Presenter Leah Goldstein Moses - The Improve Group

Last week, I escaped the Minnesota cold and headed to San Francisco. The main purpose of my trip was to present to the Performing Arts Workshop Board about the ARISE project and our findings from last year’s evaluation. It was a wonderful opportunity to meet with Board members and share how the ARISE project is serving special needs elementary students through the arts. While I was in San Francisco, I had a chance to visit the teachers and schools we work with – I even ran into an ARISE artist as I was chatting with a teacher. At the end of my trip, I had a great discussion with Performing Arts Workshop artists that serve special needs students about what it means to serve students in special education.

We’ve been presenting about our findings from Project ARISE quite a bit lately. Last month, Leah (along with Tom and Jess from the Performing Arts Workshop) presented at a national meeting of Arts Education Project Directors on working with special needs students through the arts.

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For those of you about to head off to visit family and friends on this holiday weekend the Improve Group wishes you all safe and happy travels. In the spirit of thankful giving I am highlighting the following federal opportunity that may be of help to the many organizations that assist low income individuals and families.

This week’s pick: The Administration for Children and Families (ACF), Office of Community Services (OCS) is looking for applicants for the Assets for Independence (AFI) projects. “Grantees provide an array of supports and services to enable individuals and families with low incomes to become economically self-sufficient for the long-term. A primary feature of each AFI project is that project participants are given access to special matched savings accounts.” As a condition of their Federal AFI grant, grantees must provide non-Federal funds to support their AFI project in an amount at least equal to the Federal AFI grant amount.

There are 3 due dates for applications: Jan 15, March 25 and June 25, 2009. Applications are submitted electronically using www.grants.gov. 65 awards will be given out. To see the full announcement, click here.

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Researchers at the University of Vanderbilt have recently released a new checklist, the “Test Accessibility and Modification Inventory,” to assist test creators in creating “accessible” tests that can measure content area knowledge for students with disabilities and those that are mastering English.

The challenge is in creating tests that eliminate unneeded obstacles in measuring content knowledge for students with disabilities and students mastering English while not making the tests so simple that general education students can complete them without having to demonstrate their competence. Therefore, the Vanderbilt researchers hope that by following their field-tested questions, test creators can ask themselves the necessary questions in order to eliminate common problems that make tests less accessible.

Examples of items the checklist suggests include:
• using three multiple-choice answers instead of four
• more frequent, but shorter prose sections in reading comprehension evaluation
• using illustrations only when directly related to the answer.

The researchers state that these steps eliminate unneeded “distractors” while still adequately evaluating students’ actual knowledge of the material.

The need for creating accessible tests is largely driven by the testing requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act. The law’s regulations allow a proportion of students with disabilities to take different types of tests than general education students. Two percent of all students, or about twenty percent of students with disabilities, can be counted as proficient when they take alternate tests based on modified, but grade-level, academic standards. Those tests can have fewer questions, fewer multiple-choice options and require a lower level of reading skill.

The Improve Group has done multiple evaluations with organizations and government agencies evaluating populations with disabilities or that are mastering English. There are complicated cultural and pedagogical issues involved in evaluating these types of populations. With the growing need to evaluate and address the issues concerning these populations, especially in education, tools such as the “Test Accessibility and Modification Inventory” need to continually evolve. Hopefully, such tools can be used to create better tests for all students.

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The College Board recently released a report that stated that cost of college continued to rise as the economy has faltered, putting an increasing strain on families to keep up.

For the current academic year, the average list price of tuition and fees at four-year public universities rose $394, or 6.4 percent, to $6,585 for in-state students. However, many students don’t pay the full list price. At four-year public universities, in-state students receive grants and tax breaks that lower that average to about $2,885.

At private colleges, prices rose $1,398, or 5.9 percent, to $25,143, according to the annual report. At private colleges, grants and tax breaks lower the average net price to about $14,900.

While some private colleges now exceed $50,000 when room and board are figured in, they are the exception. Overall, 56% of four-year college students attend institutions where the list price for tuition and fees is less than $9,000. But they’ve done so largely by tapping rapidly growing endowments. Now, like family savings, college endowments have suffered great losses on Wall Street, just as demand for financial aid rises.

Some colleges may try to hold down prices, but experts say that in most cases the pressure to charge more will be greater as endowments and alumni giving decrease. The College Board report emphasized that, accounting for overall inflation, prices rose less than 1 percent this year, and actually declined at public two-year colleges. But that’s only because overall inflation was unusually high, about 5.6 percent.

It is not clear if college access will be a greater challenge for the foreseeable future, especially for students in low-income, immigrant and minority groups. At the Improve Group, we have done extensive work in higher education access. What has become clear through our project work is that finding new solutions to help students access college will become imperative considering the current economic environment. The need for work in this area is particularly urgent since most evaluations are out of context relating to our changing economic environment.

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The Improve Group is currently in a reporting stage on our evaluation of the Performing Arts Workshop’s AEMDD grant work in the schools of San Francisco. Their emphasis for this grant is arts integration with special education classrooms and students. Teaching artists from “the Workshop” have been involved with General Education Classes with Inclusion (Special Education) Students and Special Day Classes (SDC). It has been very gratifying to observe the artists and students engaged in inclusive and beneficial learning activities. My pick for this week would like to celebrate those who are making inroads for inclusion of young people with disabilities.

This week’s pick: The Mitsubishi Electric America Foundation (MEAF) is honoring those who are embracing inclusion and offering the same opportunities to youth with or without disabilities. The MEAF Inclusion Champion Award is for those who are “helping to create a culture of inclusion within an organization or community or developing innovative strategies for inclusive programming in: school activities, after-school programs, community service, and leadership development.” Deadline to nominate individuals is December 1, 2008 and the maximum award amount is $1,000 for the charity of your choosing and a trophy for the nominated individual.. For more information on the nomination process please click here.

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Elections always come with a rush of excitement. For me, last Tuesday was the first time I’ve been able to vote in person for a presidential candidate. In the past, I’ve voted by absentee ballot while living in Washington, DC and Brussels, Belgium. It was so nice to experience the excitement of a national election while at home. I felt such camaraderie with my neighbors as we waited in line to cast our ballots before the polls opened at 6:30 am. I decided to get involved by volunteering for a candidate on Election Day. I spent my time encouraging my fellow Minnesotans to get to the polls, crossing paths with first-time voters and people who have been voting for over 50 years. Participating in the election process reminds me of how blessed I am to be able to voice my opinion at the polls.

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I grew up in a smaller, manufacturing town in Wisconsin. We had American Motors, American Brass, Simmons Mattress and other companies that have not survived the financial times. One of the factors facing the manufacturing and engineering sector today is a lack of skilled labor. Not everyone feels the call to white collar occupations and people are talented in a million different ways.

My now-retired father is one of the most talented men I know and his background is in the car and manufacturing industries. He can build furniture, add rooms to a home and restore a classic car with the kind of ease that others run a staff meeting or write a work plan. I have always been very proud of him and I am proud of the following funders who are trying to open up the spectrum of future job options for our youth.

This week’s pick: The Fabricators & Manufacturers Association Foundation and the Nuts, Bolts and Thingamajigs Foundation want to help nonprofits and educational organizations to provide manufacturing career experiences for young people through overnight or day camps in the summer. The FMA is a charitable organization that promotes metal forming and fabricating technology in manufacturing. The Nuts, Bolts and Thingamajigs Foundation helps young people to develop needed manufacturing skills and has actor John Ratzenberger of Cheers fame as the Foundation founder and spokeperson.

Camps should have hands-on programs targeting youth between the ages of 12 and 16 and preference will be given to those serving minority populations. Applications for funding summer 2009 camps must be submitted by December 12, 2008. Grants rage from $2,500 to $5,000. For further info on applying, please click here.

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A reminder to all that voting is Tuesday, November 4th, 2008. You may see one of the staff members of the Improve Group as a volunteer, election judge or giving rides to the polls.

If you need a ride on November 4th you can call the nonpartisan Rides to Polls Coalition at 1-877-NOV-2008 (1-877-668-2008). These rides are a nonpartisan effort of the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits.

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I recently read an Education Week article detailing the final approval on an extensive and wide-ranging set of final regulations adding new requirements on states, districts and schools via the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The Bush administration approved these regulations as Congress has continued to find agreement in reauthorizing the 7-year old law.

The regulations will require states to:
• adopt the same method of calculating high school graduation rates;
• mandate that school districts take additionally steps to ensure students in low-performing schools know they’re eligible to transfer schools or enroll in free tutoring; and
• make public information comparing states’ student achievement to national scores.

A main implication of the rule changes is that it will require states to update their formal plans that explain how they will implement key elements of NCLB due to these new regulations. Changes in those formal plans (called workbooks) that the Education Department must approve, involves explaining how states will develop content standards, assess students in reading and mathematics in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school, and hold schools accountable for student performance based on the goal that all students will be proficient in those subjects by the end of the 2013-14 school year.

Among the most significant changes involve requiring all states to adopt the same method of calculating high school graduation rates. Under the new regulations, states must track the percentage of students within four years of entering high schools. The regulations say that state proposals that count students who graduate within six years as completing on time will be considered by the Education Department. Additionally, schools must publish rates for students in racial, ethnic and socioeconomic subgroups, as well as for students with disabilities and English-language learners.

States must report data based on these new regulations in the 2009-2010 school year. By the 2011-2012 school year, states must use the new method of calculating graduations rates as one of the measures to determine whether high schools make adequate yearly progress (AYP), which is the method of determining whether a school is meeting its goals under the NCLB law, as well as improving graduation rates for students in every group for which they publish graduation data.

In the Improve Group’s work with state school districts and education initiatives, we have found that consistently reporting data across time, let along across different states, is a stiff challenge for schools trying to meet the government requirements for collecting and evaluating data. New regulations such as these could be beneficial in evaluating multiple issues in education such as improving graduation rates for multiple populations, but training in strong data evaluation methods and tools to accurately collect and analyze data would be of great use to the education system.

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