U.S. Education Policy: What Will Change and What Will Stay the Same?

By: Jeff Knight, Head Writer

The 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution makes it clear that controlling education is a power that belongs to the states, rather than to the federal government. And yet, because the federal government supports the states with education-specific dollars, the federal government does play a big role in how learning happens at schools around the country. Therefore, it matters who is president. For example,

• Thomas Jefferson was a lifelong advocate of education. Even before he became president, he unsuccessfully introduced a bill that would have created a national commitment to public schools.
• As part of the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt especially favored increased funding for schools.
• Ronald Reagan unsuccessfully proposed abolishing the Department of Education, saying that education is not a federal matter, and should be left to state and local governments to manage.
• Most recently, George W. Bush took the opposite view, spearheading No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a national education policy based on standards and accountability.

So, now that we've got a new president what can we expect to happen? What approach will the Obama administration take? Based on campaign speeches, the opinions of some experts, the whitehouse.gov website, and what we've seen so far, here's what we can expect:

• NCLB will still be here, but it will evolve. Accountability will still be important, but it will be thought of more broadly. Testing currently measures how many students pass the standards-based test. In the future, we may see more weight placed on how much each student's performance improves.
• We'll take a step towards national education standards. This will happen in a couple of ways, as groups of states work together to create better tests, and as groups of states develop trans-state standards. There won't be mandatory national standards, but these changes will lean in that direction.
• The teaching profession will see a number of reforms. These will include performance-based pay, a move toward national standards for teachers, and a renewed emphasis on professional development and teacher retention. There will also be a renewed effort to recruit teachers, particularly math and science teachers.
• The dropout crisis will be addressed further upstream. The Obama administration specifies middle school as an important and neglected opportunity for intervention and dropout prevention.
• Educational technology will be emphasized. The stimulus bill includes 650 million dollars specifically for educational technology, and other funding sources that can be spent on educational technology. In a January 8 address at George Mason University, the president stated: "To give our children the chance to live out their dreams in a world that's never been more competitive, we will equip tens of thousands of schools, community colleges, and public universities with 21st-century classrooms, labs, and libraries. We'll provide new computers, new technology, and new training for teachers so that students in Chicago and Boston can compete with kids in Beijing for the high-tech, high-wage jobs of the future."

There are other aspects of President Obama's plans and priorities for education, but these are some of the highlights. To learn more, visit http://www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/education/.

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Product Update: Ignition Questions give teachers a whole new way to engage students in the classroom!

We know that engagement is not a soft value. If students are mentally checked out, they're not going to succeed. We've developed two exciting new ways to motivate and engage students: our Connected Interface along with over 18,000 pre-loaded Ignition Questions.

Connected Interface
Our Connected Interface is a better fit with interactive whiteboards generally with increased resolution, enriched indexing, and a split-screen and full screen option for media playback which lets teachers take full advantage of the presentation area interactive whiteboards offer, and is particularly well-suited for Promethean's Activboard and ActivStudio instructional tools.

The Connected Interface is available now! Brick and ION customers can get their Connected Interface product update directly from our website.

Ignition Questions
Teachers using the Ignite! curriculum have always been able to encourage higher level thinking skills by pausing Ignite! media to pose questions and stimulate debate about concepts. With the addition of an exciting new product feature called Ignition Questions, teachers are able focus student engagement through questions pre-loaded into each media piece that concentrate on the lesson's specific curricular objectives. Ignition Questions give teachers over 18,000 teachable moments embedded directly into our math, science, and social studies curriculum! The classroom experience-for every student-becomes much more interactive and participatory

And for classrooms with learner response systems, Ignition Questions become an even more powerful engagement experience, particularly when used with Promethean's Activexpression system. Through a partnership with Promethean, Ignite! has become the first comprehensive curriculum to integrate with Activexpression. Activexpression tracks and displays when students enter responses to the questions, which makes mentally checking out not an option for students. Students are held accountable by the teacher and their peers because the whole class can see who is participating and who is not.

Ignition Questions include a drag and drop feature that gives teachers with interactive whiteboards the ability to manipulate student responses into categories, and then use the responses to stimulate classroom discussion. Using the Promethean Activepen, teachers can use student responses as labels on the media, and they can also highlight key terms, or label diagrams. There is also a data reporting feature to give teachers a powerful way to record in real-time what students understand, what needs to be reviewed, or who's struggling.

An interactive demo of Ignition Questions is coming soon to the Ignite! Learning website! Ignition Questions will be available this spring, call 866-464-4648 for more information!

March Featured Lessons

The featured math, science, and social studies lessons for the month of March are now available. Both Ignite! customers and non-Ignite! customers can download the media and print for each lesson directly from our website.

Math: Tree Diagrams

The NCAA basketball tournament begins every year in March. People have fun tracking teams' wins and losses with the tournament bracket, which can also be seen as a type of tree diagram - a diagram that uses branches to show all the possible combinations of groups of items.

This lesson on tree diagrams from our Math course will teach your students about probability and possible outcomes. After watching the media, challenge your students to solve this question: Assuming for a moment that all teams in the March Madness tournament are equal in terms of basketball ability, what is the probability a team has of winning the college basketball championship?

Science: How Earth Moves

On March 5, 1616, the Roman Catholic Church declared that the Copernican Theory (the theory that Earth revolves around the Sun) was false and erroneous. People were forbidden from teaching the Copernican theory until the 17th century when scientists such as Johannes Kepler, Galileo, and Issac Newton made discoveries that helped lead to the eventual acceptance of heliocentrism - the belief that the Sun (not Earth) is the center of the solar system.

Use this lesson from our Earth Science course to stimulate discussion in your classroom: What would the world be like today if heliocentrism was not a widely accepted belief?

Social Studies: The Great Depression

President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave his first Fireside Chat on March 12, 1933. Roosevelt used the series of thirty evening radio speeches between 1933 and 1944 to urge Americans to have faith in the banks and to support his New Deal measures during the period of The Great Depression.

Use this lesson from our World History course to help your students compare and contrast The Great Depression of the 1930s with the recession we are currently facing.

Teacher Retention and Educational Technology

By: Michael Whalen, Principal Instructional Designer

More than 1 million children drop out of high school each year.⁽¹⁾ This, of course, has cascading social, cultural, and economic ramifications. The numbers are awful and unsurprising: approximately 67% of prison inmates are high school dropouts. Almost 50% of dropouts between 16-24 years old are unemployed. High school dropouts annually earn $9,200 less than graduates. Compared to college graduates, the income gap stretches out to $1 million across a lifetime.⁽²⁾ All this raises a question: with the consequences so dire and so widely understood, why would anyone choose to drop out? Two common answers are boredom and lack of motivation.⁽³⁾

These reports of boredom and apathy reflect a classroom culture of teacher and student disengagement. The consequence is not limited to student dropout rates. The spiral of reciprocal negativity leads to teacher dropout, as well. There are many reasons teachers leave the profession to pursue other work, salary not least among them. Nonetheless, boisterous or rebellious students and lack of classroom control are important factors in teacher attrition rates.⁽⁴⁾ How high a rate? 50% of new teachers leave the profession within the first five years of teaching.⁽⁵⁾ As Layne P. Heiny points out, the high school student dropout rate is approximately 26%; therefore, the teacher turnover rate over an equivalent four-year period is greater than the student population dropout rate.⁽⁶⁾

While teacher attrition is not as immediately and obviously detrimental to society as student dropout, it directly leads to worse schools and student drop-out. Schools with high turnover are faced with hiring more inexperienced teachers and their students are further deprived of steady, consistent, and dependable role models. Students can read a teacher's lack of interest as validating their own lack of interest.⁽⁷⁾ Teacher attrition is also costly. To replace one teacher could cost a district as much as double the annual salary and benefits of the retiring teacher.⁽⁸⁾ That is just one teacher. Think about how many teachers may leave a school in a year, or a district in a year. Think about how many teachers leave the profession across your state in a year. Now think about all the ways that money could have been spent to better your school.

The inescapable conclusion is that two of the biggest problems faced in education-student dropout and teacher attrition-are fueled by daily classroom disengagement. In fact, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's The Silent Epidemic report on student dropout says the number one reason students leave school is that they are just not interested; that they find school boring. 69% state a lack of motivation and inspiration. For these students, dropping out of school is the conclusion of a long, slow process of academic and social disengagement.⁽⁹⁾ It sounds fluffy to say that we should prioritize making class more engaging. It is easy to think of some educational values as bedrock values, such as standards, budgets, assessment, and accountability. But when it comes to daily classroom reality, engagement is not a soft value. Let me say it again: engagement is not a soft value.

And what engages students? Whether it is iPods, video games, or the Internet, students invest a huge amount of time and attention engaged in interactive technologies, making social and cognitive connections. The good news is that interactive technologies-which students choose to use in their free time-can be integrated into the classroom to make class time more engaged, more social, and more conducive to cognitive connections. Learner response systems (LRS), like Promethean's Activexpressions or eInstruction's response pads, allow students to immediately respond to teacher's questions and see how their answer or grasp of an academic concept compares with that of the rest of the class. Interactive whiteboards (IWB) allow students to safely manipulate virtual objects, annotate over media, and take notes on a sturdy device while giving them a chance to get up from their seats and directly interact with the class lesson. Similarly, interactive tablets give students similar access and control of the IWB from their seats and is portable enough to share among seated students. These hardware systems have intuitive interfaces with which students are already familiar (from their free time use of technology). Students are eager to use the devices in a controlled, fun way that leads to greater involvement in class. And engaged students bring a contributing energy, rather than a disruptive energy, to a lesson, the sort of high-spirited boisterousness that benefits, instead of hinders, a classroom's progress; the sort of exuberance that teachers plan for and seek out.

As educationally inspiring as new technology can be in the classroom, it can be used as a helpful socialization tool, as well.⁽¹⁰⁾ For example, learner response systems publically display when and which students enter an answer. A teacher can call forth a question on an interactive whiteboard and monitor the class as the students respond in their LRS devices. This is a situation in which peer pressure can be used for positive educational engagement. This is valuable and necessary character education. If an entire class is waiting on one person who is not fully engaged, they can remind that student to hurry up and answer the question. Here, students can encourage one another to stay engaged and that they are all responsible for and to one another, so that a class can proceed through the day's lesson. Perhaps it is a sobering reality, but for some students, peer expectations may count for more than teacher expectations. Even if the display is set to an anonymous mode where students' names are not listed on the board, teachers in a focus group at Ignite! Learning have reported that students are still able to decipher which students are not paying attention and then goad them into reengaging.⁽¹¹⁾ When a classroom of students is able to demand full participation from one another, it takes a classroom management burden off the shoulders of the teacher. The social lesson learned here is that as a member of a community, in this case, the learning community of the classroom, you are responsible to the other members of your community and your lack of involvement can hinder the progress of a community larger than the individual. Those moments where students self-police their classrooms not only show personal and communal responsibility, they also ease the disheartening hardship of disciplining a disruptive class from the teacher.

President Obama's education plan states that the long, slow process of academic and social disengagement leading to student dropout starts in middle school.⁽¹²⁾ Clearly, there is a dire need for engaging technology to captivate uninspired middle schoolers. Coupled with an IWB and a LRS, Ignite! Learning can provide the engaging multimedia middle school math, science, and social studies curriculum necessary to create a truly active classroom, which includes thousands of animations, virtual manipulatives, games, music videos, and images; enrichment activities; print material; frequent and varied assessment; and academic rigor.

One obvious benefit of an engaged and interactive classroom is a rejuvenated classroom teacher; a teacher who can share a laugh with their students. No doubt, teachers enter the profession for noble reasons, yet sometimes the uncomfortable reality of the situation can be at odds with their initial benevolent ambitions. Using technology to create an environment where students are eager to interact, ready for engagement, and willing to learn is a step in turning that situation around. Teachers can respond to the disengaged attitudes of their students with the very tools children use to disengage.

While there are many blameless reasons teachers may retire early, one idea holds true in any profession: people want to enjoy going to work. Whether your frequent daily interactions are with other adult colleagues or middle schoolers who need to wrap their heads around equivalent fractions or the electoral college, we all want to enjoy being with the people we work with. When those people are enjoying themselves, that goal becomes easier to reach. As we embrace technology to enjoy our free time, we can embrace technology to beneficially enjoy our work time, as well.

⁽¹⁾ Alliance for Excellent Education. (2007). The High Cost of High School Dropouts: What the Nation Pays for Inadequate High Schools. Washington, DC: Author.
⁽²⁾ Jay Mathews, "Dropout-Prevention Program Sees to the Basics of Life," Washington Post, Dec. 10, 2007; page B01.
⁽³⁾ Bridgeland, John M.; et al. (2006). The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts. Civic Enterprises in association with Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
⁽⁴⁾ Allen, Michael, (2005) Eight Questions on Teacher Recruitment and Retention: What Does the Research Say? ECS Teaching Quality Research Reports.
⁽⁵⁾ Dill, Vicky and Stafford, Delia. (2008) Teacher Retention a Critical National Problem. Haberman Foundation.
⁽⁶⁾ http://www.RetainingTeachers.com, accessed 1/30/2009
⁽⁷⁾ Bridgeland, John M.; et al. (2006). The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts. Civic Enterprises in association with Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
⁽⁸⁾ Fitz-enz, J. (1997). It's costly to lose good employees. Workforce, 76, 50-51.
⁽⁹⁾ Bridgeland, John M.; et al. (2006). The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts. Civic Enterprises in association with Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
⁽¹⁰⁾ Texas Association of School Administrators. (2008). Creating a New Vision for Public Education in Texas: A Work in Progress for Conservation and Further Development. Austin, Texas.
⁽¹¹⁾ Focus group held at Ignite! Learning in Austin, Texas on Wednesday October 22, 2008.
⁽¹²⁾ Obama, Barack and Biden, Joe. (2008). Barack Obama and Joe Biden's Plan for Lifetime Success Through Education.

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