of ASCA MODEL TRAINED SCHOOL COUNSELORS, 5-6 FOR SANTA ANA HS)" "Based on the district's own review last year and information from the District Attorney's Office.

When parents of the two students shot to death at Santana High School in 

2001 offered to drop their lawsuit against the district in exchange for the district's holding a conference on school violence, the district refused! The district would rather continue spending mind numbing amounts of the taxpayers money on litigation rather than accept the parents offer to settle for no money, said attorney Kenneth Hoyt. (Associated Press report on September 9, 2005) Theses conferences should have been held anyway. Daniel Shinoff called the shooting "unforeseeable" and said the district WAS NOT CULPABLE.  (School attorneys encourage districts to follow a policy of "no investigation, no paper trail." Shinoff would rather show felonious and life threatening disregard for the safety of his student via non-action. Better to pretend that the problem doesn't exist than risk associated culpability for the single tragic incident.  Nothing is forseeable when you keep your eyes closed and turn away from the obvious problem all around you.) 

What reason could there be for harming and shooting Others?" said Grossmont High School District's Superintendent William Shinoff in a glazed-over idiotic looking stupor. (this was, as has happened so many times in Moreno Valley USD that few people on the inside know about all the skeletons and coverups,)  Shinoff's was a preplanned statement to divert from answering incriminating questions and a poorly vailed lead into complete denial) Denying the grieving parents closure or even the common respect of knowing measures would be discussed and implemented as the highest priority so this  won't happen again to another child.


"There is no excuse for that," added. Of course not you idiot. Nor is there any excuse for tolerance of bullies and covering up the multiple wrongdoings.  This moron thought that disassociation would gain the district some advantage with the legal system. He could not have been more wrong. His reoccurring ethic of Money before humanity would cost the Taxpayers  millions of dollars a year on lawyers who specialize in helping to cover or excuse administrators like Shinoff and hundreds of others who seek to avoid responsibility, not to solve problems. And they are the system that you leave your children with not understanding the actual risk.  The money would be better spent if administrators showed their caring by completely dealing with bullying and student safety before curriculum or asinine mandates like "W's" No Child Left Behind (in reality a thinly valed ongoing attempt at systematically destroying the hard fought importance of all children receiving an education equal and free.) but more than not our schools are run by bureaucratics who gave up on teaching but had too much money and education invested so they became petty, fear driven and cravenlly pervayors of disception and coverup - that is to say maintain business as usual. 


These types of administrators are driven by a Board of Education who collectively have little education, almost no experience within education and absolutely no other requirements. Felons - OK, Child Molesters - No ask, No tell and ability to care about kids - not hardly. The board is a stepping stone for small time politicians. Yes, they choose and reign over superintendents like Shinoff.