Page 787

by 7 percentage points, to 16 percent. Over the satne span, the share of income going to
tile bottom 80 percent has fallen by 7 percentage points. It’s as if every household in that
bottom 80 percent is wiiting a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1
percent. This is why the usual assurances that come fiom people like Sutn_rne~ -- that an
open, technologically advanced global economy is inevitable and good-- feel, as he
himself wrote in The Financial Times, like "pretty thin gruel."
Dealing with tiffs anxiety -- making globalization work for the masses -- has become the
central economic issue of tile day in Smnmers’s mind. And since his Harvard presidency
ended a yea ago, he has set out on a search for solutions. To him, it seems like a natural
sequel to the policies he pushed in the 1990s. To liberal Democrats, it seems long
overdue. "I breathe a great sigh of wistfulness and relief and say, ’Finally, they’ve come
arotmd,’" Reich says. "It was, I think, a fimdamental failure on the part of the Democrats
in the late ’90s not to face the structural changes that needed to be faced."
Sttn~ne~s recentiyj oined the board of Teach for America, in large measme to think more
about education reform. He has also joined an advisory board of Bhie Cross and Blue
Shield of Massachusetts, the state at the center of health care refoi~n. (His gut instinct is
that Massachusetts’s tmiversal-cover~e plan isn’t radical enough.) He has re-engaged in
academic life, becoming the co-editor of a journal paltly so he can nudge other
economists to do research on big policy issues. With tlie DemoclNs back in control of
Congress, he lms testified at hearings and met plivately with membels to talk about
inequality. His old fiiends and colleagues from the Clinton administration have now
spread out to the Federal Reserve, Capitol Hill and, of course, Hillaw Clinton’s
can~paign. In effect, Smnmers is assembling a virtual think tank. "I think the defining
issue of our time is: Does the economic, social and political system work for the middle
class?" he told me. "Because the system’s viability, its staying power and its health
depend on how well it worlcs for the middle class."
At age 52, Lmly Surmne~s has already finished his ilrst tiu-ee careers. The son of two
economists at the Univelsit¥ of Pennsylvania and the nephew of two Nobel-~vinuing
econo~nists, he em’olled at M.I.T~ when he was 16. Then came the swill aise to tenure at
Harvard, a flmly of research papers on seemingly every major topic in economics and an
award called the JohnBates Clark Medal, given every other year to the best econoinist
under 40. "I’ve been arolmd some pretty stnart people," said Jonathan Gnlber, an M.I.T.
econo~nist and a fol~ner student of Smnmers’s. "But it’s a different level with L,alaN."
The rap on him-- in academia and later in Washington, where he moved in 1991 to
become the chief economist of the World B auk- was always ttmt he knew he was the
smartest guy inthe room and acted like it. At factflty seminars, he wotfld sometimes
intenttpt another professor a few nfinntes into a presentation, succinctly summarize the
tmdelivered portion, poke holes in tile argntnent and offer suggestions about how to make
the same points in nlore compelling fashion. To the great amusement of his colleagues at
Treasm% he occasionally ~lid the same thing to officials from foreign gover~unents who
had come to call on him.
But the notion that Summers can be a bttlly misses one thing: he likes it when people
fight back. As Treasul~.¢ secretary, he encom~ged his own staff to disagree with him when
they thought he was wrong. "He was incredibly open to people pushing back and
challenging tlim," said Timothy Geithner, the cut, rent president of the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York., who worked under Sttmmel~ at Treasury. "It’s what he desires ~nost.
It’s how he ttfinks through things." During a conversation I was having with him one
morning in a Senate cafeteria, in tile midst of explaining why he thonght the pay of chief
executives was economically rational, StUunlei,s stopped and said, "When I’ve thought
about possible explanations for this, one is that I’m wrong."
 Page 788

As a restflt of this intellectual playfulness, many people find it ttnilling to talk with hi~n.
He loves to exanine an idea flom every possible angle, searching out the weaknesses in
order to arrive at a better conclusion. Hei~~ has said that Sttmmers should be
given a permanent White House job, a SOlt of fixer of flabby policy ideas. Of cotu’se,
Sttmmers’s style, or lack of it, is also at the root of his well-publicized missteps.
By most accom~ts, he did learn to solten himselfwtfile in Washington, which helps
explain his successful decadelong mn there. Shortly alter Clinton lelt office in 2001,
Sttmmers was given the ~nost prestigious job in higher education. It’s hard to think of
anyone else in public life today who has roached the pinnacle of three different careers.
And Ha-card w’as supposed to be the end of the Sttmmers story. Given his age and his
ambitions -- his plans to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the life sciences,
eliminate tuition for lower-income students and reinvigorate undergraduate education --
he seemed destined to lead the university for the next 20 years.
But back in academia, whare social skills are not a prerequisite for success, he seemed to
forget tt~at his he,V job had more in common with being a cabinet secreta7 than with
being a professor. Most famously, he wondered aloud at an academic conference in 2005
whether i~mate differences helped explain why men dominated the top ranks of research
science. He never recovered.
The most obvious place to land wottld have been Wall Street, and he talked with
Goldman Sachs and Citigronp. But he instead took a lucrative pat-time job at a big
hedge fund, D.E. Shaw. Summers’s main professional home remains, surprisingly,
Harvard, where his wife, Elisa New, is a lite~ure professor and he holds a distingtfished
endowed chair.
On a recent sraing afternoon, he ,,~s the surprise guest speaker for the final meeting of a
lecture comse called Morality and Taboo, taught by Alan Dershowitz,, the law professor,
and Steven PiN~er, the psychologist. They were prominent suppol~ers of his presidency,
and the occasion seemed ripe for self-justification. Summers has alveays kept the support
of Harvard’s undergraduates, and when he vcas introduced, the students in the classroom
gave him a 20-second ovation. Some stood. !Jr his introduction, Dershowitz defended
Smmners’s remarks about gender and science as honest intellectual inquiry. But
S~trmnors wo~tldn’t have it. °’I think it was, in retrospect, an act of spectacular
in,prudence," he told the class. He still inaintains that some critics mischaracterized his
remarks, "out the bottom line is that girls around the world cane to think that the president
of Harvard believed they cottldn’t be scientists. "There are enormous benefits to being a
leader of a major institution, but there a-e also costs and limitations," he continued.
thought I cotfld have it both ways, and I was wroug." Even wlien someone is defending
him, Stmuners can’t hold back from a debate.
In many ways, the political path that he has followed over his career is also the path of
his patty. The d~cades after World War II were do~ninated by the Keynesian notion --
shaped in part by one of his Nobel-winning uncles, Paul Sanuelson -- that government
was good. But the stagflation of the 1970s caused a whole ofgener~ion of economists to
look instead toward the market, which seemed far more efficient at allocati~hg resources.
Today Sunune]s says he believes in markets as much as ever, and he begins ahnost any
discussion of globalization by pointing out its benefits. Food, clothing, fitmitttre and
dozens of everyday items are more affordable than they once were. Interest rates are low,
as is inflation, and recessions come less otten. Bringing down the deficit in the ’90s, he
argues, helped make this possible.
But Smmners says he now has to reckon with anew reality. Despite good growth over
the last four yeas, the pay of most American workers has barely kept pace with inflation.
Techi~ology and global trade are conspiring to let highly sldlled workers do more -- to be
 Page 789

more productive and to play on a bigger stage -- ~vhile at the same time malting millions
of other workers replaceable. The middle-class income gains of the Clh~ton yeats now
look like an aberration, caused by a combination of low oil prices (which allowed a dollm"
to go fiaxther) and a financial bubble that made the job market mmsually tight. "I don’t
think my general orientation to the world has changed," Summm,s says, noting that he
favored interventions like tax credits for the poor duting the ’90s and continues to won-y
about the deficit today. "But I think if you look at how the economy is worldng for
ave1~ge families, the sensible pliofity has shifted." Geithner, the New York Federal
Reserve president, puts it this way: "The Ncts have changed a little bit. That’s what
Lan3,’s evolution reflects?’
What’s st~ildng today is how much Democrats on either side of the 1990s debate agree
with one another. Most say that globalization itself carmot be held back, because it stems
more from the inexorable march of teclmology than from any change in tlzde laws.
Credit-card call centers have moved to India and Ireland because they can function there,
not because a new law allowed them to go. Trying to prevent jobs from leaving will
create the problems that protectionism always had, like higher inflation and slower
economic growth. But leaving the mmket to work its magic also won’t do. Even the
centrists withfl~ the pmty agree that the govermnent needs to meddle in the economy
more than it once did.
The model that most appeals to Stmnners is, in fact, the United States -- in the decades
after World Win II. At the time, this country was opening itself to more global
competition, by rebtnlding Ettrope and sigtting fin~cial agreements like Bretton Woods.
But it was also taking concrete steps to build the modem middle class. In addition to the
O.I. Bill, there were tlie Fede1~ Housing Adinhfistration, the Interstate Highway System
and a very different tax code. The history ofl~’ogressivism "has been one of the market
being protected from its own excesses," Smnmers says. "And I think now the challenge
is, again, to protect a basic market system based on open trade and globalization, to make
it one that works for everyone or for almost everyone, at a tone when market forces are
often I~’oducing outco~nes that seem increasingly problematic to middle-class families."
A new social contl~aCt wound look different, of cottrse. The tax code of the 1950s, with a
top margirtal rate of 91 percent, stifled innovation. Today’s system goes too fat- in the
other direction, Susnmers says, exacerbating ineqtmlity with loopholes and deductions
that let a lot of affluent fat~tilies avoid taxes, and the Bush tax cuts haven’t helped. Health
care reform is another obvious priority. In Sttrmners’s view, the cut-tent employer-based
system, which ca’eates insecurity for many families and big costs for companies, may
need to be replaced by one in ~vhich the govermnent pays for insut-ance but individuals
choose what pl~a-~ they want. It wotfld be single payer, but not as England or Canada does
it.
Surmnex~ becomes really excited by what he sees as the potential fox" a life-sciences
revolution. It will happen only if government again does its p,’ul, thouglt, and in the last
few yeats federal support for medical research has failed to keep pace with inflation. A
more sensible policy, he argues, has the potential not only to keep people healthy and
,alive for longer but also to create well-paying jobs. He likes to talk about "clusters" like
Silicon Valley --in the life sciences ,’rod other areas -- ~vhere groups of companies can
feed off one another to become ~nore productive. Moving jobs to a low-wage country
then becomes less attractive. And the government can help create clustms, just as it btrilt
the highway system and the Intemet. If you didn’t know any better, you might even refer
to this idea as industrial policy.
Sutmners no~v occupies a fimny place in the Democratic constellation. His vatSous dust-
ups over rite years have left lahn with a f~ n~tmber of enemies. But he also has alot of
 Page 790

influential fans, as well as the ability to ir~ ect an issue into the public debate merely by
discussing it. Under a Democratic president, he would be an obvious candidate to rm~ the
Federal Reselve or the World Bank. But amore likely path could be the one taken by
Kissinger, ~vho has spent the last 30 years as a force in RepuNican foreign policy despite
having been out of government. Summers nmy actually be better suited for this role than
for some of the jobs he has held recently. It’s one in which the quality of an idea matters
more than its delive1%
A fieelance career would have its fi-dstrations, but Strummers has had some success in
perstmding othea’s. Bill Gates has said he decided to devote much of iris money to global
poverty and disease after reading a 1993 World Bank report -- a report that Sttmmers
instigated. His efforts to recruit poor students to H,-uw’ard helped make a national issue of
the lack of low-income students at elite colleges. In India, where politicians say he
influenced theft" own approach to laade agreements, they still quote him the way people
here quote Alan Greenspan.
"I’m finding my way," Stumners said about his newest career, his fomth. "I think one has
to be prepared to accept long causal chains. That is, if you’re laying to tlthtk about a
problem and propose a solution, it does not happen the next day. But it affects the climate
of opinion, and things go from being inconceivable to being inevitable."
David Leonhardt writes a weeMy economics column for The New Yorlc Times.
 Page 791

The Louisville Courier-Journal

Sunday, June 10, 2007

HIGH SCHOOL ROUND TABLE

The real world
Does liigh school prepare students for life after gradualion?

By Raven J. Railey
Spedal to The Courier-Journal

Most area schools are out for the surrmler, but how well are theh" lessons preparing
students for life on the job, at home and as adtflts?

Members of The Cottrier-Jottrnal’s High School Round Table recently talked about their
schools’ strengths and weaknesses in prepatS_ng young people for the "real ‘‘vorld."

They also discussed where they think educators’ pfiolifies should be and the effect of
state and federal standards, such as the No Ctuld Left Behind Act.

The rolmd table is an ammal tradition dating to 1983. This year’s members were chosen
from inore than 270 applicants.

Here are excerpts of their conversation:

Raven Railey: Do you think the educational system prepares you well for life after high
school?

K’eion Brown, 18, senior at Fairdale High School: No. It’s harder in the real ‘‘vorld
than it is in school, hi school, you can slack off, but in the real world if you do, then you
are going to fail and get fired from yonrjob.

Danielle Hawks, 18, senior, Bullitt Central High School: I want to be ateacher. So
going to school is helping ine be what I want to be.

But to helI) me compete in the world, I don’t think so much. My school has done a good
job this year. We were on a grading scale to where anything below a 50 was an F and 90
to 100 was an A. I skated through school until Otis year. Then they changed it -- anything
below a 70 is now an F.

Miguel Cruz, 17, senior, Waggener High School: If you want to succeed, you’ll find it
at whatever school you go to. What drives you is not the education that you receive, but
the discipline in yourself.

Amauda Kasey, 16, freshman, Charlestowl High School: I don’t necessarily think
high school prepares you for life, but I don’t think it’s all the school’s fault. I think it’s
mostly just ore age and ilmnaturity.
 Page 792

Surriya Ahmad, 17, junior, Louisville Collegiate School: I would like to see more
required courses that teach life valnes so that ldds can get exposure to other things before
they go out into the real world, like home econonfics coarses -- basic things.

At our school, we have a life skills comse. Each year, ~ve talk about different things. The
jtmior class, we took a career test so that we cotdd see what vve would want to major in.

Bryce Milburn, 17, senior, Boyle County High School: I think high school is more
about teaching you how to deal with people.

They’ll show where yore" interests are. I think that college is the best part to leatT1 stuff
because you actually get serious.

High school is petty much like a day care for teenagers. I can skip class and get an A, so
I do. I think their rules should be a lot stricter.

Railey: Do others have "life skills" classes? Shotfld they be taught in school?

K’don: Yes, because I think that people waste money. If I was tanght earlier instead of
later ho~v to save it, I would have a whole lot more than I do now.
If they were taught how to speak to people, people wouldn’t jump to conclusions or get
aggravated, and then we wouldn’t have so much violence going on.

Chase Sanders, 17, junior, Male High School: I can think of only one class that I have
taken that has helped hie to make good choices in life. That was in my freshmml year
when I was in ROTC.
If you are going to have a class like that, you need to have it later on Have them take it
one seinester tNir senior year.

DaNdle: I don’t tl~ink that we need to lem:n how to live our lives and how to inanage our
money by the govelmnent. That is something that you need to find out on your own or
with your parents’ influence.

Migud: I would love to see a combination of a discipline course mid a self-confidence

com~e. A lot ofldds that I know really second-guess thelnselves.

Amanda: We have family consmner science courses: personal skills, relationship sldlls
and life skills. Mostly it’s like a health class, so I dofft really temxl that much.

But I do like the program "Baby, Think it Over." You get to carly that little baby around
and it squalls all day.

I have never learned how to balance a checkbook, and I know that’s going to hint me
pretty bad.

Sur riya: School should offer more com~es on how to ~narmge your money and on things
like balancing a checkbook.
 Page 793

The life skills course, to gradtmte, you have to give a senior speech in fl’ont of the upper
school. You have to develop the confidence to do that.
You also have aweekthat the seniors get off and they go and explore a field that they
fltink they might want to do ~vhen they graduate. You shadow a doctor or work in some
other field.

Hilary Borgmder, 15, freshman, Sacred Heart Academy: We have a class catled
"Self," and it teaches you how to control your anger. If something bad happens, like a
death or your parents get divorced, it teaches you how to deal with that.

Business is required and so is computer applications for all four years.

DaNdle: Agrictflture is really big at our school. Our business depmtment is really, really
big. We have alot of the family consttmer science classes,

I took accounting, and I worked in the bank this year. I am certified that I can work at a
bank now, which is really good for me if I ever need to get a job.

Amanda: We have a big business wing where you cottld take computer application
classes. We have the Prosser School of Tectmology that we go to every other day. It has
cltlinary, cosmetology, aviation mid a bunch of different programs.

Miguel: We have a child development center where we have a day care.

Chase: My school has business classes you can take, but you cml only take these classes
when you are a senior. The Blflldog Bank -- it’s like abank that they have in our school
that’s helped by National City Bank. You can take law and govermnent classes.

K’don: My school has four l~ogm~ns that you can intern for. I chose to do fuefighter.
They sent me down to the fire depmtment that was close to our school. They taught me
how to save pe@e’s lives and get certified in EMS, and how to do trench rescues.

Bryce: They have this ~vork-study progr~t where if you have a job, you can leave at
noon and go work. Most people leave and they don’t strut the job until 3 p.m. They just
go home and sleep. So it’s kind of a waste of time.

Hilary: We Nave a whole broadcasting wing, and they have TV shows.

Railey: Them seems to be ,nore emphasis on testing and teaching to federal and state
standards in public schools. Is this helpfitl?

DaNdle: I don’t think that is working at my school.

With "No Child Left Behind," the focus is bringing everyone who is dow~ low up. So if
you are a student that does take the ~nore advanced classes, you are kind of left to do it on
your o~m.

I guess that’s kind of a good thing, because it’s going to teach more self-discipline.
 Page 794

Amanda: It just stresses us out. We are always testing, audit messes up otu schedtfles. It
takes away from our classes.

People just rnn tkrough it because they know it doesfft count, so I don’t think it’s
accurate representation of what we are learning.

Surriya: It’s a good starting point to see ifevel~cone is on equal foo~lg. I don’t t/rink it’s
an end-all to see what’s going on.

Danielle: CATS tests mean nothing to us in the long rim, whereas the ACT is us getting
into school or not. The test that we really should be ,studying for, the school doesn’t care
about.

I~iley: What challenges do you think educators face in teactting effectively?

Chase: You have so many different ldds that have different situations, and they come
from different backgrom~ds.

Amanda: The standards get in tile way, and they can’t teach what they t/rink is more
relevant to life. We don’t go on field trips anymore, and we can’t watch doctuneutaries.

We don’t actually get to explore oi" talk about what we think.

Miguel: They Nave to tly and please the govel:mnent, please tile students and please the
parents at tile s~rne time.

Surriya: At our school, it’s eas7 to talk to our teachers, and the class size is small. You
can’t connect if the class size is large.

K’eion: This past year I had an integrated-science teacher that I felt was the best teacher.
She stayed after every day to make sure that you understood what she "~vas trying to teach
you. BUt she had students that didn’t want to learn.

Railey: How do your schools excel, and what’s one thii~g you’d change?

Amanda: We learn how to get along withpeople that we don’t necessarily agree with.

I’d rather go in-depth with stuff than just barely cover it because you have to move on to
the next standard.
Chase: The school is doing their job. The only change that I would make is that schools
give you more choices toward your career goals, maybe yom’jtmior or senior year.

DaNdle: Our teachers are really great teachers, but I don’t think that the school gives
them the chance to teach what they really want to teach. There are so many restrictions.

The adnfinist~tion does alot of picking and choosing the role-model students, and they
don’t pick very well. That sends the wrong message to some ldds.
 Page 795

They are more outgoing, but are they really the ones that are achieving in school?

Miguel: They excel in providing the teachers for you. I believe that should be the most
that they should trove to do.

Surriya: The schools excel at the wide variety ofacade~nic courses they offer. It gives
the students a chance to prepare themselves for college.
An improvement would be to not just focus on academics, but bring in other types of
COUlNeS.

Bryce: The only thing that my school achieves is forcing all the teenagms in the area to
get to know each other.

I think they need some more money in peer education.

You spend most of your life in fiont of the computer screen if you are going to work.
They need to let you know how, other than to just type on a keyboard.

K’eion: I feel like most of our students --most of our seniors in pat~cular -- wouldn’t
have made it without ore" teachers. Our teachers care a lot about us, and they push us to
become better.

My math teacher, he pushes all his students to the maxim~m~ of their ability, because
that’s how much he ~,wauts them to succeed.

Instead of treating people on the athletics teams like they are more important, they just
need to treat everyone equally.
 Page 796

The Yorktown Patriot, Yorktova~ University

Why are college students going into debt?

Junl0, 2007, 09:39

WASHINGTON -- As the first in her immigrm~t family to attend college, Lucia DiPoi
said she had few clues about financing her college education. So when financial aid mid
low-interest govennnent loans did not stretch far enouglL Ms. DiPoi applied for $49,000
in private loans, too. "How bad could it be?" she recalls thinking.

When Ms. DiPoi graduated fiom Tufts University in Boston, she found out. With interest,
her private loans had reached $65,000 and she owed an additional $19,000 in federal
loans. Her moi~hly tab is $900, with interest rates topping 13 percent on the private
loans.
Ms. DiPoi, now 24, quickly gave up her dreatn to work in an overseas refugee camp. Tile
pay, she said, "wottld have been enough for Ine but not for Sallie Mae," her lender.
The regtflations that the federal EducationDepartment proposed this month to crack
down on payments by lendels to universities and their officials were designed to end
conflicts of interest that could point students to pmticular lenders.

But they do nothing to address a l~oble~n that ~nany education officials say may have
greater consequences -- more students relying on p~ivate loans, which are so unregulated
that Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of New York recently called thegn rite Wild
West of lending.
As college trillion has soared past file stagnant limits on federal aid, private loans have
beco, ne file fastest-growing sector of the student finance market, more than t~ipling over
five years to $17.3 billion in the 2005-06 school yem; according to the College Board.

Unlike federal loans, whose interest rates are capped by law -- now at 6.8 percent --
these loans carry vmiable rates that can reach 20 percent, like credit cards. Mr. Cuomo
and Congress are now investigating how lenders set those rates.

And while federal loans come with safeguards against students’ overextending
themselves, private loans have no such li~nits. Students are piling up debts as high as
$100,000.

Banks and lenders face negligible lisk froIn allowing students to take out large sums. hi
the federal ovenhaul of the bankruptcy lawin 2005, lenders won a provision that makes it
virtthally impossible to discharge private student loans, in bankruptcy. Previously such
provisions had only applied to federal loans, as a way to protect the taxpayer against
defaulting by students.

While federal loans also allow bonowers myriad chances to reduce or defer pay~nents for
hardship, private loans typically do not. And many private loan agreements make it
impossible for students to reduce the principal by paying extra each month tmless they
 Page 797

are paying offthe entire loan. Officials say they are troubled by the amotmt of debt that
loan companies and colleges are encouraging students to take on.

"It’s a huge problem," said Bmznak Nasshian, associate executive dhector ofthe
American Association of Collegiate Registral,s and Adinissions Officers. "When a
student signs the paper for these lomts, they are basically signing anindentme," Mr.
Nassirian said. "We’re indebting these kids for life."

Dozens of students interviewed said that when they signed for their loans they were
unclem on what interest rate they were getting and that financial aid com~selors
discussing repayment failed to include interest that students were compotmding while in
college. The lenders say they are providing a valuable service, helping students who
nfight otherwise not be able to afford college. Tom Joyce, a spokesman for Sallie Mae,
the nation’s lmtgest student lender, said the company’s average intetsst rate on private
student loans was just over 10 percent and that the typical bo~Tower was a yotmg person
with little or no credit histo~7 and no collateral.
"What wottld the credit card interest rate be for that borrower -- 24, 25 percent?" Mr.
Joyce asked. "Our goal is to make it possible for students to graduate."

But various members of Congress are now looldng at ways to tighten ovmsight of private
student loans.

The large growth in tnivate loans -- once confined tnqmarily to graduate students --
largely cotnes fiom steep increases in tttifion, which have ontpaced inflation and federal
aid, attd an increasing reluctance among parents to take on more debt.

For the last 15 years, the li~nits on the most connnon federal loans have stagnated at
$17,125 for four yem~. They will increase slightly stating next month. In addition, loan
companies have also come to realize that such loans cat be hugely profitable.

Although the federal Education Department has no jurisdiction over tnivate student loans,
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings recently pledged to convene the agencies that do,
including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and
the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
Resem’ch by rite U.S. Public Interest Research Group and others show that some students
are taking private loans before exhausting their eligibility for low-interest, fixed-rate
federal loans.

Janea Morgan, 25, a 2006 graduate of California College San Diego, said that college
officials had her fill out the federal fi~mndal aid form but never tapped federal loans.
Instead, she said, they steered her to a Inivate loan with KeyBank, at an interest rate that
could rise four times a year, with no cap.

Now, she is cmrying $46,000 in private loans at 9.22 percent interest, which she fears
may rise beyond her ability to pay. Ms. Morgan said that when she asked college officials
~vhy they bypassed federal loans, "They said it would take too long,"
 Page 798

Barbara Thomas, vice president and chief operating officer at California College San
Diego, said that she could not discuss Ms. Morgan’s situation because of privacy laws,
but that generally students someti,nes took too long to fill out the federal financial aid
application properly. "It’ s a time thing that ldds have to work with," Ms. Thomas said.

Sometimes marketing is at work. Last September, the United States Student Association
co~nplained to the Federal Trade Cormnission that a major private lending program, Loan
to Learn, made "false and deceptive claims" in a brochure called "Demystifying
Financial Aid."

According to the complaint, the brochure stated inaccurately that "most govermnent loans
are need-based," suggested that federal loans could not be used for education-related
costs like computers and books, mid that there were "strict deadlines" on applying for
federal loans. In fact, students can get federal lom~s to pay for educatiolual expenses, even
retroactively.

George C. Pappas, a spokesman for Loan to Letup, dismissed the complaint as

"absolutely ridiculous." Neve~daeless, EduCap, the parent company, has removed the
passages from the guide. The F.T.C. declined to cormnent on Loan to Learn.

Students with private loans can be caught by surprise at how adjustable interest rates
allow debt to swell.

Sean Craig Hicks, 35, attended the West~vood College of Aviation Teclmology, now
known as Redstone College, in Broomfield, Colo., from 1997-2000 in the hope of
becoming an airplane mechanic. He said a financial aid officer gave him an application
for a $6,000 private loan ttn-ough Wells Fro’go to help pay outstanding expeuses just
before graduation. On the school’s hall walls, he said, were fliers for Wells Fargo loans.
"You trast those people when they tell you this is the one to go witty," Mr. Hicks said.

Mr. Hicks said his loan docttments had pronfised that if he paid the minimmn due each
mouth, he would pay off the loan by 2010. Instead, after six years of payments, most of
them on time, he owes $100 more than when he took out the loan.

A spokeswoman for Wells Fargo, Mmy Berg, conftrmed that Mr. Hicks held a student
loan, but called the de alings with him a private inatter. Officials at Redstone College did
not respond to ~equests for comment.

Many students out of dozeus interviewed said it was not pmticularly cleat" what interest
rate they had signed up for.
Take Attila Valyi, a Motorola employee in Plantation, Fla. Eager tojvanp-sta~t his
education, he turned to/Xanerican InterContinental U~tiversity, a for-profit institution
offering a bachelor’s degree in 13 months. But discovering how much the diploma would
cost was an endeavor wolthy of a dissertation.

While the $28,000 tuition was no secret, Mr. Valyi said that at the mging oftmiversity
officials, he had signed an application for a loan that doubled as a pledge to pay the
money back. It did not indicate an interest rate. He took out two moae loans before
getting his bachelor’s degree, realizing only when it was too late, he said, that he cmied
 Page 799

loans at three different interest rates that could rise from month to montlL the largest for
$10,745 at 18 percent.
When Mr. Valyi, 30, contacted the lender, Sallie Mae, to refinance, he said he was told he
could not do so tmtfl he graduated. "You’re locked in at 18 percent," he said he was told.

Martha Holler, a spokes~voman for Sallie Mae, said Mr. Valyi and other bon’owers of
those years would have been told, dining the application process andin an approval
letter, the interest rate as a percentage above the prime rate. And they were free to cancel,
up to 30 days aider the money went to the school.

Lynne Baker, a spokeswoman for the Career Education Corporation, which o~vns
American InterContinental and scores of other for-profit colleges, said that the
colporation did not track individual student interest rates and that whether to pay such
rates was the students’ decision.
 Page 800

THE ARAB AMERICAN NEWS

SCHOOL GRANTS TO PROMOTE LEARNING ARABIC

By: Mohamed Kadry / The Arab Ameiican News

2007-06-09

DEARBORN t~IGHTS -- The U.S. Department of Education presented Stm

International Academy with a $339,586 check for a federal Foreign Language Assistance
Program grant on Friday to promote Arabic among America’s most popttlous Middle
Eastern population. This program provides grants to establish, improve, or expand
innovative foreign language programs for elementat7 and secondary school students in
order to increase the ntunber of students studying critical languages to help ensme
America’s competitiveness in the international economic and political spheres.
As pat of the federal push to establish and expand foreign language programs in
America’s schools, four schools in Dearborn Heights, Dearborn, and Detroit will be
recognized with grants that over three years are expected to exceed $1 nfillion in value.
Nawal Hanmdeh, founder, superintendent and CEO of Star International Academy, heads
an educational powerhouse that ~m~:s her charter schools in the top 50 nationwide. Her
students’ MEAt) reading proficiency levels from 2003-2005 smpassed Detroit and
Dearborn Public schools, and math proficiency gains were higher than all local public
school districts, despite having a much ttigher number of econonfically disadvantaged
students. Star International Academy also outpeffol:med 87 percent of Michigan charter
schools serving ecottomically disadvantaged students in reading and 77 percent in math.
It also ranked fomth in reading proficiency and seventh in math of all schools in the
enthe state serving similar populations.
Nearly 90 percent of the school’s students are of Arab or Middle Eastern descent. Some
speak Arabic well but many have little or no exposure to the language. This giant will
allow the school to implement much needed diversified language programs that will
accommodate the entire student body.
Fewer than one percent of Ameiican high school students study Arabic, Chinese, Farsi,
Japanese, Korean, Russian or Urdu. Fewer than eight percent ofU. S. undergraduates take
foreign language courses. U.S. Secretm7 of Education Mat:garet Spellings calls the
finplementation of high-quality foreign language programs, "...not just an education
issue; it’s an economic issue, a civic issue, a social issue, a national sectNty issue, and it’s
eve~5,body’s issue."
The grant comes at a time when American govermnent officials are revitalizing the effoit
to promote Arabic as a necessms~ language particularly in foreign and diplomatic afNil,~.
It is intended to imme~se all students in all grades in both the Arabic ~’md English
languages, and pro~note the study of both Arabic and American cultures tl~’ough artifacts,
geography, customs, traditions, folklore, dances, and music.
"We promote peace, not wars," Hanmdeh said. "The more we ande~stand each other, and
our cultures, the less conflict there is. We bring people together, sharing in the process of
learning, shining meals, shari~g lives...our students, our parents, our staff, and the
coimnunities around us all share together. It’s a good role model for a global world."
Students performed Arabic folk songs and traditional dances for the philanthropic guests,
higltlighted by a musical perfo~Tnance from Ali Bazzi who sang and played his Arabic
4rum to a cheering audience.
 Page 801

Nonrespons
FrOITl: Yudof, Samara
Sent: June 10, 2007 11:37 AM
To: Private- Spellings, Margaret; Dunn, David; Simon, Ray; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Maddox,
Lauren; Talbert, Kent; Briggs, Kerri; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Halaska, Terrell; Oldham, Cheryl;
Flov~rs, Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Herr, John; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; McLane,
Katherine; Rosenfelt, Phil; Cadello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Terrell, Julie;
Toom ey, Liam; ’tracy_d._young@who.eop.gov’; William s, Cynthia
Subject: 06.10.07 In the News

Attachments: 061007 In the News.doc

06.10.07 In the Ne~vs

TheWashington Post: Can D.C. Schools Be Fixed? (Dan Keating and V. Dion Haynes)

TheWashington Post: His Body Imprisoned, His Mind Set Free (Marc Fishe~9

TheWashington Post: Schools Chief Infusing Some Of His O~vn Pep Into St. Mary’s (Megan G~en~vell)

TheAssociated Press: Clinton: No Child Left Behind Threatens U.S. Creative Edge (Hem? Jacl~an)

TheNew York Thnes: Private Loans Deepen a Crisis in Student Debt (Diana Schemo)

TheNew York Times:: Iraq Is Backdrop for Many Graduation Speakers (Alan Finder)

The New York Times: Lar~3~ Sununers’ s Evolution (David Leonhardt)

The Louisville Courier-Jom~al: The real ~vorld; Does high school prepmv students for life after
graduation? (Raven Railey)

The Yorkto~vn Pah’iot: Why are college students going into debt?

The Arab American News: School Grants to Promote Learning Arabic (Mohamed Kadry)
 Page 802

061007 In the
X~ews.doc (166 KB...

The Washington Post

Can D.C. Schools Be Fixed?

After decades of reforms, three out of four students fall below math standards. More money is spent running the
schools than on teaching. And urgent repair jobs take more than a year...

By Dan Keat~ng and V. Dion Haynes, Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, June 10, 2007; A01

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn!content!arlicle/2007/06/09/AR2007060901415.html>
Kelly Miller Middle School opened its doors in a struggling Northeast Washington neighborhood in 2004, a $35
million showcase for the District’s public schools, every classroom equipped with a whiteboard and computers.
A particular source of pride was a media production room, where students could broadcast announcements and
produce programs to be viewed on TVs wired in each classroom.
Tln’ee years later, there have been no broadcasts. The room still needs a last, aitical piece of equipment, which
fell into a bureaucratic chasm. Until a few days ago, the principal had never been told what the part was or when
it was coming. For now, the $150,000 production room is a storage closet for unused books and fm-niture.
As Mayor Adrian M. Fenb¢ (D) prepares this week to become the first Washington mayor with direct control of
the schools, his team promises a clean slate and a rapid ttu-naround. Yet a detailed assessment of the state of the
school system, based on extensive public records, suggests that the challenge is enom~ous: The system is among
the highest-spending and worst-performing in the nation. Kelly Miller is one small example of a breakdom~ in
most of the basic functions that are meant to support classroom learning.
¯ Tests show that in reading and math, the District’s public school students score at the bottom among 11 major
city school systems, even when poor chilchen are compared only with other poor children. Thirty-three percent
of poor fotu-th-graders across the nation lacked basic sldlls in math, but in the District, the figme was 62 percent.
It was 74 percent for D.C. eighth-graders, compared with 49 percent nationally.
¯ The District spends $12,979 per pupil each yem, ranking it third-highest an~ong the 100 largest districts in the
natior~ But most of that money does not get to the classroom. D.C. schools rank first in the share of the budget
spent on admi~tistration, last in spending on teachers and instruction.
. t~incipals repolling dangerous conditious or urgently needed repairs in their buildings wait, on average, 379
days -- a year and t~vo weeks -- for the problems to be fixed. Of 146 school buildings, 113 have a repair request
pending for a lealdng roof, a Washington Post analysis of school records shows.
- The schools spent $25 million on a computer system to manage personnel that had to be discarded because
there was no accurate list of employees to use as a starting point. The school system relies on paper records
stacked in 200 cardboard boxes to keep track of its employees, and in some cases is five years behindin
processing staff paperwork. It also lacks an accurate list of its 55,000-plus students, although it pays $900,000 to
a consultant each year to keep count.
 Page 803

¯ MatN students and teachers spend their days in an environment hostile to learning. Just over half of teenage
students attend schools that meet the District’s definition of "persistently dangerous" because of the number of
violent crimes, according to an analysis of school reports. Across the city, nine violent incidents are reported on
a typical day, including fights and attacks with weapons. Fire officials receive about one complaint a week of
locked fire doors, and health inspections show that more than a third of schools have been infested by mice.
"I don’t know if anybody knows the magnitude of problems at D.C. public schools. It’s mind-boggling," said
Abdusalam Omer, the school system’s chief business operations officer, who was hired in Februaly to tackle
payroll, plnchasing, personnel and repair operations.
Omer, who worked for the schools as chief fumncial officer a decade ago, said little has changed.
"It’s like I’ve been in a coma for 10 years and just woke up," said Omer, who left the schools to be chief of staff
to fo~:rner mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) and then worked in Kenso__.for the U~fited Nations.
He said that when he walked into the personnel office this year, it was "strikingly scary" to find the mountain of
boxes holding files on more than 11,000 employees.
The pressines on the schools to succeed have increased in recent years as a congressionally mandated
experiment with independent, publicly funded ctmrter schools has taken root. Viewed by proponents as a way to
both improve the traditional public schools and give parents an option, charters have proven to be uneven in
quality but hugely popular. Nearly one-fourth of public school students now attend the city’s 55 charters, and
because funding follows the students, regular public schools with shrinking enrollment are losing funds.
MacFarland Middle School off Georgia Avenue in Northwest, for example, is surrounded by charters, and
enrollment has dropped fi’om more than 600 to about 300 in two years.
"I dorit try to compete with them anymore," said Antonia Peters, in her ninth year as MacFarland’s principal. "I
try to work with the kids that ~ve have. Most of my students are ELL [Englishlanguage learners] or special
education, but they take the same test as mainstream kids in English. It’s hard if you don’t know the language or
have special needs, but we’re held to the san~e standards."
As with many other schools across the city, her program has been pared to the basics, with foreign language and
air classes gone from the curriculum.
She reaches out to community groups to bolster her resources for instruction. A fo1Iner employee volunteers to
watch over students who have been suspended so they don’t have to be sent home. Peters can’t hire an ai-t
teacher, but a custodian at the school with a flair for art, Kenneth McCrory, helps students paint porl~aits before
he cleai~s the building.
’Below Ground Zero’
Like school districts in most large cities, Washington’s faces daunting problems, including a large population of
students from poor fainilies living in troubled neighborhoods. About tllree-fourths of elementary students are
poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price ltmches.
Across the city, dedicated teachers and principals work every day to help non-English speaking children learn to
read, challenge bright students to stay engaged and provide a secure refuge for children coping with damaged
families.
_~peiintendent Clifford B. Janev -- the sixth superintendent in a decade -- said he is making steady progress and
hopes that new test results, to be released in the coming months, will show significant gaius in achievement.
He and others point to pockets of excellence: The predonimately low-income students in a French program at
J.O. Wilson Elemental7 School in Northeast consistently finish near the top in ivatioual competitions, the
 Page 804
number of students taking Advanced Placement classes has increased by nearly one-third in the past three years,
and the rate of graduates going to college has doubled since 1999, according to one study.
In his nearly three years in the District, Janey has dram1 praise for imposing rigorous systemwide standards on
what should be taught at each grade, a cuniculum to accomplish that and a testing program to measure its
success. That reversed a trend of letting each school set its own path, which was widely criticized in education
circles.
Janey said he inherited not only poor classroom performance, but an agency where the computers didn’t work,
the payroll was a mess, schools lacked supplies and textbooks arrived months late.
"We were at or below ground zero and had been hovering there for some length of time," he said. "We are not in
denial. We are doing the work in spite of that. That’s the proposition we were given. It’s an obstacle, but it hasn’t
paralyzed us to distract from our core mission. I’ll be damned if it’ll paralyze us."
For years, debates about the quality of city schools revolved arotmd a central question: Does lagging academic
achievement -- two out of three students are not proficient in reading and thiee out of four are not proficient in
matt1 -- merely reflect the high number of students who are poor and unprepared for lem-rting? Or are other urban
districts with similar student populations better at improving performance?
That q~iestion finally has an answer, thanks to an expansion of a federal program that tests student achievement
across the country. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, had been reporting results by
state since 1990, but in recent years began isolating test scores from selected urban school systems.
Eleven city school districts were tested in 2005, including New York_, Boston, Atlanta, _Cleveland, Miami and
Chicago_, as well as the District. The Washington Post’s analysis of the data shows that D.C. students mikked last
or were tied for last on eve~Nmeasure. That is tree even when poor chil&enin the District are compared only
with poor chilNen in, say, Atlanta.
Indeed, on almost every cut of the scores, District students finished at the bottom, including students who were
not poor and whose parents were better educated.
The one group that scored well was ~vhite students, creating the widest gap between white and minority students
among the cities tested. The District’s white students, who make up 6 percent of the school populatio~, tend to
be affluent and are concentrated in a few schools.
The test results from NAEP combined students from public and charter schools. The Post’s analysis, separating
out the charter results for the first time, tinned up a significant change: D.C. charters had lower scores in both
reading and math in 2003, but they moved slightly past the other public schools in both subjects in 2005.
This could mean either that ctm_rters are able to do more for their students or that charters are simply &awing the
best students from the public schools.
Overall, District scores improved slightly between 2003 and 2005, the latest results available. But those in the
other reban districts improved more, leaving Washington at tt~e bottom.
A Voice From t~e Gym
Benjamin Hosch alTived from Chester to becorne principal at Theodore Roosevelt High School in 2005 and
quickly decided he didn’t have "the level and caliber" of staffhe needed. Only one in six students were meeting
the basic standards. He thought he’d scored a coup when "one of the best math teachers in the District" agreed to
come fi’om a charter school. He sent the paperwork downtown, but the hiring was delayed so long the teacher
took a job elsewhere.
Hosch was disgusted by the filth at the 75-year-old school on 13th Street Northwest. "No one has ever walked in
 Page 805
my building in my career as a principal and said my building looked dirty -- until I got here," he said.
He tried to get rid of his custodians, only to find that the personnel office put them back in his school because
there were no openings elsewhere. And the office failed to fill three teacher openings in core subjects by the
time school opened.
But when he questions the office on why things have been going offtrack, Hosch said, "the things people say to
me don’t make sense."
Just around the comer from Roosevelt, at Powell Elementary School, Principal Lucia Vega said she has had to
"warehouse" at least one unwanted staffer.
Walking down tile hallway recently, Vega stopped and commented: "Hem that singing? Coming from the
gym?" said Vega as a lone voice echoed down the hallway. "That’s my literacy coach." The coach "was given to
me" by the central office, Vega said, adding that the coach does not work with students, and, in Vega’s view,
doesfft contribute much to the school. "That person is totally useless ....That $80,000 is something I could
have used for my students."
The coach, Cheryl Mabr% said she has been with the schools for 34 years andhas been trained to help teachers
work with students who are struggling to read and write. She said she was sent by the central office to Powell
because, like most D.C. public schools, it did not meet academic targets.
"As far as what I’m doing, I think I’m making an impact," Mabry said, but she does not expect to be back next
year. "Ms. Vega has other ideas. I don’t think I fit into her plans."
When Vega was informed last year that she had overspent her budget, she knew something was wrong and
visited the regiolml adininistmtive office to check the ledger. There, she discovered that her budget included
salaries for two teachers who did not work at her school and whom she had never heard o£ The personnel
office, for unlcnown reasons, had assigned them to her payroll.
Staffproblems go beyond how teachers are deployed. Citywide, fewer than half of core courses are taught by
teachers who are considered "highly qualified" in their subject, which requires that they have earned a degree or
passed a competency test in that subject. Nationally, the numbers are worse in only one state -- Alaska.. In most
states, the figure was over 90 percent.
Within the District, teachers are less likely to meet this "highly qualified" standard at schools with poorer
students, according to a Post analysis.
At Deal Junior Higt~, which has relatively few poor" students, two-thirds of the core classes have highly qualified
teachers, twice the figm’e at MacFarland and GarneR-Patterson nfiddle schools, where almost all the students
come from poor families.
Across the city, 58 percent of classes in the junior high and middle schools with the most affluent students are
taught by highly qualified teachers, compared with 38 percent at the poorest schools, The Post found. The gap is
smaller at elementary schools.
Under the law, parents must be told if their child’s teacher does not meet this standard. But that hasn’t happened
because the District is more than a year behind in submitting the data.
Students are also hurt by the system’s management problems. A 2003 audit, for example, found mistakes in
student transcripts at all of the city’s 16 high schools.
Flyi~g Spark~
The list of repair requests fi-om D.C. schools, compiled in a database at the central office, details the crumbling
condition of many of the city’s school buildings. This spring, it contained thousands of unfilled requests,
 Page 806
including 1,100 labeled "urgent" or "dangerous" that have been waiting to be fixed, on average, for more than a
year.
Of the 146 schools, 127 have a pending repair for electrical work, some of which caused shocks or flying
sparks. Those typically have been on the books for two years.
At the stm~t of the 2002 school year, a student fi-om Ferebee-Hope ElementmTin Southeast was taken to the
hospital after being gouged by shm-p edges on a broken railing. It took the school system more than four years to
make that repair, records show.
Gage-Ecldngton Elementary hi Northwest notified the central repair office in May 2006 that a plexiglass
window was dangling fi’om its fratne in the second-floor boy’s restroom, posing a danger because a student
could fall ont. Two months later, the head custodian sent a second request labeled "Dangerous." A third request
went out in September, and a fourth in November, reading "asap! This is a safety hazard." The princiFal said it
took workers until January to replace the window.
More evidence of neglect has been uncovered by city health inspectors sent to check school cafeterias. In the
most recent round of inspections, 85 percent of cafeterias had violations, inching peeling paint and plaster
neat food, inadequate hand-washing facilities and insufficient hot water. Well over one-third of public school
cafeterias showed evidence of rodent or roach infestations in the past tNee years, according to health
inspections.
Aliel Smith, an American University_student who taught recentlyin an after-school program at Bruce-Monroe
Elelnentat~! School in Northwest, said she initially was appalled at the mice scmlying arotmd file cafeteria and
kindergarten classroom. They are so common, she said, that students have given them names and drawn their
pictures.
"These kids are so used to it, it doesn’t faze them anymore," Smith said. "First it upsets you, then you get used to
it, then you work around it."
Broken Pronfises
Families at H.D. Cooke ElementatV School have seen firsthand how grand plans can derail.
A $19 million project to rehab the buildi,~g in Columbia Heights has dragged Oll for years. The schools relocated
students to a vacant building in 2004, spending at least $3 million since then to transport them, but broke grotmd
only last week.
Troy Robinson isn’t letting his two daughters get their hopes up. "All I’ve heard is promises," he said. "Seeing is
believing."
In the years since the constnlction plans have been on the table, five chatter schools have opened in the area.
A similat discounect is playing out across town at Kelly Miller Middle, over the $150,000 media production
room and the missing equipment.
When Pl{ncipal Sheena Tuckson anived at the school in the fall, she was thrilled when she learned about the
plan for student broadcasts.
"I see it as leat~ling about job training, looking to their future, what are the possibilities out there," she said.
She had assumed the long-awaited, mystery piece of equipment could anive any day.
When The Post inquired about the missing part, Renard Alexander, who heads the instructional television
program, said it was a $2,000 custom catnera. But, he said, it was not his department’s job to provide it. He said
it is up to the principal to order and pay for the camera out of her school budget.
 Page 807

But nobody had told Tucksor~

This is the latest glitch in a series that stretches back three years. The ambitious plan first stalled in the mad rush
to open the school. The media room became a low pliolity that was put on hold when the funding was used for
other putposes. Responsibility slipped from the construction managers down the chain to Alexander’s
department. Some equipment was eventually installed -- most recently in March, when workers told Tuckson’s
staffthat the school needed just one last piece.
Now, the room has a rack of media components, a DVD/VCR and a television. A second black rack, designed to
hold more components, lies empty on its side.
Stanley Johnson, director of instructional technology, said all new buildings me being designed with production
rooms, but most are not being used. Changing piiofities among top administrators and smaller federal grants
have left the schools without money for the remaining equipment and trai~ting.
"It is a unique set oflearuing tools that we’re talking about," he said. "’We have these great things we can do. I’ve
got great plans. We could be so much further along."
Research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.
Photo slideshow available at <http://www.washingtonpost. com/wp-
srv/metro/interactives/dcschoots/galIeries/inthetrenches.html?hpid=artslot>

D.C. Schools Scorecard available at <http://www.washingtonpost. com/wp-

srv/metro/interaetives/desehools/seoreeard html?hpid=topnews>
 Page 808

The Washington Pos~

His Body Imprisoned, His M~nd Set Free

By Marc Fisher, Metro Co|unmis~
Sunday, June 10, 2007; C01
Bythe time he diopped out of the D.C. school system in 1 lth grade, Leslie Sharp had attended six different high
schools. Some kicked him out; some he just left. He didn’t go to any of them all that often.
When he did show up, nobody asked him where he’d been. Nobody bothered to try to get to know him. Nobody
demanded ttkat he do much work. "Some schools," Shai~p tells me, "they thought I was a female because of my
name."
By the time Sharp fmally did stay put somewhere, he was behind bars. Convicted of selling guns on the street,
he spent nearly two years in jail. While there, he did some things he had never done before. He read books. He
m’ote poems. He earned his high school equivalency diploma. He connected with adults who told him he had
talent, asked him about his life and insisted that he do his work.
This is a poem by Leslie Shm~). It is called "Five."
I am five
My father calls me L.J.
I hem" yelling and screaming
I’m laying on the bed
Trying to figure out what’s going on
In my blue, red and white p.j.’s
My father holding me, telling me don’t wo~sy
Everything’s going to be o.k.
My mother meant the world to me
I feel lost
I am just five.
L.J. Shalp is 19 now, working as an intern at the National Juvenile Defender Center, putting together brochures
for yotmg people facing criminal charges. He’s hying to get started in college, aiming to study architecttu-e and
design. And he mites.
That all started not in the D.C. schools but in the D.C. jail, where a guard asked Shalp one day ~vhether he was
going to the book club. It wasn’t as if he had anything better to do, so he found himself in the weekly session ran
by volunteers from Free Minds, a District-based nonprofit group that introduces teenage fignates to books and
creative miring, then follows up with them after they are released, connecting them to training, jobs and more
books.
The devastating poraait of the D.C. public schools painted in the investigative series that begins in today’s
Washington Post is a grim landscape of low scores, sunken expectations and a hollow curriculum. What those
 Page 809
systemic woes produce is far too many classrooms in which teachers seek only to get thi’ough the day and kids
such as Leslie Sharp are passed through without the slightest bunyan touch -- name, passions, even gender
unknown.
In jail, Sharp started out by reading the books and ~vriting the book reports he was assigned. And then he took
the leap: "I basically put my emotions down on paper. Sometimes I’d m-ite things that weren’t intended to get
out, but they do. It gave me something to do when I get mad, to relieve my mind."
He ~vrote about being locked up:
Sometimes I wish I can roll over and this just be a dieam
But when the troth set in everything is not what it seem
These are my consequences fiom the way I acted
Now I do what I’m told and can’t help the feeling of being
trapped.
In the D.C. schools, Sharp would show up Mondays to get the week’s assignments and Fridays to take the tests,
and that was about all. When I asked Sharp if any teacher had ever inspired him, he excitedly told me about a
class on entrepreneurship in which the teacher taught the basics of statlJng a business. But when I asked for the
teacher’s name, it became clear that Sharp and the teacher had never spoken to each other.
Kelli Taylor, who nms Free Minds with Tara Libert, knows that the District’s schools include many caring
teachers who work in difficult conditions with students deeply burdened by poverty, violence, dysfunctional
parents, substance abuse and gang life. But she also knows that "we as a community are failing our chilch’en.
Among the 200 youths aged 16 and 17 that Free Minds has served over the last four years, their average reading
level is just
fifth grade when they arrive at the jail." Many have never read a book. Many have been labeled special
education students, often because they behaved poorly in school.
"They actually say that people just want them out of the way," Taylor’ says. Over and over, she finds young men
who can barely read when they arfive at the jail but are reading voraciously six months later. "I have had two
different kids in out" program tell me with a straight face that they are ’retarded’ and won’t ever be able to go to
college. Anyone could tell that these boys were not mentally retarded, but they’d already heard it and accepted
the label."
The stories she hears about the schools a’e as disheartening as they a’e consistent: Boys who attend school only
occasionally yet are never confronted about their skipping. Boys who say theywere never assigned homework in
high school. Boys who cannot nane a teacher or a book that ever meant anything to them.
Obviously, some kids a’en’t ready to lean until they’re slammed with the shock of losing their fieedom. But just
as obviously, many of them had no chance to discover the fi-uit of knowledge because no adult ever set out to
connect with them while demanding that they world hard and study well.
Taylor received a letter fiom a yotmg man named Drew, an inmate who said: "If I had this type of support when
I was in the streets, I would not be in jail right now. Y’all got me over here miring letters, poems and stories. I
think I could be a writer! It makes me feel so happy, I never had no one who cared about my education. So y’all
really touch my heart."
Sharp doesn’t blame the D.C. schools for where he ended up. He figures he’s the one who decided to make his
way on the sfaeets. "School basically was irrelevant," he says. "I thought I had something to prove. You can tell
 Page 810
a child anyflfing, but they’re going to do what they want."
And then he says this: "The past is what made me today." He is talldng about his mother, about growing up on
the street, about how easy it is for a ldd to make some cash "doing the wrong thing." Sharp plans to mite about
this, using the tools he learned in plison but not in the D.C. schools.

10
 Page 811
The Washington Post

Schools Chief Infusing Some Of His Own Pep Into St. Mary’s
By Megan Greemvell
Washington Post StaffWriter
Sunday, June 10, 2007; COS
Michael Martirano’s colleagues tease him about his abundant use of what he calls his "e-words."
"There’s just so much energy and enthusiasm here," he said while walking ttn’ough an elementary school hallway
recently, shaking his hands back and forth to amplify his point. "Education here is just so exciting. It’s
electrifying!"
Rarely has "electrifying" been a word people associate with St. Mary’s County. Rural and sleepy, maybe. But
with rising test scores and ambitious new programs in the public school system he oversees, Martirano says he
plans to use a lot more "e-words" to describe St. Ma~3is. By the time he’s done, he says, the fast-growing county
surrounded by the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay will have the best public schools in Maryland.
Such talk is usually reserved for Montgomery County, which is known for its academic rigor and is one of the
largest school systems in the state. Or perhaps Howard County, which for years has boasted the highest overall
scores on the Maryland School Assessment.
Martirano has worked in both places, teaching in Montgomery and overseeing 39 schools as an assistant
superintendent in Howard. Factor in his experience as a teacher in Anne Anmdel County and a principal in
Prince George’s Colmty, and he’s made stops in four of the six largest school systems in the state.
So how did an ambitious 48-year-old educator end up in an area known for being far away and self-contained?
More than a few eyebrows were raised two years ago when Mal~irano announced he would leave his position as
the dhector of school administration in Howard to become St. Mary’s superintendent, but the Frostburg native
said he is convinced his new district will soon be seen as a destination.
"We’re a good school system on the precipice of being a great one," Martirano says fi’equently.
From some, it might seem boastful, but supporters -- and there are legions of them -- say the first superintendent
to come fiom outside St. Mary*s in many years has the right combination of big-city experience and small-town
charm to get the job done.
Parents love his easy interaction with their chil&en and his commitment to improving test scores. Teachers
compliment his mu-tllring attention that they say never feels stiNng. Board of Education inembers sayhis lofty
goals are infectious. Former s~lperintendent Patricia M. Richardson retired a poplflar figure, but she never
generated anywhere near Ma~tirano’s buzz.
Martirano’s co-~vorkers and friends speak first about his seemingly endless energy. He talks quickly, moves
quickly and demands quick restflts fiom his staff. He is in his office by 7:15 each morning and often stays
through eveni~tg meetings or events that end after dark.
"He is extremely di~ven and extremely focused," said Daniel Michaels, a close fiiend and co-worker fi’om the
Howard schools. "And because he’s so people-oriented as well, he is able to accomplish so much."
Under Martirano’s watch, Maryland School Assessment scores have risen to within a few points of Howard’s,
and countless ambitious programs have begun. A science and engineering academy will open next year, as will
Southern Maitland’s first charter school. Frill-day kindergarten became the norm last fall, a year ahead of the
state mandate. An element0aN school devastated by a fire reopened with state-of-the-art technology within a
I1
 Page 812

Marth’ano has won as much praise for acknowledging the school system’s failings as for new initiatives. Within
a few months of his hiring in 2005, he unveiled his "15 Point Plan of Priorities," headlined by a focus on the
achievement gap between black and white students. His biggest goal is to have every child reading at grade level
by third grade, which he believes is realistic.
Weekdays begin on the treadmill at 4:45 a.m. By 6:50, he is out the door of his Leonardtown home to drop the
two youngest of his three children offat Leonardto~w~ Middle School. Meetings begin promptly at 8.
On a recent Thmsday morning, Marrirano’s 8 a.m. meeting was with Kathleen Lyon, executive director of
student services for the school system. They spoke about the hiring process for a dlstrictwide security
coordinafor, coming graduation ceremonies and a celebration for special education teachers.
"Did that letter go out? Who are they supposed to send it back to? We’ve got to follow up on that ASAP,"
Marthano said at one point, referring to a letter to members of a task force and speaking so quickly the words all
seemed to be part of one long sentence.
Lyon laughed.
"He’s onlyin about second gear at the moment," she said. "Give it a few hours."
Indeed, as the morning wore on, MmlJrano appeared to pick up the pace. By the time he pulled his red Ford
Expedition into a parking lot in front of Leonardtown’s popular Linda’s Cafe for an early lunch, tie had visited
four schools, greeted dozens of student; and placed phone calls to several employees who had received
promotions earlier in the week.
Yet, as fast as he moved, MaNrano always seemed to be a few minutes late, a fact explained by his tendency to
stop to chat with every student or staff member he passed or to strike a pose with students whenever he sees a
camera. He has a knack for names and personal details, asking a teacher about the gardening grant she was
awarded last fall mid stopping to congratulate a gift he had watched play on the varsity basketball tean~.
"There’s the big cheese!" a high school freshman yelled in the superintendent’s direction.
"Why are you calling me that9. You’re the one in here working hard on your Spanish lesson. Maybe you’re the
big cheese," Martirano responded with a grin.
Several people who know Martirano have compared his charisma with that of a seasoned politician, an analogy
that’s not far off. He was the student body president in high school and was viewed as a big man on campus at
the University of Maryland, fiiends said. He won acceptance to several law schools and hoped to nm for office
someday, but he couldn’t shake the desire to be a teacher.
"This is a calling for me," he said in a rare moment of public solemnity. "It’s not about the positional power or
the rifle. It’s like the Bible says: ’To whom much is given, much is expected.’ "

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CLINTON: NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND THREATENS U.S. CREATIVE EDGE

By HENRY C. JACKSON, Associated Press Writer

June 9, 2007, 9:41 PM EDT

12
 Page 813

INDIANOLA, Iowa -- Democa-atic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton c~iticized the No Child Left Behind
education program Satm’day, saying its emphasis on testing puts American students in danger of losing their
creative edge. "I think that we are in danger ofnanowing the cun’iculum and leaving children behind," Clinton
said Satmday. "That’s the ve~7 opposite of what they said would happen." Clinton voted for No Child Left
Behind, President Bush’s signature education policy, in 2001, but has since been a sharp critic. She said the
program’s emphasis on testing is diluting resom-ces from other valuable areas of education. That will be a
problem for the count~3~ going foI-vvard, she said. "Part of the reason America was always in the forefiont of the
World Economy is that we’re the innovators ... it’s because we have creative lem-ners, we have people who
learnedto get aromld obstacles, they didn’t go in a straight line." Clinton spoke at a campaign event in
Indianola, where she helped raise money for state lawmaker Sen. Staci Appel. At the end of the event Appel,
who is serving her first term in the Legislature, said she was endorsing Clinton’s presidential bid. Clinton gave
a version of her stump speech before taking a handfifl of questions fiom a crowd of about 300 people. One
woman, a college student studying music, asked Clinton what she would do to ensm’e there was room for music
education in public schools. Clinton said she was a big supporter of music and other creative venues in school.
"Anyone who’s ever heard me sing, tmows, I can’t sing," she said. "It’s a shame. I always sound great to my ears.
...But I love music, and I cherish music, and I think back to my own years at school when the music teachers
would come into ore classroom." Clinton said music and art can help unlock hidden potential in some students.
’.’Music and art, and exposure to different set of cttlttual experiences can ignite such a creative passion and
~mag:ination in some people," she said. "I worry that No Child Left Behind with its emphasis on tests ... is going
to weed so many kids out."
 Page 814

The New York Times

June 10, 2007

Private Loans Deepen a Crisis in Student Debt
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

WASHINGTON - As the first in her immigrant family to attend college, Lucia DiPoi said she had few clues
about financing her college education. So when financial aid mad low-interest government loans did not stretch
far enough, Ms. DiPoi applied for $49,000 in private loans, too. "’How bad could it be?" she recalls thinking.
When Ms. DiPoi graduated from Tufts University in Boston, she found out. With interest, her private loans had
reached $65,000 and she owed an additional $19,000 in federal loans. Her monthly tab is $900, with interest
rates topping 13 percent on the private loans.
Ms. DiPoi, now 24, quickly gave up her dream to work in an overseas refugee camp. The pay, she said, "would
have been enough for me but not for Sallie Mae," her lender.
The regtflations that the fedelal Education Department proposed this month to crack dom~ on payments by
lenders to universities and their officials were designed to end conflicts of interest that could point students to
particular lenders.
But they do nothing to address a problem that many education officials say may have greater consequences -
more students relying on private loans, which are so um’egulated that Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of
New York recently called them the Wild West of lending.
As college tuition has soaredpast the stagnant limits on federal aid, private loans have become the fastest-
growing sector of the student finance market, more than laipling over five years to $17.3 billion in the 2005-06
school year, according to the College Board.
Unlike federal loans, whose interest rates are capped by law - now at 6.8 percent - these loans can2~ variable
rates that can reach 20 percent, like credit cards. Mr. Cuomo and Congress are now investigating how lenders
set those rates.
And while federal loans come with safeguards against students’ overextending themselves, private loans have
no such limits. Students ae piling up debts as high as $100,000.
Banks and lenders face negligible risk fiom allowing students to take out large sums. In the federal overhaul of
the bankruptcy law in 2005, lenders won a provision that makes it virtually impossible to discharge private
student loans in bmkkruptcy. Previously such provisions had only applied to federal loans, as a way to protect the
taxpayer against defaulting by students.
While federal loans also allow bon’owers myriad chances to reduce or defer payments for hardship, private loans
typically do not. And many private loan agreements make it impossible for students to reduce the principal by
paying extra each month unless they are paying offthe entire loan. Officials say they are troubled by the amount
of debt that loan companies and colleges are encovaaging students to take on.
"It’s a huge problem," said Barmak Nassiria~ associate executive director of the American Association of
Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. "When a student signs the paper for these loans, they are
basically sighting an indenture," Mr. Nassirian said. "We’re indebting these ldds for life."
Dozens of students interviewed said that when they signed for their loans theywere unclear on what interest rate
they were getting and that financial aid counselors discussing repayment failed to include interest that students
were compounding while in college. The lenders say they are providing a valuable service, helping students who
might otherwise not be able to afford college. Tom Joyee, a spokesman for Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest
student lender, said the company’s average interest rate on p~vate sq:udent loans was just over 10 percent and
that the typical bon’ower was a young person with little or no credit history and no collateral.
"What would the credit card interest rate be for that bol~ower - 24, 25 percent?." Mr. Joyce asked. "Ova goal is
to make it possible for students to gaaduate."
But various members of Congress are now looking at ways to tighten oversight of private student loans.
The large growth in private loans - once confined primarily to graduate students - largely comes fiom steep
 Page 815
increases in tuition, which have outpaced inflation and federal aid, and an increasing reluctance among parents
to take on more debt.
For the last 15 years, the limits on the most common federal loans have stagnated at $17,125 for four years.
Theywill increase slightly stating next month. In addition, loan companies have also come to realize that such
loans can be hugely profitable.
Although the federal Education Department has no jurisdiction over private student lom~s, Education Secretary
Margaret Spellings recently pledged to convene the agencies that do, including the Secmities and Exchange
Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
Research by the U.S. Public h~terest Research Group and others show that some students are taking private
loans before exhausting their eligibility for low-interest, fixed-rate federal loats.
Janea Morgan, 25, a 2006 gnaduate of California College San Diego, said that college officials had her fill out
the federal financial aid foirn but never tapped federal loans. Instead, she said, they steered her to a private loan
with KeyBank, at an interest rate that could rise four times a year, with no cap.
Now, she is carrying $46,000 in private loans at 9.22 percent interest, which she fears may rise beyond her
abilityto pay. Ms. Morgan said that when she asked college officials why theybypassed federal loans, °°they
said it would take too long."
Barbara Thomas, vice president and chief operating officer at California College San Diego, said that she could
not discuss Ms. Morgan’s situation because of privacy laws, but that generally students sometimes took too long
to fill out the federal financial aid application properly. °°It’s a time thing that kids have to work wiLh," Ms.
Thomas said.
Sometimes marketing is at work. Last September, the United States Student Association complained to the
Federal Trade Commission that a major private lending progranl, Loan to LemT~, made °°false and deceptive
claims" in a brochure called °°Demystifying Financial Aid."
According to the complaint, the brochure stated inaccurately that °~nost government loans are need-based,"
suggested that federal loans could not be used for education-related costs like computers mid books, and that
there were °°strict deadlines" on applying for federal loans. In fact, students can get federal loans to pay for
educational expenses, even retroactively.
George C. Pappas, a spokesman for Loan to Learn, dismissed the complaint as °°absolutely ridiculous."
Nevertheless, EduCap, the parent company, has removed the passages from the guide. The F.T.C. declined to
comment on Loan to Lemn.
Students with private loans can be caught by surprise at how adjustable interest rates allow debt to swell.
Scan Craig Hicks, 35, attended the Westwood College of Aviation Technology, now known as Redstone
College, in Broomfield, Colo., from 1997-2000 in the hope of becoming an airplane mechanic. He said a
financial aid officer gave him an application for a $6,000 private loan through Wells Fargo to help pay
outstanding expenses just before graduation. On the school’s hall walls, he said, were fliers for Wells Fatgo
loans. °°You trust those people when they tell you this is the one to go with," Mr. Hicks said.
Mr. Hicks said his loan documents had promised that if he paid the minimum due each month, he would pay off
the loan by 2010. Instead, after six years of payments, most of them on time, he owes $100 more titan when he
took out the loan.
A spokeswoman for Wells Fargo, Mary Berg, confirmed that Mr. Hicks held a student loan, but called the
dealings with him a private matter. Officials at Redstone College did not respond to requests for comment.
Many students out of dozens interviewed said it was not particularly clear what interest rate they had signed up
for.
Take Attila Valyi, a Motorola employee in Plantation, Fla. Eager to jump-start his education, he turned to
American InterContinental University, a for-profit institution offering a bachelor’s degree in 13 months. But
discovering how much the diploma would cost was an endeavor worthy of a dissertation.
While the $28,000 tuition was no secret, Mr. Valyi said that at the urging of university officials, he had signed
an application for a loan that doubled as a pledge to pay the money back. It did not indicate an interest rate. He
took out two more loans before getting his bachelor’s deglee, realizing only when it was too late, he said, that he
cat-ted loans at tlru-ee different interest rates that could rise from month to month, the largest for $10,745 at 18
percent.
15
 Page 816
When Mr. Valyi, 30, contacted the lender, Sallie Mae, to refinance, he said he was told he could not do so until
he graduated. °~You’re locked in at 18 percent," he said he was told.
Martha Holler, a spokeswoman for Sallie Mae, said Mr. Valyi and other borrowers of those years would have
been told, during the application process and in an approval letter, the interest rate as a percentage above the
prime rate. And they were free to cancel, up to 30 days after the money went to the school.
Lynne Bal;er, a spokeswoman for the Career Education Corporation, which owns American InterContinental
and scores of other for-profit colleges, said that the corporation did not track individual student interest rates and
that whether to pay such rates was the students’ decision.
 Page 817

The New York Thnes

June 10, 2007
COMMENCEMENT SPEECHES
Iraq Is Backdrop for Many Graduation Speakers
By ALAN FINDER

For many if not most membeas of the class of 2007, the war in ~ has been the constant background of their
college years. And so as seniors graduated from thousands of colleges and uttiversities in recent weeks, the war
was on the mind of many commencement speakers. Some criticized its prosecution, others commended the
sacaifices of the hundreds of thousands of volunteers serving in the armed forces, but few ignored the continuing
stnggle.

°’Most of you were juniors in high school when terrorists attacked America in September 2001, and it became
clear we were a nation at war," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told graduates at the United States Naval
Academ2. "With your credentials, you could have attended another prestigious university, and subsequently
putsued a private life, ~vith all its material rewards, your freedom and safety assured by other young men and
women who volunteered to serve in the American military."

Some speakers offered a critical view of the war and its consequences. Anthony W. Mazx, the president of
Amherst College, spoke at Amherst’s commencement of the lessons of the Roman empire, which he said
declined when leaders turned away from civic action toward private pursuits, abdicating civil authority to the
military.

"Always, out" political reach, our cultmal persuasion, our economic integration and out" military ntight m’e
bounded," Dr. MaIN said, drawing analogies between Rome’s decline and the present. "At those boundaries,
smugness is challenged. If we fail to heed that challenge, if we do not learn fiom the limits of out victories, we
risk the fate of Rome."
Boyd Tir~sley, an electric violinist in the Dave Matthews Band, told graduates in a speech the day before
gl"aduation at the Universi of Vir "nia, his alma mater, "I hope that you will once again bring us back to a time
when a person’s patriotism was judged by how much they loved their country, and not by how much they loved
War."

Still, there was plenty of customary commencement £are. Graduates were exhorted to be bold and public
spMted, to confront environmental degradation and.global warming, to end poverty in the United States and
curb it intelnationally. They were urged to find their irmer voice, to leap confidently over obstacles in their
careers, to avoid apathy and the lure of personal enrichment over civic engagement.
°~i’imes like these call for people like you to stand up and get to work," Kamala D. Harris, the San Francisco
district attorney, told graduates at San Francisco State University. ’°I"o break barriers, to chive change, roll up
your sleeves instead of throwing up your hands."
There was also the usual complement of confessions. Brian Williams_the anchor of the NBC Nightly News,
confided to students at Tulane that he had not earned a college degree, which he described as "one of the great,
great regrets of my life." The mystery novelist Mary Higgins Clark told graduates of _Quinnipiac University that
she could not sing, dance, cook or sew, though she acknowledged she could tell a stoly.

And Tom Brokaw, the former news anchor at NBC, said at the Skidmore College commencement that his
mentor at the University of South Dakota had characterized his undergraduate career this way: "We always
17
 Page 818
thought his first deglee was an honoral7 degree."
Then, too, a number of speakers worried aloud that they might be going on too long. The presidential historian
Michael Beschloss reminded graduates at Lafayette College that former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey
was known for giving speeches that lasted as long as three hours.
"Once Humphiey did this, and even he knew he was overdoing it," Mr. Beschloss said. "He yelled at the
audience, ’Anybody here got a watch?’ and someone yelled back, ’How about a calendar?’"

Robert M. Gates
Secretary of defense
The College of William & MaiN
Some of you may know the story of Ryan McGlothlin, William & Mary class of 2001: a high school
valedictorian, Phi Beta Kappa here and Ph.D. candidate at Stanford. After being turned dotal bythe Aarny for
medical reasons, he persisted and joined the Marines and was deployed to Iraq in 2005. He was killedleadiug a
platoon of riflemen near the Syrian border.

Ryan’s story attracted media attention because of his academic credentials and family connections. That
someone like him would consider the military surprised some people. When Ryan first told his parents about
joining the Marines, they asked if there was some other way to contribute. He replied that the privileged of this
country bore an equal responsibility to rise to its defense.

It is precisely duriug these trying times that America needs its best and brightest young people, from all walks of
life, to step forward and commit to public service. Because while the obligations of citizenship in any
democracy are considerable, they are even more profound, and more demanding, as citizens of a nation with
America’s global challenges and responsibilities - and America’s values and aspirations.

Tom Brokaw
Folrner anchor, NBC News
Slddmore College
You’ve been told during your high school years and your college years that you are now about to enter the real
world, and you’ve been wondering what it’s like. Let me tell you that the real world is not college. The real
worldis not high school. The real world, it turns out, is much more like jtmior high, You are going to encounter,
for the rest of your life, the same petty jealousies, the same inational juvenile behavior, the same uncertainty
that you encountered dining your adolescent years. That is your burden. We all share it with you. We wish you
well.

Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Supreme Corot justice
St. Mary’s College
Decades from now, you maybe different than you are today in a lot of significant ways. You may have a lot
more than you have today. You may have more rnoney and more status and more power and more
accomplishinents. You may also have more responsibilities, more womes, more regrets and more braises. But
underneath all of that, you will still be the same person who is here to@ graduating from college, and it will be
good for you to stay connected with the people who know the real you.

Gloria Steinem <http://t~pics.nv~mes.c~m/t~p/reference/timest~pics/pe~p~e/s/g~iasteinem/index.htm~?

inline=nvt-per>
Writer
Smith College
In my generation, we were asked by the Smith vocational office how many words we could type a mir~ate, a
question that was never asked of then all-male students at Hal~ral’d
 Page 819
<http://topics.nvtimes.eom/top/reference/timestopics/orRanizationsih/hm.vard lmiversity/index, html ?inline-~l,/t
~ or Princeton. Female-only typing was rationalized by supposedly greater female verbal sldlls, attention to
detail, smaller fingers, goodness knows what, but the public imagination just didn’t include male typists,
certailfly not Ivy League
<http://topics.nvfimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/or~anizations/i/iv¥ league/index.html?inline-~Wt-or R>-
educated ones.
Now computers have come along, and ’°typing" is "keyboarding." Suddenly, voila! - men can type! Gives you
faith in men’s ability to change, doesn’t it?

Kamala D. Hanis
San Francisco district attorney
San Francisco State University
As you grow in your career, you may hit ,another balrier - the limits that others set for you. A ceiling on what
you can accomplish and who you can be. That happened to me. When I decided to nm for district attorney, it
was considered a man’s job even here in San Francisco. No woman had ever been elected disla-ict attorney in
San Francisco. No person of color had ever been elected district attorney in San Francisco.
I remember the day I got my first poll results back. I was sitting in a small conference room, a little nervous, but
very hopefifl. Then I read them. I was at 6 percent. And that wasn’t good. So I was told what you all have
probably hemd in your life, and that you will certainly hear in your future. I was told that I should wait my turn.
I was told that I should give up. I was told that I had no chance.
Well, I didn’t listen.
And I’m telling you, don’t you listen either. Don’t listen when they tell you that you can’t do it.

John Grisham <http~//t~pics.nytimes.c~m/t~p/reference/~mest~pics/pe~p~e/g/j~hn-grisham/index.htm~?

inlinc~-nvt-per>
Novelist
University of Virginia
Thirty years ago this week, I graduated from college, class of 1977. I don’t recall much about my
commencement. I do remember that the spewer was dull and long-winded, and he did infolrn us that the future
was ours and the world was at our feet. I do remember sitting tttrough my commencement being pretty smug: I
was graduating from college, I had been accepted to law school and I knew exactly what I was going to do. I
was going to study tax law. I wanted to be a tax lawyer because I was convinced I could make a lot of money
representing wealthy people who did not want to pay all their taxes. That was my dieam, and I had it all
plamled. I knew the day I was going to start law school, the day I was going to finish. I had a pretty good idea
where my office was going to be. It was all planned.

I don’t know where this idea came from. I did not like tax la~v. I sure didn’t know any wealthy people. Looldng
back, I cannot begin to remember where this idea was planted, but that was my dieam. I had everything planned.
The idea of,,vriting a book had never crossed my mind. I had never written anything that had not been required
by school. I had never diemned of it.
Lesson No. 1 : You cannot plan the rest of your life.

Rev. Peter J. Gomes

Professor, Hm~cmd University
Augustalka College
Mound this time of year I have an mmoying habit of asking people, like you seniors, "Do you have a job?" You
resist answering that question, but I repeat it, "Your mother and I want to know, do you have a job?" By job we
don’t mean simply something that gives you a salary; I think we really mean: "Do you have a purpose? Do you
have a calling? Do you have a vocation?"

I want to suggest to you that whether or not you have a job, everyone has a vocation, and that vocation is to live
19
 Page 820
a life that is wol~h living. The best advice I can give is that which St. Paul gives us in Romans 12, where he says
to the likes of you, who all look alike fiom here, "Be not conformed to this world." Do not join the thiong.
Don’t get lost in the crowd. Don’t be a part of the coolde-manufactured college generation, but stake out for
yourselves some extraordinmy, maybe even eccent6c, piece and place of the world, and make it your own.

Representative Johil Lewis

<htto://topics.ngdmes.com/top/reference/thnestopics/people/1/iohn 1 ewis/index.htrnl?inline--nvt-p er>
Democrat of Georgia
Adelphia University
Sometimes I hear some young people say nothing has changed. I feel like saying, come and walk in my shoes. In
1956, at the age of 16, being so inspired by Dr. King along with some of my brothers and sisters and first
cousins, we went to the little library in Pike County, Alabama, a public library in the little town of Troy trying to
get libra,3r cards, trying to check out some books. And we were told by the librarian that the library was for
whites only and not for coloreds.

I never went back to that library until July 5, 1998. Bythat time I was a member of Congress, and I went there
for a book signing of my book. Hundreds of blacks and white citizens showed up. I signed many books. In the
end, 1hey gave me a library card. It says someth_ing about the distance we’ve come and the progress we’ve made
in laying dom~ the burden of race.

Jeffrey D. Sachs
Director of the Earth Institute,
Columbia University
<htVp://topics.nytirnes. com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/cohwnbia_university/index.html?
inline=nvt-orR>
Ursinus College
It’s aB about choice, graduates, it reallyis. There is nothing about fate. It’s all about choice. It’s all about values,
creativity, leadership. Let me give you jnst one small example of choice: the choice we are making, the choice
we should be making. Malaria is a disease we don’t know very much in this country, but it is a disease that will
kill two million chil&en this year, over~vhelmingly in Afiica. Two million childien. Now this is a disease that is
largely preventable and 100 percent treatable. And the treatment costs 80 cents. But people are so poor that two
million kids are going to die this year because they don’t even get access to the simplest things, like a bed net
treated with insecticide that would protect them fiom this disease.

Now here’s the basic arithmetic of our time: There are 300 million places in Africa, sleeping sites where people
are vulnerable to being bitten by this disease. 300 million. Each bed net costs five bucks. I trust your economics
course was sufficiently good so you could quickly calculate this, it’s ,vhy I went for a Ph.D. I know that’s $1.5
billion. Or you could take out Excel if you want to do it that ,vay. $1.5 billion~ And yet almost none of these
cttildren sleeps under a bed net because they are too poor. But what is $1.5 billion in today’s world? That is
what we spend every day on the Pentagon. That’s our daily military budget. So here is the calculation and here
is the choice. One day’s Pentagon spending would provide all sleeping sites in Afi-ica with five years of bed net
coverage, to fend off a disease which kills millions every year. That’s a choice. We haven’t made it. My
suggestion is, the Pentagon take next Thursday off.

Shirley Ann Jackson

President, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
University of Rochester
<http://topics.ngdmes.com/top/reference/limestopics/organizations/u/universitv of rochester/index.h~n~l?
inline=nvt-or~_
I am an optimist. I am short, and short people can only see the glass as half full. So optimize who you are and
~vhat you are. Optimize your experiences and what you have learned. Optimize others. Optimize your
 Page 821
opportunities. Seize them and do meaningful things.
Berry Gordy Jr.
Founder of Motown Records
Occidental College
I was a songwriter, I was struggling, and I loved it. I wanted to be the greatest songwriter. I was writing about
everyflfing - everything I saw. But I was not malting money, and I finally agreed with everyone I ever talked to
who knew me, who said, "Boy, you need to get a job - a real one." So I got a job on the Ford assemblyline. And
every day I watched how a bare metal frame rolling dov, q~ the line would come offthe other end a spanldng
brand-new car. Wow, I thought. What a great idea. Maybe I can do the same thing with my music - create a
place where a ldd off the street can walk in one door an unknov, q~ and come out another door a star. That little
thought that came to me while running up and down that assembly line at Ford Motor Company became a
reality you now know as Motown.

Laura Bush <http://topics.nylimes.com/top/reference/ftmestopics/people/b/laura busMndex.html?inline--nyt-

First lady
Pepperdine Universit’¢
<http://topics.nvtimes. corn/top/re ferenc e/timestopics/or ganizations/p~tmiv ersitv/index.html?
inline=nvt-org>
Today starts a period of incredible liberty and adventure - a time to demand the most of life, before life makes
specific demands on you. And as you work to make the most of what you’ve received, I can tell you one thing
for sure: You won’t waste your talents and education if you freely give them in selwice to others.
This is especially important for the class of 2007. More than any other generation of Americans, yours is tasked
with resolving challenges that lie fro beyond your doorstep - even far beyond America’s borders. Bet~veen
cellphones and the Internet, you have a world of information literally at your fingertips. And because our ~vofld
is so small, you can’t ignore the genocide in Darfur, or the hmnan-rights abuses in Burma. You can’t tam away
as pandemic diseases torment an entire continent. And you can’t look aside as American communities lie in

Dean Kan~en
Inventor and entrepreneur
Bates College
We’re moving from a world of stuff, from the idea that there’s a finite amount of gold out there, a finite amotmt
of almost anything out there. Thioughout all of history, people fought over stuff. land, fuel, sttfff. But in your
generation, the most value that will be created isn’t stuff anymore. It really is ideas. The Interact is an
abstraction, and the value of Google exceeds the value of all the car makers. In a world that’s about ideas, it’s
not a zero-sum game. You don’t have to win by someone else losing, where you have the gold or oil or water,
and somebody else doesn’t.

ka~gela Davis
Professor, UniversiW of California
<http://t~pics.nvfimes.c~m/t~p/reference/timest~pics/~rgaff1zati~ns/u/universitv of califomia/index.htrnl?
inline=nvt-org2_,
Santa Cruz
Glinnell College
I hope that you will treasure the approaches and ways of thinldng that you have learned more than the facts you
have accumulated. For you will never discover a scardty of facts, and these facts will be Nesented in such a
way as to veil the ways of thinldng embedded in them. And so to reveal these hidden ways of thinking, to
suggest alternate fianleworks, to imagine better ways of living in evolving worlds, to imagine new human
relations that are freed from persisting hierarchies, whether they be racial or sexual or geopolitical - yes, I
this is the work of educated beings. I might then ask you to think about education as the practice of freedom.
21
 Page 822

Alice Walker
Novdist and poet
Naropa University
When it is all too much, when the news is so bad meditation itself feds useless, and a single life feels too small
a stone to offer on the altar of peace, find a human sunrise. Find those people who are committed to changing
out" scary reality. Human sumises are happening all over the earth, at every moment. People gathering, people
worldng to change the intolerable, people coming in their robes and sandals o1 in their rags and bare feet, and
they are singing, or not, and they are chanting, or not. But they are working to bring peace, light, compassion to
the infinitely frightening downhill slide ofhutnan life.

George Stephanopoulos
<http:/Itopics.nvtimes. comftop/referenceltimestopicslpeople/s/george stephanopoulos/index.html?inline-mwt-
l) er>
Chief Washington coi:respondent, ABC News
2St. Johns University
<http:/Itopics.nyfimes.com/top/referencellJmestopics/orgaff~zafaondstst_johns tmiv ersity/index.html ?iNine=nyt-
org>
Solidarity and love are needed more than ever in a world that confounds us with conlaadictions and confronts us
with the challenge of living with its paradoxes.
We live in the strongest militaT power the world has ever known. No countryin the world can match that
arsenal, but years of war have taught us the painfi~l limits of military force. And we all have been mm’ked by the
day when 19 men aimed only with box cutters and a death wish stmck at the heart of our culture and
consdousness.
You me about to enter one of the biggest economies the world has ever known. We are creating more
billionaires and millionaires than ever before, but the gap between our richest and our poorest is bigger than
ever before. One out of every eight Arnericans is living in poverty, with millions more slruggling to get by.
You’ll be shaping a culture that for better or worse, is copied all over the world. The liberties and opportunities
we take for granted make us a magnet for people from all over the world. But the power we project also makes
us a target. A country with the reach of an empire cannot avoid the envy of those who have less, orthe duty to
help care for them.

Tavis Smiley
Radio and tdevision talk show host
Rut~ers University
<http://topics.nvfimes.com/top/reference/limestopics/organizations/r/rutgers the state university/index.html?
inline~wt-org2_
The tragedy of life does not lie, yotmg folk, in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to
reach. It is not a calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream. It is not a disaster to
not be able to captme yore ideals, but it is a disaster to have no ideals to capture. It is not a disgrace to not be
able to reach all the stars, but it is a disgrace to have no stars to reach for.

22
 Page 823

The New York Thnes

June 10, 2007

ENCOUNTER
Larry Sunnners’s Evolution

By DAVID LEONHARDT

Back in the 1980s, bvo young Haward,professors t~34ng to reinvigorate the Democratic Party wottld meet at the
Wtusthaus restaurant in Cambridge, Mass., to have hmch and argue with each other. They must have made for
an entertaining sight, one of them bearish and the other less than five feet tall, debating each other in a dark
Harvard Square clive. The argument, in a nutshell, came to this. The smaller man - Robert Reich, a futme
secretary of labor - argued for something that he called "industrial policy." Since the government couldn’t avoid
having a big influence on the economy, he said, it should at least do so in a way that promoted fast-growing
industries and invested in worthy public projects.
The bearish professor was Lawrence H. Sumlners~ who was then the youngest person to have received tenme in
the modem history of Harvard University. He loved to tackle big, broad questions, and, byhis lights, industrial
policy an~ounted to another version of the governmental meddling that had helped consign the Democratic Party
to opposition status. How could bm’eaucrats know which industries and projects to support with tax credits? The
better solution, Summers responded, was to get the economy growing fast enough that the problems of the
middle class would begin to solve themselves. And the way to do this was to slow gove~3unent spending and
raise taxes on the wealthy, which would bring down the Reagan-era budget deficits and, eventually, interest
rates. Once that happened, the American economy would be unleashed.
The debate, friendly as it was when Smnmers and Reich were having it, would come to dominate the struggle
over domestic policy within the Democratic Party for more than a decade. Bill Clinton. ended up embracing the
centrist, business-fiiendly ideas of Summers and his mentor, Robert Rubin, and the situation played out just as
they had predicted: interest rates felt, and along came a boom that helped almost everyone. Inthe late ’90s, the
wages of rank-and-file workers rose faster than they had in a generation. A fia~strated Reich left the Labor
Department after Clinton’s first term, while Summers eventually ascended to thetop job at the Treasury
Deparl:ment.
All of which makes it rather fascinating to listen to Summers talk these days. Having left the presidency of
Harvard after a rocky five-year tenure, he has tin-ned his attention back to economics. But he doesn’t sound like
a triun~phant Clinton alumnus who simply wants the country to return to the policies of the 1990s. He sounds,
strangely enough, a little like Bob Reich.
On Oct. 30 of last year, Summers made his debut as a monthly columnist for The Financial Times. The colmnn
was tifled "The Global Middle Cries Out for Reassurance." He began by noting that the world’ s economy had
grown faster over the previous five years than at any other point in recorded history. "Yet in many coiners of the
globe there is growing disillusionment," he continued. The main reason seems to be that the benefits of growth
are flowing largely to only two groups: previously impoverished residents of Asia and an international elite.
Summers’s favorite statistic these days is that, since 1979, the share ofpretaxincome going to the top 1 percent
of American households has risen by 7 percentage points, to 16 percent. Over the same span, the share of
income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by 7 percentage points. It’s as if every household in that
bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 everyyear and sending it to the top 1 percent. This is why the
usual assm’ances that come from people like Summers - that an open, technologically advanced global economy
is inevitable and good - feel, as he himselfvaote in The Financial Times, like "pretty thin gruel."
Dealing with this anxiety - making globalization work for the masses - has become the central economic issue of
the dayin Summers’s mind. And since his H~ard presidency ended a year ago, he has set out on a search for
solutions. To him, it seems like a natm’al sequel to the policies he pushed in fl~e 1990s. To liberal Democrats, it
seems long overdue. "I breathe a great sigh of wistfulness and relief and say, ’Finally, they’ve come around,’ "
23
 Page 824
Reich says. "It was, I think, a fundamental failtue on the part of the Democrats in the late ’90s not to face the
stmctm-al changes that needed to be faced."
Summers lecentlyjoined the board of Teach for America, in large measure to think more about education
reform. He has also joined an advisory board of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts, the state at the
center of health care refolrn. (His gut instinct is that Massachusetts’s universal-coverage plan isn’t radical
enough.) He has re-engaged in academic life, becoming the co-editor of a jomnal partly so he can nudge other
economists to do research on big policy issues. With the Democrats back in control of Congress, he has testified
at hearings and met privately with members to talk about inequality. His old friends and colleagues from the
Clinton administration have now spread out to the Federal Resei~re, Capitol Hill and, of course, ~nton’s
campaign. In effect, Summers is assembling a virtual think tank. ’°I think the defining issue of our time is: Does
the economic, social and political system work for the middle class?" he told me. "’Because the system’s
viability, its staying power and its health depend on how wall it works for the middle class.’"
At age 52, La:try Summers has already finished his first thi’ee careers. The son of two economists at the
University of Pe~msylvania and the nephew of two Nobel-winning economists, he em’olled at M.I.T..when he
was 16. Then came the swift rise to tenure at Harvard, a flurry of lesearch papers on seemingly evely major
topic in economics and an award called the John Bates Clark Medal, given every other year to the best
economist under 40. "I’ve been around some pretty smmt people," said Jonathan Gruber, an M.I.T. economist
and a former student of 8ummers’s. "But it’s a different level with Lan7."
The rap on him - in academia and later in Washington, where he moved in 1991 to become the chief economist
of the World Bank - was always that he kne~v he was the smartest guy in the room and acted like it. At faculty
seminars, he would sometimes interrupt another professor a few minutes into a presentation, succinctly
summmize the undelivered pollJon, poke holes in the argument and offer suggestions about how to make the
same points in more compelling fashion. To the great amusement of his colleagues at Treasmy, he occasionally
did the same thing to officials fi’om foreign governments who had come to call on him.
But the notion that Summers can be a bully misses one thing: he likes it when people fight back. As Treasury
secretaly, he encouraged his own staff to disagree with him when they thought he was wrong. "He was
incredibly open to people pushing back and challenging him," said Timothy Geithner, the era-rent president of
the Federal Resel~re Bank of New York, who worked under Stunmers at Treasury. "It’s what he desires most.
It’s how he thinks through things." During a conversation I was having with him one morning in a Senate
cafeteria, in the midst of explaining why he thought the pay of chief executives was economically rational,
Summers stopped and said, "When I’ve thought about possible explanations for this, one is that I’m m’ong."
As a result of this intellectual playfulness, many people find it thiilling to talk with him. He loves to examine an
idea fiom every possible angle, searching out the weaknesses in order to ai:rive at a better conclusion. Hem21
Kissinger has said that Summers should be given a permanent White House job, a sort of fixer of flabby policy
ideas. Of course, 8un]mers’s style, or lack of it, is also at the root of his well-pulolicized missteps.
By most accounts, he did lemn to soften himself while in Washington, whichhelps explain his successful
decadelong run there. Shortly after Clinton left office in 2001, Sun]mers was given the most prestigious job in
higher education. It’s hard to think of anyone else in public life today who has reached the pinnacle ofthree
different careers. And Harvard was supposed to be the end of the Smnmers story. Given his age and his
anlbitions - his plans to invest hundieds of millions of dollars in the life sciences, elin~inate tuition for lower-
income students and reinvigorate undergraduate education - he seemed destined to lead the m~iveisity for the
next 20 years.
But back in academia, where social skills are not a prerequisite for success, he seemed to forget that his new job
had more in common with bring a cabinet secretm7 than with being a professor. Most famously, he ~vondered
aloud at an academic conference in 2005 ~vhether innate differences helped explain why men dominated the top
ranks of research science. He never recovered.
The most obvious place to land would have been Wall Street, and he talked with Goldman Sachs and ~12.
But he instead took a lucrative part-time job at a big hedge fund, D.E. Shaw. Summers’s main professional
home remains, surprisingly, Harvard, where his wife, Elisa New, is a literature professor and he holds a
distinguished endowed chair.
On a recent sp~ing afternoon, he was the sml)rise guest speaker for the final meeting ofa lectq~re course called
 Page 825
Morality and Taboo, taught by Alan Dershowitz, the law professor, and Steven Pinker, the psychologist. They
were prominent supporters of his presidency, and the occasion seemed ripe for self-justification. Summers has
always kept the support of Harvard’s undergraduates, and when he was introduced, the students in the classroom
gave him a 20-second ovatior~_ Some stood. In his introduction, Dershowitz defended Summers’s remarks about
gender and science as honest intellectual inquiry. But Summers wouldn’t have it. °I think it was, in retrospect,
an act of spectacular imprudence," he told the class. He still maintains that some critics mischaracterized his
remarks, but the bottom line is that gifts arotmd the world came to think that the president of Hm-vard believed
they couldn’t be scientists. ~q~nere are enormous benefits to being a leader of a major institution, but there are
also costs and limitations," he co~Nnued. °°I thought t could have it both ways, and I was wrong." Even when
someone is defending him, Summers can’t hold back from a debate.
In many ways, the political path that he has followed over his career is also the path of his proW. The decades
after World War II were dominated by the Keynesian notion - shaped in part by one of his Nobel-winning
uncles, Paul Samuelson - that government was good. But the stagflation of the 1970s caused a whole of
generation of economists to look instead toward the market, which seemed far more efficient at allocating
resources. Today Summers says he believes in markets as much as ever, and he begins almost any discussion of
globalization by pointing out its benefits. Food, clothing, ftu-nittue and dozens of everyday items are more
affordable than they once were. Interest rates are low, as is inflation, and recessions come less oRen. Bringing
down the deficit in the ’90s, he argues, helped make this possible.
But Suntmers says he now has to reckon with a new reality. Despite good growth over the last four years, the
pay of most American workers has barely kept pace with inflation. Techi~ology and global trade are conspiring
to let highly skilled workers do more - to be more productive and to play on a bigger stage - while at the same
time making millions of other workers replaceable. The middle-class income gains of the Clinton years now
look hke an aberration, caused by a combination of low oil prices (which allowed a dollar to go fm-ther) and a
financial bubble that made the job market unusually tight. "I don’t think my general orientation to the world has
changed," Summers says, noting that he favored interventions like tax credits for the poor dmJ_ng the ’90s and
continues to worry about the deficit today. °°But I think if you look at how the economy is working for average
families, the sensible priorityhas shiRed." Geitlmer, the New York Fe&ral Reserve president, puts it this way:
"The facts have changed a line bit. That’s what Larry’s evolution reflects."
What’s striking today is how much Democrats on either side of the 1990s debate agree with one another. Most
say that globalization itself cannot be held back, because it stems more from the inexorable march of technology
than fi’om any change in trade laws. Credit-card call centers have moved to India and Ireland because they can
function there, not because a new law allowed them to go. Trying to prevent jobs from leaving will create the
problems that protectionism always had, like higher inflation and slower economic growth. But leaving the
market to work its magic also won’t do. Even the centrists within the party agree that the government needs to
meddle in the economy more than it once did.
The model that most appeals to Summers is, in fact, the United States - in the decades aRer World War II. At the
time, this countts~ was opening itself to more global competition, by rebuilding Europe and signing financial
agreen~ents like Bretton Woods. But it was also tatting concrete steps to buildthe modern middle class. In
addition to the G.I. Bill, there were the Federal Housing Administration, the Interstate Highway System and a
very different tax code. The history ofprogressivism °°has been one of the mm-ket being protected from its own
excesses," Sunwners says. ~And I think now the challenge is, again, to protect a basic market system based on
open trade and globalization, to make it one that works for everyone or for almost everyone, at a time when
market forces are often producing outcomes that seem increasingly problematic to middle-class families."
A new social contract would look different, of course. The tax code of the 1950s, with a top marginal rate of 91
percent, stifled innovation. Today’s system goes too far in the other direction, Sununers says, exacerbating
inequality with loopholes and deductions that let a lot of affluent families avoid taxes, and the Bush tax cuts
haven’t helped. Health care reform is another obvious priority. In Summers’s view, the ctm’ent employsr-based
system, which creates insecurity for many families and big costs for companies, may need to be replacedby one
in which the govermnent pays for insurance but individuals choose what planthey want. It would be single
payer, but not as England or Canada does it.
Summers becomes really excited by what he sees as the potential for a life-sciences revolution. It will happen
25
 Page 826
only if government again does its pat, though, and in the last few years federal support for medical resem’ch has
failed to keep pace with inflation. A more sensible policy, he m-gues, has the potential not only to keep people
healthy and alive for longer but also to create well-paying jobs. He likes to talk about "clusters" like Silicon
Valley - in the life sciences and other areas - where groups of companies can feed off one another to become
more productive. Moving jobs to a low-wage countrythen becomes less attractive. And the government can
help create clusters, just as it built the highway system and the Intemet. If you didn’t know any better, you might
evenrefer to this idea as industrial policy.
Summers now occupies a funny place in the Democratic constellation. His various dust-ups over the years have
left him with a fair number of enemies. But he also has a lot of influential fans, as well as the ability toinject an
issue into the public debate merely by discussing it. Under a Democratic president, he would be an obvious
candidate to run the Federal Reserve or the World Bank. But a more likely path could be the one takenby
Kissinger, who has spent the last 30 years as a force in Republican foreign policy despite having been out of
government. Summers may actmally be better suited for this role than for some of the jobs he has held recently.
It’s one in which the quality of an idea matters more than its delivery.
A freelance career would have its frnstrations, but Summers has had some success in persuading others. Bill
Gates <http://topics.nvtimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/bill gates/index.html?inline--nvt-per> has
said he decided to devote much of his money to global poverty and disease after reading a 1993 World Bank
report - a report that Stm~mers instigated. His efforts to recruit poor students to Harvard helped make a national
issue of the lack of low-income students at elite colleges. In India, where politicians say he influenced their own
approach to trade agreements, they still quote him the way people here quote Alan Greenspan
<htt~://topics.nytimes. com/top/reference/flmestopics/people/g/alan greenspan/index.html?inline-~wt-per>.
"I’m finding my way," Summers said about his newest career, his fourth. ’°I think one has to be prepared to
accept long causal chains. That is, if you’re trying to think about a problem and propose a solution, it does not
happen the next day. But it affects the climate of opinion, and things go from being inconceivable to l:eing
inevitable."
 Page 827
The Louisville Courier-Journal

Sunday, dune 10, 2007

HIGH SCHOOL ROUND TABLE

The real world
Does lfigh school prepare students for life after graduation?
By Raven J. Railey
Special to The Courier-dournal
Most a’ea schools are out for the summer, but hoar well are their lessons prepming students for life on the job, at
home and as adults?
Members of The Courier-Journal’s High School Round Table recently talked about their schools’ strengths and
weaknesses in preparing yotmg people for the "real world."
They also discussed where they think educators’ priorities should be and the effect of state and federal standards,
such as the No Child Left Behind Act.
The round table is an annual tradition daring to 1983. This year’s members were chosen from more than 270
applicants.
Here are excerpts of their conversation:
Raven Railey: Do you think the educational system prepares you well for life aRer high school?
K’eion Brown, 18, senior at Fairdale High School: No. It’s harder in the red world than it is in school. In
school, you caI~ slack off, but in the real world if you do, then you are going to fail and get fired from yotu" job.
Danielle Hawks, lg, senior, Bulli~t Central High Schooh I want to be a teacher. So going to school is helping
me be what I want to be.
But to help me compete in the world, I don’t think so much. My school has done a good job this yea’. We were
on a grading scale to where anything below a 50 was an F and 90 to 100 was an A. I skated through school until
this year. Then they changed it -- anything below a 70 is now an F.
Miguel Cruz, 17, senior, Waggener High School: If you want to succeed, you’ll find it at whatever school you
go to. What chives you is not the education that you receive, but the discipline in yourself.
Amanda Kasey, 16, freshman, Charlestown High School: I don’t necessa~ly think high school prepares you
for life, but I don’t think it’s all the school’s fanlt. I third< it’s mostly just out age andimmatufity.
Surr~ya Ahmad, 17, junior, Louisville Collegiate School: I would like to see more required courses that teach
life values so that kids can get exposure to other things before they go out into the real world, like home
economics courses - basic things.
At ota school, we have a life skills course. Each year, we talk about different tlrings. The junior class, we took a
career test so that we could see what we would want to major in.
Bryce Mflburn, 17, senior, B~yle County High Schooh I think high school is more about teaching you how to
deal with people.
Thesill show where your interests are. I tlfink that college is the best pat to teaxt stuff because you actually get
serious.
High school is pretty much like a day care for teenagers. I can skip class and get an A, so I do. I think their l~es
should be a lot stricter.
RMley: Do others have "life skills" classes? Should theybe taught in school?
K’eion: Yes, because I think that people waste money. IfI was taught earlier instead of later how to save it, I
would have a whole lot more than I do now.
 Page 828

If they were taught how to speak to people, people wouldn’t jump to conclusions or get aggravated, and then we
wouldn’t have so much violence going on.
Chase Sanders, 17, junior, Male High School: I can think of only one class that I have taken that has helped
me to make good choices in life. That was in my freshman year when I was in ROTC.
If you are going to have a class like that, you need to have it later on. Have them take it one semester their senior

Danielle: I don’t think that we need to lean how to live our lives and how to manage our money by the
government. That is something that you need to find out on your own or with your parents’ influence.
Miguel: I would love to see a combination of a discipline course and a self-confidence course. A lot of ldds that
I know really second-guess themselves.
Amanda: We have fancily consumer science courses: persoual skills, relationship skills and life skills. Mostly
it’s like a health class, so t don’t really learn that muck
But I do like the program "Baby, Think it Over." Youget to carry that little baby around and it squalls all day.
I have never leaned how to balance a checkbook, and I know that’s going to hurt me pretty bad.
Surr~ya: School should offer more courses on how to manage your money aid on things like balancing a
checkbook.
The life skills course, to graduate, you have to give a senior speechin front of the upper school. You have to
develop the confidence to do that.
You also have a week that the seniors get offand theygo and explore a field that they think they might want to
do when they graduate. You shadow a doctor or work in some other field.
Hila~:y Borgmeier, 15, freslnnan, Sacred Heart Academy: We have a class called "Self," and it teaches you
how to control your anger. If something bad happens, like a death or your parents get divorced, it teaches you
how to deal with that.
Business is required and so is computer applications for all four years.
DaNdle: Agniculture is really big at our school. Our business depa-trnent is really, really big. We have a lot of
the family consumer science classes.
I took accounting, and I worked in the bank this yea’. I an certified that I canwork at a bank now, which is
reallygood for me ifI ever need to get a job.
Amanda: We have a big business wing where you could take computer application classes. We have the
Prosser School of Teclmologythat we go to eve~3~ other day. It has culinary, cosmetology, aviation and a bunch
of different programs.
Miguel: We have a child development center where we have a day ca’e.
Chase: My school has business classes you can take, but you can only take these classes when you are a senior.
The Btflldog Bank -- it’s like a bank that they have in our school that’s helped by National City Bank. You can
take law and government classes.
KMon: My school has four programs that you can intern for. I chose to do firefighter. They sent me down to the
fire depa-tment that was close to our school. They taught me how to save people’s lives and get certified in
EMS, and how to do trench rescues:
Bryce: Theyhave this work-study program where if you have a job, you can leave at noon and go work. Most
people leave aid they don’t start the job until 3 p.m. Theyjnst go home and sleep. So it’s kind of a waste of time.
Hfla~d: We have a whole broadcasting wing, and they have TV shows.
RMley: There seems to be more emphasis on testing and teaching to federal mid state standards in public
schools. Is this helpfi~l?
 Page 829

Danielle: I don’t think that is working at my school.

With "No Child Left Behind," the focus is bringing everyone who is down low up. So if you are a student that
does take the more advanced classes, you are kind of left to do it on your owlt
I guess that’s kind of a good tiling, because it’s going to teach more self-discipline.
A~l~an~|a: It just stresses us out. We are always testing, andit messes up our schedules. It takes away fiom our
classes.
Peopleju~runthroughitbecause theyknowitdoesn’tcount, sol dofftthinkit’s anaccuraereNesentationof
whNwe arelearNng.
Surr~ya: It’s a good starting point to see if everyone is on equal footing. I dolft think it’s an end-all to see what’s
going on.
Daniellc: CATS tests mean nothing to us in the long nm, whereas the ACT is us getting into school or not. The
test that we really should be studying for, the school doesn’t care about.
Ra~ey: What challenges do you think educators face in teaching effectively?.
Cl~ase: You have so many different kids that have different situations, and they come from different
backgrounds.
A~r~al~la: The standarcLs get in the way, and they can’t teach what they think is more relevant to life. We don’t
go on field tlips anymore, and we can’t watch documentmies.
We don’t actually get to explore or talk about what we thi~lk.
Mig~ael: They have to try and please the government, please the students and please the parents at the same
time.
S~rrtya: At our school, it’s easy to talk to our teache~, and the class size is small. You can’t connect if the class
size is large.
K’e|ol~: This past year I had an integrated-science teacher that I felt was the best teacher. She stayed after every
dayto make sure that you understood what she was trying to teach you. But she had students that didn’t want to
lean.
Railey: Hoar do your schools excd, and what’s one thing you’d change?
A~r~anda: We lean how to get along with people that we don’t necessarily agree with.
I’d rather go in-depth with stuff than just barely cover it because you have to move on to the next standard.
Cl~ase: The school is doing their job. The only change that I would make is that schools give you more choices
toward your career goals, maybe your junior or se~tior year.
Daniel|e: Our teachers are really great teachers, but I don’t think that the school gives them the chance to teach
what they really want to teaclt There are so many restrictions.
The administration does a lot of picking and choosing the role-model students, and they don’t pick vely well.
That sends the waong message to some kids.
They are more outgoing, but are they really the ones that are achieving in school?
M[guel: They excel in providing the teachers for yott I believe that should be the most that they should have to
do.
Sun’tya: The schools excel at the wide variety of academic courses they offer. It gives the students a chance to
prepare themselves for college..
An improvement would be to not just focus on acadelniCs, but bring in other types of courses.
Bryce: The only tiling that my school achieves is fordng all the teenagers in the area to get to know each other.
 Page 830

I think they need some more money in peer educatioIt

You spend most of your life in front of the computer screen if you are going to work. They need to let you know
how, other than to just type on a keyboard.
K’eion: I feel like most of our students -- most of our seniors in particular -- wouldn’t have made it without our
teachers. Our teachers cm’e a lot aloout us, and they push us to become better.
My math teacher, he pushes all his students to the maximum of their ability, because that’s how much he wants
them to succeed.
Instead of treating people on the athletics tean~s like they are more important, they just need to treat everyone
equally.

30
 Page 831
The Yorktown Patriot
Why are college students going into debt?

Jun 10, 2007, 09:39

WASHINGTON - As the first in her immigrant family to attend college, Lucia DiPoi said she had few clues
about financing her college education. So when financial aid and low-interest government loans did not stretch
far enough, Ms. DiPoi applied for $49,000 in private loans, too. °°How bad could it be?" she recalls thinking.
When Ms. DiPoi graduated from Tufts University in Boston, she found out. With interest, her private loans had
reached $65,000 and she owed an additional $19,000 in federal loans. Her monthly tab is $900, with interest
rates topping 13 percent on the private loans.
Ms. DiPoi, now 24, quickly gave up her dream to work in an overseas refugee camp. The pay, she said, °~ould
have been enough for me but not for Sallie Mae," her lender.
The regulations that the federal Education Department proposed this month to crack down on payments by
lenders to universities and their officials were designed to end conflicts of interest that conld point students to
patticular lenders.
But they do nothing to address a problem that many education officials say may have greater consequences -
more students relying on private loans, which are so unreg~ated that Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of
New York recently called them the Wild West of lending.
As college tuition has soaredpast the stagnant limits on federal aid, private loans have become the fastest-
growing sector of the student finance market, more than tripling over five years to $17.3 billion in the 2005-06
school year, according to the Colleg~ Board.
Unlike federal loans, whose interest rates are capped by law - now at 6.8 percent - these loans carry vmiable
rates that can reach 20 percent, like credit cards. Mr. Cuomo and Congress are now investigating how lenders
set those rates.
And while federal loans come with safeguards against students’ overextending themselves, private loans have
no such limits. Students are piling up debts as high as $100,000.
Banks and lenders face negligible risk from allowing students to take out large sums. In the federal overhaul of
the bankruptcy law in 2005, lenders won a provision that makes it virtually impossible to discharge private
student loans in banlm,lptcy. Previously such provisions had only applied to federal loans, as a way to protect the
taxpayer against defaulting by students.
While federal loans also allow bollowers myriad chances to reduce or defer payments for hardship, private loans
typically do not. And many private loan agreements make it impossible for students to reduce the pl~ncipal by
paying extra each month tmless they are paying off the entire loan. Officials say they are troubled by the amount
of debt that loan companies and colleges are encouraging students to take on.
"It’s a huge problem," said Barmal< Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of
Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. "When a student signs the paper for these loans, they are
basically signing an indenture," Mr. Nassirian said. "We’re indebting these ldds for life."
Dozens of students interviewed said that when they signed for their loans theywere unclear on what interest rate
they were getting and that financial aid counselors discussing repayment failed to include interest that students
were compounding ~vhile in college. The lenders saythey are providing a valuable service, helping students who
might otherwise not be able to afford college. Tom Joyce, a spokesman for Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest
31
 Page 832
student lender, said the colnpany’s average interest rate on private student loans was just over 10 percent and
that tie typical borrower was a young person with little or no credit histopy and no collateral.
°°What would the credit card interest rate be for that borrower - 24, 25 percent2." Mr. Joyce asked. °°Our goal is
to make it possible for students to graduate."
But various rnembers of Congress are now looking at ways to tighten oversight of private student loans.
The large growth in private loans - once confined primarily to gqaduate students - largely comes from steep
increases in tuition, which have outpaced inflation and federal aid, and an increasing reluctance among parents
to take on more debt.
For the last 15 years, the limits on the most common federal loans have stagnated at $17,125 for four years.
They will increase slightly starting next month. In addition, loan companies have also come to realize that such
loans can be hugely profitable.
Although the federal Education Department has no jurisdiction over private student loans, Education Secretary
Margaret Spellings recently pledged to convene the agencies that do, including the Secmities and Exchange
Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance CorI?oration.
Research bythe U.S. Public Interest Research Group and others show that some students are taking private
loans before exhausting their eligibility for low-interest, fixed-rate federal loans.
Janea Morgan, 25, a 2006 graduate of California College San Diego, said that college officials had her fill out
the federal financial aid fo~rn but never tapped federal loans. Instead, she said, they steeredher to a private loan
with KeyBank, at an interest rote that could rise four times a year, with no cap.
Now, she is carrying $46,000 in private loans at 9.22 percent interest, which she fears may rise beyond her
abilityto pay. Ms. Morgan said that when she asked college officials why they bypassed federal loans, °°1"hey
said it would take too long."
Barbara Thomas, vice president and chief operating officer at California College San Diego, said that she could
not discuss Ms. Morgan’s situation because of privacy laws, but that generally students sometimes took too long
to fill out the federal financial aid application properly. "It’ s a time thing that kids have to work with," Ms.
Thomas said.
Sometimes marketing is at work. Last September, the United States Student Association complained to the
Federal Trade Commission that a major private lending program, Loan to Lean, made °°false and deceptive
claims" in a brochure called ~Demystifying Financial Aid."
According to the complaint, the brochure stated inaccurately that °’most government loans are need-based,"
suggested that federal loans could not be used for education-related costs like computers and books, and that
there were °’sla-ict deadlines" on applying for federal loans. In fact, students can get federal loans to pay for
educational expenses, even retroactively.
George C. Pappas, a spokesman for Loan to Learn, dismissed the complaint as °°absolutely ridiculous."
Neve111aeless, EduCap, the parent company, has removed the passages from the guide. The F.T.C. declined to
comment on Loan to Learn.
Students with private loans can be caught by surprise at how adjustable interest rates allow debt to swell.
Sean Craig Hicks, 35, attended the Westwood College of Aviation Technology, now known as Redstone
College, in Broomfield, Colo., from 1997-2000 in the hope of becoming an airplane mechanic. He said a
financial aid officer gave him an application for a $6,000 private loan tluough Wells Fargo to help pay
outst,-mding expenses just before graduation. On the school’s hall walls, he said, were fliers for Wells Fargo
 Page 833
loans. "’You trust those people when they tell you this is the one to go with," Mr. Hicks said.
Mr. Hicks said his loan documents had promised that if tie paid the minimum due each month, he would pay off
the loan by 2010. Instead, after six years of payments, most of them on time, he owes $100 more than when tie
took out the loan.
A spokeswoman for Wells Fargo, Mary Berg, confirmed that Mr. Hicks hdd a student loan, but called the
dealings with him a p~:ivate matter. Officials at Redstone College did not respond to requests for comment.
Many students out of dozens interviewed said it was not particularly clear what interest rate they had signed up
for.
Take Attila Valyi, a Motorota employee in Plantation, Fla. Eager to jump-start his education, he turned to
American InterContinental University, a for-profit institution offering a bachelor’s degree in 13 inonths. But
discovering how much the diploma would cost was an endeavor worthy of a dissertation.
While the $28,000 tuition was no secret, Mr. Valyi said that at the urging of university officials, he had signed
an application for a loan that doubled as a pledge to pay the money back. It did not indicate an interest rate. He
took out two more loans before getting his bachelor’s degree, realizing only when it was too late, he said, that he
oanied loans at three different interest rates that could rise from month to model-t, the largest for $10,745 at 18
percent.
When Mr. Valyi, 30, contacted the lender, Sallie Mac, to refinance, he said he was told he could not do so until
he graduated. "You’re locked in at 18 percent," he said he was told.
Martha Holler, a spokeswoman for Sallie Mae, said Mr. Valyi and other borrowers of those years would have
beentold, dining the application process and in an approval letter, the interest rate as a percentage above the
prime rate. And they were free to cancel, up to 30 days after the money went to the school.
Lynne Baker, a spokeswoman for the Career Education Cool, oration, which owns American InterContinental
and scores of other for-profit colleges, said ttlat the corporation did not track individual student interest rates and
that whether to pay such rates was the students’ decision.

33
 Page 834

THE ARAB AMERICAN NEWS

SCHOOL GRANTS TO PROMOTE LEARNING ARABIC

By: Mohamed Kad~T / The Arab American News

200%06-09

DEARBORN HEIGHTS - The U.S. Department of Education presented Stm" International Academy with a
$339,586 check for a federal Foreign Language Assistance Program grant on Friday to promote Arabic among
America’s most populous Middle Eastern population. This program provides grants to establish, improve, or
expand innovative foreign language programs for elementary and secondary school students in order to increase
the number of students studying critical languages to help ensure America’s competitiveness in the international
economic and political spheres.
As part of the federal push to establish and expand foreign language programs in America’s schools, four
schools in Dearborn Heights, Dearborn, and Detroit will be recognized with grants that over three years are
expected to exceed $1 million in value.
Nawal Hamadeh, founder, superintendent mid CEO of Star International Academy, heads an educational
powerhouse that ranks her chm’ter schools in the top 50 nationwide. Her students’ MEAP reading proficiency
levels from 2003-2005 sin-passed Detroit and Dearborn Public schools, and math proficiency gains were higher
than all local public school districts, despite having a much higher number of economically disadvantaged
students. Star International Academy also outperformed 87 percent of Michigan charter schools serving
economically disadvantaged students in reading and 77 percent in math. It also ranked fourth in reading
proficiency and seventh in math of all schools in the entire state serving similar populations.
Nearly 90 percent of the school’s students are of Arab or Middle Eastern descent. Some speak Arabic well but
many have little or no exposure to the language. This grant will allow the school to implement much needed
diversified language programs that will accommodate the entire student body.
Fewer than one percent of American high school students study Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Japanese, Korean,
Russian or Urdu. Fewer than eight percent of U.S. undergraduates take foreign language courses. U.S. Secretary
of Education Mmgaret Spellings calls the implementation of high-quality foreign language programs, "...not just
an education issue; it’s an economic issue, a civic issue, a social issue, a national security issue, and it’s
everybody’s issue."
The grant comes at a time when American government officials are revitalizing the effort to promote Arabic as a
necessary language particularly in foreign and diplomatic affairs. It is intended to inmaerse all students in all
grades in both the Arabic and English languages, and promote the study of both Arabic and American cultures
through artifacts, geography, customs, traditious, folklore, dances, and music.
"We promote peace, not wars," Hamadeh said. "The more we understand each other, and our cultures, the less
conflict there is. We bring people together, sharing inthe process of learning, sharing meals, sharing lives...our
students, our parents, our start; and the commur~ities around us all share together. It’s a good role model for a
global world."
Students performed Arabic folk songs and traditional dances for the philanthropic guests, higtflighted by a
musical performance from Ali Bazzi who sang and played his Arabic oh’urn to a cheering audience.
 Page 835

06,09,07 In the News

Tile Washington Post: A National TestWe Don’t Need (Margaret Spellings)

The Washington Post: Measurable Progress in School; No Child Left Behind is

hdping. The next step will take courage. (Editorial)

The Washington Post: Federal Grant to Support Gradual Charter Rollout (Nelson
Hernandez)

Tile Washington Post: Naval Academy Gets New Leader; Superintendent Leaves
Legacy Of Tough Policies (Raymond McCaffrey)

Tile New York Times: A Plan to Pay for Top Scores on Some Tests Gains Ground
(Julie Bosman)

The New York Times: When Second Graders Run Wild, With Federal Approval
(Paul Vi tello)

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: U.S. funds performance pay for prindpals in dry schools
(Joe Smydo)

Leesburg Today: Hatrick Goes To Capitol Over NCLB (Charlie Jackson)

Reuters: Cuomo launches New York student rights drive

 Page 836

The Washington Post

A National Test We Don’t Need

By Margaret Spellings

Saturday, June 9, 2007; A17

A quiet revolution of ac countability is s~veeping public education. We’re measuring

students annually, breaking down scores by student group, attd insisting that all childlen
be taught to achieve at grade level or better.
A new study by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy, revealing improved student
perfonnm~ce and a nmrowing achievement gap across most of the cotmtry, shows that
we’re on the right track.
But while test scores are up, has the academic bar been raised? An Education Department
~ released this week found that state standards for reading and math assessments
were generally lower than those of the National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP, also l~town as the Nation’s Report Card). Inmost cases, the knowledge required
to reach the. "proficient" level on state tests was comparable to the "basic" level on
NAEP. Other studies have echoed these findings.
This may fuel a Beltw-ay-based movement for "national standards" and a national test
created and mandated by the federal govmlment. Such a move would be unprecedented
and unwise.
National standards me not synonymous with higher standards -- in fact, they’d threaten to
lower the academic bar. And they would do little to addi’ess the persistent achievement
gap.
Why do I believe this approach is wrong?
First, it goes against more than two centuries of American educational tradition. Under
the Constitution, states and localities have the primary leadership role in public
education. They design the cmriculum and pay 90 percent of the bills. NeighboNood
schools deserve neighboNood leadership, not dictates fiom bureaucrats thousands of
miles away.
The proper role of the Education Depmtment is in helping states, districts and schools
collect datato d~ive good decision inaldng, hfformation is our stockin trade. President
Teddy Roosevelt tmderstood this when he called on the federal government to l~ovide
"the fifllest, most accmme [and] most helpful information" about the "best educational
systems."
States that have shown true leadership, such as Al-kansas and Massachusetts, can inspire
others to act.
Second, the debate over national standards would become an exercise in lowest-cormnon-
denominator politics. We’ve seen it before, most recently dra~g the divisive fight over
national history standards in the 1990s. -
The landinark 1983 repo~t" A Nation at Risk" called for "standardized tests of
achievement.., as part of a nationwide (’out not federal) system of state and local
standardized tests" to stem rite rising tide of mediocNy in our schools.
Rather than top-down nm:ndates, we are encouraging a race to the top.
 Page 837

Five years ago, many states did not legul~ly measure their students’ performance against
the tongh NAEP standmds. Today, all 50 do. The president’s plan to reanthorize the No
Child Letl Behind Act calls on states to post theh" scores side-by-side with the NAEP
results. This would increase transpareucy and drive up the political will to raise state
stand,~-ds.
We are already seeing heartening signs of change. States are aligning high school
coursework with college and employer expectations. Many have adopted a core
curriculum of four years of English and tluee years each of math mid science. Recently,
itine states atmounced a co~mnon Algebra II assessment, the largest such effort ever
tmde~aken.
In addition, all 50 govemo~,s have agreed to adopt a common measttre of graduation rates
to help solve the dropout crisis. "There is more momentum in the states now than at any
time since.., the release of’A Nation at Risk,’ "repo~s Achieve Inc., an alliance of
governors and business leaders dedicated to high standmds.
Ore aptnoach is worldng for students. According to NAEP, more reading progress was
made by 9-year-olds from 1999 to 2004 than in the previous 28 yeats combined. Math
scores have reached record highs across the board. History scores improved in all three
grade levels tested -- fomth, eighth and 12th. And the number of students taking an
Advanced Placement exam in high school has risen 39 percent since 2000.
President Bush wants to build on this inogress. His plan would train more teachers to lead
adv-anced math and science classes. It would offer incentives for the best teachers to work
in the most challenging enviromnents. It would also provide more choices and options,
such as intensive tutoring and scholarships, to help childien in tmderperforming schools -
- measm’es opposed by the big teachers unions.
Accotmtability can light the way forward. But only higher standards can take us there.
We’ve knocked down the blackboard wall that once stood between schools and parents.
Now we must work with Congress and the states to sl~e and replicate best practices, not
scrap them for an m~tested system.
Ore" goal is a public education system that is transparent and responsive to the needs of
parents and children -- not to the whims of Washington.

The writer is the secretary of education.

 Page 838

The Washington Post

Measurable Progress in School

No Child Left Behind is helping. The next step will take courage~

Saturday, June 9, 2007; A16

HAS STUDENT achieveinent increased trader the No Child Left Behind Act? The
answer, according to an objective new report, is a resounding yes. That should give pause
to those who seek to derail reauthoi~zation of the No Ctffld Left Behind legislation.
An exhaustive study loy the Center on Education Policy showed students scoling higher
on state reading and math tests and na~Towing the achievement gap between white and
minolity studei~ts. The pace of itnprovement increased alter President Bush signed the
legislation in 2002. The report has extra credibility because, as The Post’s Amit R. Paley
wrote, it was written by a nonpartisan group that has ciiticized the implementation of No
Child Left Behind.
Tile repoit is full of caveats about crediting the 2002 federal law for any improvements,
and rightly so. Learning depends on many factors. It’s clem; though, that ~nany of the
elements that lead to student success are in place because of the requirements of No Child
Left Behind. Being held accotmtable for the performance of all students leads schools to
pay more attention to black and Hispanic students, children with disabilities and those
lemning English. The law has spuned schools across the country to focus on the
qtmlifications and trahffng of their teacher~, to use datato &~ve instruction and to
emphasize results. Testing students to prove their proficiency and making those results
public brought needed accountability to Alnefica’s classrooms,
It’s troubling that the gaflls students showy on state tests are not mirrored in the National
Assessment of Fxtucational l~ogress. The latter, the "national report card," showed so~ne
gnus, most notably in math, but there is no match with the state tests. Perhaps so~ne of
the difference is attribntable to the difference in nature of the t’,vo tests. Still, it’s cleat; as
was doctunented in a repolt this week from the U.S. Edncafion Department, that there are
",vide and ttnacceptable disparities in state standards. That some states watered down their
standards to nmke it easier to reach NCLB goals for student proficiency is a huge failing
of the law.
Congress can correct that when it reauthofizes No Child Left Bettinct America can no
longer afford the quaint tradition of each state defining success differently. There should
be one measttre for what it ~neans to be proficient in a subject and at a grade level. Some
have argued, as Education Secretm~y Margaret Spellings does on file page opposite today,
that tiffs would lead to a lowming of standards. But that would happen only if she or her
successor allowed it. Get tile best educational minds together; set the bar high. Algebra is
algebra whether in Wyoming or Tennessee, and parents everywhere deselve to know
whether their childien have learned to solve eqtmtions.
 Page 839

The Washington Post

Federal Grant to Support Gradual Charter Rollout

By Nelson Hernandez

Washington Post Stall" Writer

Saturday, June 9, 2007; B04

BALTIMORE -- Maryland will receive an $18.2 million federal grant to fimd the
expansion of the state’s nascent charter school program, state education officials
announced yesterday.
The grant may allo~v the state to launch as many as 30 additional chatter schools during
the next three years, a spokesman for the Maryland State Depaltlnent of Education said.
Tiffs would more than double the mmlber of charter schools in Maryland, which began its
chatter programin 2003 as a way of providing alternative methods of public school
instrnction.
The grant also will be used to help with the recntitment and certification of staff at
charter schools, which are considered public schools but are rtm independently. The
money will also help ensure that the new schools meet facility and cuniculmn
requirements.
State Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick announced the grant at rite Crossroads School in
the Fells Point neighborhood of Baltimore., one of the most successful of Maryland’s 23
chmter schools. Graslnick noted that Crossroads, responsible for 150 sixth-, seventh- and
eighth-graders, is the only middle school in Baltimore that met federal standards for
adequate yearly progress. Most of its graduates go to either private schools or selective
public high schools.
The school chooses students by lottery, and so it is demographically similar to other
public middle schools in the city; 85 percent of its students qualify to receive flee or
reduced-Nice meals.
Grasmick said the state’s chatter schools, which handle about 5,000 students, are
generally worldng because of the slo~v mid methodical approach to opening them. Other
states, she said, have launched chattel schools at a ~nuch faster pace, bnt at the cost of
quality.
"We don’t want to start charter schools -- as some other states have done -- that exist for
two years and then they collapse," Grasmick said. "I really think for the next several
yeat~ we ought to continue with ore cmrent approach to this. Most of ore" chmter schools
are good."
Most of the schools are so new it is difficult to judge how successful they have been.
Some schools, such as Crossroads, have scored far better than average in Baltimore;
others, such as Monocacy Valley Montessori School in Frederick, score below the
cotmty’s averages and have raised questions as to their effectiveness.
Chatter schools have gained in popularity nationally, especially as away ofimpro~dng
perfoixrlance in struggling school system~ nearly 20,000 students ill the District attend
chatters. But they have not been adopted without debate. Opponents of charter schools,
 Page 840

including representatives of teachers unions, say they cotfld siphon resources a~vay froln
the public school system. They also say that the schools’ academic results have been
lLtleven.
In Maryland, the main arguments have revolved arotmd the folamfla for ftmd~ng the
schools. Each school bom’d has varying lalleS on funding for building and transpoltation,
employee benefits and special education, leading to differences in per-pupil spending
between chalter schools and standard public schools. The Maryland Cotut of Appeals is
expected to role this sunmler on a case concellfing the foslding roles.
At Crossroads, the students and teachers said they have been successful because of the
small setting, high expectations and the dedication of the staff. A group of foltr seventh-
gradels nodded vigorously when asked if they wanted to go to college; students showed
offtheir class projects, which are a centerpiece of the hands-on instructional method
favored by the school.
One of the seventh-gradeR, Dat~ian Antonio Mazyck, 13, said Crossroads ’,was a different
tmivelse flom Lombard Middle School, the school he had attended the year before.
Lombard has about 500 students, compared with Crossroads’ 150 students. At
Crossroads, 51 percent of the students were able to pass the state math test; at Lombard,
only 4.5 percent passed. But Darriatl saidlow test scores ~vere the least of Lombard’s
problems.
"That was the baddest school," DmTian remembered. "They set the lmthrooms on fire.
They smoked in the bathroom."
His classlnates said they wouid never get away with that at Crossroads. One student even
said going there ",was "a privilege."
 Page 841

The Washington Post

Naval Academy Gets New Leader

Superintendent Leaves Legacy Of Tough Policies

By Raymond McCaffrey

Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, June 9, 2007; B01

Almost everything about U.S. Naval Academy superintendent Rodney P. Rempt evoked
passionate debate -- fi’om his policies to discomage sexual harassment, to more benign
subjects, such as the way he zipped around the Annapolis campus in a golf carl outfitted
with tiny flags and emblazed with his title, "Supe."
Critics and suppoIIers agree that Vice Adm. Rempt, who stepped down yesterday, will be
remembered for his aggressive crackdown on sexual misconduct, alcohol abuse and
honor violations by midshipmen.
But they agree on little else, including whether he should be remembered fondly for
promoting a cultme of change at a troubled academy or loathed for kowtowing to
Congress and liberal women’s groups.
Under Rempt, who is retiring and was replaced by Rear Adm. Jeffrey L. Fowler at a
change-of-co~mnand ceremony yesterday, the academy initiated such policies as
subjecting midshipmen to routine breathalyzer tests to suppoll a tough new alcohol policy
and reqniring them to take classes as part of an effort to prevent sexual harassment and
assault. The result, supporters say, is that the acade~ny is providing outstanding leaders of
chm-acter at a time of war.
At yesterday’s ceremony, Rempt was co~nmended for taking a bold stand on gender
equality and sexaml hamsmnent issues and for helping to lead the academy out of a Cold
Win" mind-set and tow’ard the challenges of the futme.
"You served as a bridge between two eras," said Adm. Michael Mttllen, chief of naval
operations.
CNics -- so~ne of whom are academy altunni-- argue that Re~npt went too far in
prosecuting high-profile sexual assault cases, such as the one involving fo~:mer Navy star
quarterback Lamar S. Owens. They have assailed the supefiutendent in message groups
and even thi-eatened to withhold contributions to the academy after Rempt expelled
Owens, who was cleared of raping a female midshitnnan but convicted of misconduct for
having sex in a dorm.
As for the golf cat% some view it as the ultimate sign of arrogance; others see the
avtmcular touch of an academy graduate who liked to ~nix with midshipmen whenever
possible.
"I think being out on that golf cart just adds a little bit ofhvananness and makes people
smile," said J. Bonnie Newman, chair of the academy board of visitors, an advisory
connrdttee that includes membms of Congress.
 Page 842

It is Rempt’s humanity, not pressure from Congress, that prompted him to taclde sexual
misconduct and other issues, Newman said. "For Rod Rempt, this is a matter of iight and
wrong."
Rempt is known to be a man of strong opinions. Before the Owens case went to trial,
Rempt was faulted for e-mails sent to tile school colmnnnity that a Navy judge said
insinuated the midshipman’s gtfilt in the alleged rape.
His critics see hint as a pawn of speciai-interest groups. Last yeai; the Center for Military
Readiness nominated him for its inaugural "Patsy" Award, dispensed to "An Official
Whom Felninists Have Used to Impose Their Policies on the Men and Women of the
Military." Rem~, according to the organization’s Web site, was "nomilmted for
repeatedly using ’double standards involving women’ (D SIW) in disciplinary matters,
includiltg several high-profile prosecutions for alcohol abuse and sextml misconduct by
male but not fenmle midstfipmen."
The centel’s founder, Elaine Donnelly, said: "That’s building a pint oftfis legacy, and it’s
not a good legacy."
Rempt, Domlelly said, "went overboard" in response to the congressional pressure from
such feminists as Sen. Barbara A. Miktflski (D-Md.), amember of the academy board of
visitors.
Mikulsld issued a statement saying that she believes that Remptls "most lasting legacy at
the Academy will be changing tile culture regarding sexual misconduct. Under his
leadership, we have a renewed emphasis on accountability and pelsonal responsibility,
which is fostering a culture that does not tolerate sexual harassment or misconduct."
At yesterday’s event, Rempt called the moral development of the midshilxnen "the most
important part of our mission." He said midshipmen should be instilled with "a clear
sense of right and vcrong."
Surveys indicate higher approval ratings than previously among female and male
midshipmen on such issues as whether tile academy provides a positive environment for
women. But Donnelly said Rempt pushed "gender quotas" so that about one in five
midship,nen are now women at a time when tile Navy and Marines need more ,nen to
serve in combat.
Critics also say that in talgeting Owens, a prominent black midshipman, Rempt
unintentionally set back the advancement of African kanericans in t~ Navy. Next yea~s
prospective graduating Class of 2008 has 253 women, rougkly thiee times the mm~ber of
female ,nidshipmen in 1980. By comparison, next year’s graduating class of 2008 has 69
African American inductees, four more tl-o_n in 1980.
Peter Optekal; a former Navy football player, sent a letter to Rmnpt asldng him to recuse
himself from Owens’s case because Rempt’s handling of it would dmnage the recrnitmeut
of qualified black midshipmen.
"The Naval Academy has had a long history of disparity in the treatment of blacks," said
Optekar, who said he observed racial diSClitnination when he was playing football during
tile early 1960s.
Rempt did remove himself from any fitrther consideration of Owens’s legal case,
although he said allegations, of his lack of neutrality were untrue. He made the fmai
administrative decision on Owens’s future.
Rempt declined a request to be interviewed. But Rear Adm. Bruce MacDonald, the
Naves chief lawyer, in a menlo obtained thi’ough a Freedom of Information Act request,
 Page 843

sided with Rempt after Optekar submitted an affidavit saying that the superintendent
insinuated Owens’s gtfilt dining a conversation with him and othel" ahmmi at an Idaho
barbecue after the jtuT verdict.
MacDonald, the judge advocate general, said that Rempt was "repo~ted to have said that
the accused was guilty of sexual assatflt, that the victim was in the fetal position for two
days, and that 1lad tiffs case not been refen’ed to trial by general corot-martial, every
fenfinist group and the ACLU wotfld be ’after us.’" Although not conceding that Rempt
made the comments, MacDonald vcrote: "The fact that he m~iculated an observation does
not mean he was espousing an improper motivation."

Staff writer Mary Otto contributed to thix report.

 Page 844

The New York Times

June 9, 2007

A Han to Pay for Top Scores on Sortie Tests Gains Ground

By JULIE BOSMAN

Roland G. Fryer, a 30-year-old Harvard. economist known for his study of racial
inequality in schools, is back in New York to again promote a big idea: Pay students cash
for high scores on standardized tests and their perfolanance might improve. And he has
captured the attention of Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein and Mayor Michael R.
Bloomberg.
Across the country, educators have been expelimenting with cash incentives. A program
in Chelsea, Mass., gave children $25 for perfect attendance. Some Dallas schools pay
children $2 for each book they read.
But tile idea is controversial. Many educators maint~L mnong other objections, that
cttildren Nave to learn for the love of it, not for cash.
Until now, Professor Fryer’s idea of cash for performance has had no serious takers.
Three years ago, he tried to implement a pilot program in New York City charter schools
that would have given students cash in exchange for good test scores.
"They kicked us out," Professor Fryer said of the schools that first considered the
program. And solne Depart~nent of Education officials were not enthnsiastic, either, he
said. "They laughed in my face."
But Mr. Bloomberg has recently shown interest in using paylnents, raised from the
private sector, as a way to change behavior and reduce povelty.
In Septe~nber, he proposed giving cash to poor adults to encore’age them to do evei3Nting
from keeping their children in school to seeldng preventive medical care. And so, he said
yesterday at anews conference, he was receptive to Professor Fryer’s idea. "If we aren’t
looking at evelMhing" he said, "shame on us."
This week, Professor Fryer met with a group of school plincipals who are consideling
participating inhis incentives progrmn. Information abont the progrmn was first reported
yesterday in The Daily News.
Education Department officials said that putting the program into effect has a long way to
go. "We are still at a preliminary stage," Debm Wexle~; a depaltment spokeswoman, said
yesterday. "Neither the mayor nor the chancellor have approved any progranl details."
Professor Fryer said that trader his program, fomth graders and seventh graders who take
the new rotmd of inandatory standardizedtests that the city is introducing in the fall
would be rewmrled with at least $5. They would get more money for high scores, with a
cap of $25 for fom~h graders mid $50 for seventh graders. In addition, each pmticipating
school wottld receive $5,000.
Money for the payments will come from private backers, Professor Fryer said, because
there would be no public money available for them.
The prospect of cash introduced into the dassrooln has made some local educators
mleasy.
 Page 845

°’It makes me really nervous,~’ said Maggie Siena, the principal of Public School 150 in
TriBeCa. "I suspect paying ldds for achievement in any way tends not to work."
Ernest Logan, the president of the principals’ union, also expressed concerns. "We are
troubled by additional pressure being placed on children to achieve perfection," he said.
"What really matters in education is continued student progress, not perfect test scores."
Professor Fryer and other educational scholars have argued that some chiRh-en, especially
those from impoverished baclcgrotmds, lack the foresight and role models to be self-
motivated.
"The fmldamental problem with education and motivating kids to lean ~vhat riley need to
learn is that the payoffs me so distant," said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the
Brookings Institution, a lell-leaning research organization. "So it’s very hard to motivate
students to do well. Good students get that motivation from somewhere -- from peels,
their parents, how they’re INsed -- but the kids who are m~notivated have a very hard
time mlderstanding that what they do today pays offdecades from now."
Eric Nadelstern, the chief executive of the school system’s empowerment initiative --
which gives principals more autonomy to ran their schools -- l~ded Professor Flyer in a
recent e-mail message to principals. "He has my enthusiastic support," Mr. Nadelstem
said. "I encourage you to give the program serious consideration."
Professor Fryer, who is black, has explored racial issues in education extensively. He has
written studies on tile gap in test scores between black chil&en and white children, the
economic effect of"acting wtfite," how the mental ability ofyotmg chil&’en differs by
race, and the causes and conseqtmnces of attending historically black colleges and
mtiversifies.
Professor Fryer, on his Web site, ameficaninequalit¥1ab.com, calls the progranl
"Iucentivising: An Experi~nent in NYC Public Schools."
In anear-empty cafeteria at Frank SinatraHigh School of the Arts in Queens on
Wednesday, Professor Fryer promoted the plan to a dozen principals with an informal
speech about poverty, file test score gap, his professional experience ~d personal history
and his grandmother’s suggestions for file plan.
He persuaded at least one principal to change her nfind about the progrmn. "Prior to
going into the meeting, I wasn’t in favor of it," said Crystal Sitmnons, the principal of the
Academy for Social Action in Harlem. "But now I think it could work if it is established
in file light way. There should be some financial-literacy element, for instance."
After the meeting, l~ofessor Flyer said in an e-mail ~nessage to the principals that more
than half the available spots in the proposed incentive progrmn had been filled.
Mr. Loveless of Brooldngs said that though cash-incentive programs tend to make people
uneasy, he believed the proposal was worth consideling. "I would t,~ke it seriously," he
said. "I don’t think we should let our queasiness over directly awarding kids with cash
prevent us fi’om expe15nenting. We need to find out if this works or not."
 Page 846

The New York Times

June 9, 2007

WEST BABYLON JOURNAL

When Second Graders Run Wild, With Federal Approval

By PAUL VITELLO

WEST BABYLON, N.Y., June 8 -- As aresult of some speeches made and some laws
passed somewhere fat" away where the president lives, all tile kids in Debra Thuma’s
second-grade class at the Tooker Avenue Elementary School were down on the floor,
bicycle=pedaling their legs in the air on Friday morning.
Except for a few of the gifts. They stood near their desks.
"It’s tile dresses," explakled Mrs. Thmna. "At this age, alot of the gifts wear dresses.
Isn’t that lovely? But they don’t necessarily like putting their legs up in the air."
Exercise in most pnblic schools used to happen only dining two gym periods a week. But
to meet a federal mandate calling for more supervised physical activity, many schools
arotmd the comitry have begun daily fitness workonts like tile one inMrs. Thltma’s class
here.
Some are ilnprovised, and others, like Mrs. Tharna’s, are conducted with the help of
videotaped programs that take the kids throngh a 5- or 10-minnte session ofjtmlping
jacks, running in place, situps, push-ups and the above-mentioned bicycle pedaling,
which some of the gifts, according to Mrs. Thmna, really hate.
It is a condition of childhood that go’m-ups decide what is good for yotL however; and
following a series of stndies chronicling the increasing rates of obesity and diabetes in
children, the deciders in the fedelal government ordered Inore activity.
The order was embodied in Section 204 of Public Law 108-265, the Child Nutrition and
W.I.C. Reanthorization Act of 2004, which requires that by the end of the 2006-7
academic year- by now, in other words-- schools provide daily "physical activity and
other school-based activities designed to pronlote student wellness."
At Tooker, this means a prodigious amount of foot-stamping, hand-clapping, j ack-
jtmlping and other types of othelwise forbidden behavior taking place right ill tile nfiddle
of the morning, between lessons in cm~ive, double-digit addition and the science of
magnets.
"The idea is that it’s not enongh to ]laVe ml athletic program or gym class twice a week,"
said Lou Howatfl Jr., the physical education director for West Babylon schools. "Kids
need to be physically active during file day, evm3~ day. Tiffs is a program that reglllm"
teachers can do. You don’t need to be in phys-ed class."
To meet the federal deadline, three weeks ago administrators at Tooker Avenue
Elementary introduce d a seven-minute exercise tape produced (and provided free of
charge) by a Long Island company, Kid Fitness.
The company, which produces a children’s exercise show of the sanle name for public
television, hopes to have its fitness tape used in elementary schools throughout the
country. As part of a pro~notional effort, it donated 9,800 copies to the New Yoi’l{ City
 Page 847

school system in Febmm7 -- enough for ,~ classes from kindelgmten tlnough the
second g~de.
On Friday, the star of the tape, Kid Fitness himself, a very fit 26-year-old actor nmned
Casey UntelTnan, visited the elementary school here.
After asking M~s. Thuma’s 23 students if they were ready to have some tim, Mr.
Unterman, dressed in the superhero costtune of his character, provided a crisp, precise
demonstration of all the exercises that the children, facing t~n, perfor~ned in their own
yotmger, wilder versions.
Mrs. Thmna said that in her 15 years of teaching second graders, she noticed that "inost
kids are pretty fit at this age" but become less active later on. "By flflh grade," she said,
"you start to see the overweight kids."
Stephen J. Virgilio, chairman of the health and physical education depamnent at Adel;phi
University_, and a consttltant to the Kid Fitness company, said that between the fillh and
10th grades, n~y children become physically inactive. "Partly it’s becanse of video-
game and television habits," he said, "and partly it’s the influence of too much organized
spoats -- when the kids drop out of organized spolts, they don’t know how to play. They
just stop."
That is why promoting nonsports exercise for children at a young age, as the federal law
requires, is "such a good idea," he said.
When the kids, sweating and flushed, were done with their exercises for the inorning, Mr.
Unterman asked if they did not love feeling "fit and healthy."
They did, they said.
"I like having it fn~t thing in the morning," said Jessica Marmaroff, 7, speaking later to a
reporter who asked about the regimen, "because then, like, you don’t have to do a lot of
work."
And what about the issue of the ddresses?
Emily Tmtaglia, 7, explained that this was not necessarily the deal breaker that some
might have one believe.
"All you have to do is hold your skirt like this," she said, gathering the folds on either
side of her skilt and in two no-nonsense fists. "Youjnst have to not forget."
 Page 848

Pittsburgh Post-Gaz ette

U.S. funds perfor~nance pay for prindpals in dry schools

Saturday, June 09, 2007

By Joe Smydo, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Pittsbmgh Public Schools Superintendent Mark Roosevelt got a boost yesterday in Iris bid
to have principals shoulder more responsibility for the district’s academic overhaul.
The U.S. Depaltment of Education announced that it is awarding the Pittsbmgh Public
Schools a five-year, $7.4 million grant to help fired a pay-for-perfoiznance program for
the district’s principals.
The money will be used to give salat2¢ increases and bonuses to principals who meet
certain performance goals, such as increasing student achievement. It also vail be used to
pay for Rand Corp. analyses of school progress and to pay five or more employees to
administer the incentive program.
"It’s excellent news," Mr. Roosevelt said.
In all, the program VAIl cost nearly $9 miNon over five yem,~. The district must come up
vAth $1.4 million in program costs not covered by the grant.
U.S. Education Secretaly Margaret Spellings said the grant will come from the Teacher
Incentive Fund, established to fund incentive-based compensation plans for teachers and
pNlcipals in high-poverty distlicts.
The department introduced the fired last year with 16 grants, including one to the School
District of Philadelphia. Pittsburgh is one of 18 recipients this year, and others include
Charlotte-Mecldenburg Schools in Nolth Carolina, four Florida districts, a group of
Texas charter schools and the University of Texas.
Mr. Roosevelt has introduced new ctnxiculum and other programs to boost sagging test
scores. To ratcliet up the pressure on plSncipals at the district’s 65 schools, he’s doing
away with the annual salary increases they’ve traditionally received regardless ofjob
peffolanance.
Instead, Mr. Roosevelt wants to give ammal raises of up to $2,000 to each plincipal who
meets, or shows progress toward, goals in 28 m’eas such as leadership and community
outreach. The raises would be added to the principal’s base pay.
In addition, he wants to offer plincipals bonuses of up to $10,000 each for incre uses in
student achievement dining the year. A bonus would not be added to the principal’s base
pay and could be earned again in following years.
The distlict is waiting to see whether it will receive athree-year, $6.6 million grant from
the Los Angeles-based Broad Folmdation to establish a IaSncipal recruitment and
mentolSng program. The pay-for-performance and reoNtment are part of the distlict’s
broader pl~cipal development efforts.
 Page 849

Leesburg Today

Hatrick Goes To Capitol Over NCLB

By Charlie Jadtsou

Created June 8, 2007

As the U.S. Congress debates the reauthodzation oftha No Child Left Behind laws,
superintendents across the country, including Loudoun’s Edgar B. Hatfick, are expressing
their reselvations about the cunent regulations.

Hatfick went to Capitol Hill last month as a representative of the American Association
of School Administratoi, and spoke to seuatol~ about changes that could be made to the
ElementarT and Secondm7 Education Act, more widely known as No Child Lelt Behind.

"My personal concerns center around ldds," Hatrick said last week. "The nature of this
high-stakes testing, it has become a billion dollar industry. It’s just not good to try to
lneasme what children know based on 45 questions multiple-choice tests. I’m opposed to
the labeling that occurs.
"Our message is that standards are a good thing. Now, we’d like to see money come with
the standards."

The federal law, Hatfick said, is interpreted 50 ways in 50 states. In Virginia, school
districts test theh students annually with Standards of Learning tests. These tests are used
to measure the students’ and schools’ progress. If a school fails to meet benchrnar-ks in
specific areas, schools can be placed on probation. Ill some instances, parents are allowed
to opt out of the public school arid use public money to attend a private school. Hatrick
suggests that if private schools are going to take public dollars, they too should be held to
strict standards.

One of the many problems with tile law, Hatfick noted, is tlmt school systelns are forced
to test students who are still learning the English language at grade level. The Vfl’gilfia
Depar~rnent of Education and its school districts had a pnblic spat with the U.S.
Depar0nent of Education earlier this year" concerning English Langrhage lear~ners. Hatfick
believes the law, as wlitten, gives U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings
latitude in how she intelprets testing of English language leamels. Hatrick said school
systems are also forced to test special needs students in the same vein.

"They need individualized plans for learning," tie said. "We shouldsfft take those same
ldds we say can’t succeed in a regtflar classroom and tmn aromld and give them a grade
level test. I continue to believe a lot of what is fi-ustrating people, cotfld have been
resolved. We believe that the law gives [Spellings] latitude in the testing of English
language learners."
 Page 850

Hataick said he’d also like to see Coitgress add additional performance measmes to g~ade
schools. Instead of just test resttlts, Hattick said schools could be graded on graduation
rates and what students do after college.

But the most important change Hatrick would like to see centers arotmd dollars.

"We have a law that is forcing us to spend an awful lot of money to test these kids, and
the federal government is not paying," he said.
 Page 851

Reuters

Cuomo launches New York student rights drive

NEW YORK, June 8 (Reuters) - New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo began an
effolt on Friday to educate students about their rights lmder a new state law after a
scandal in the $85 billion U.S. student-loan indust13~.
Cuonlo and congressional investigators have accused major student lenders of paying
kickbacks to college aid officers to curlN favor mid dalml tip business among students.
Many colleges and companies, including major lenders such as Sallie Mae (SLM.N:
Quote, ProNe, Research), Bank of America (BAC.N: ~kO~, ProNe Research) and
Citigroup (C.N: D_~9_k~, Profile Research), have settled with Cuolno.
The attorney general latmched the effolt to educate students about the new law -- Student
Lending Accountability, Transparency and Enforcemeut Act of 2007 -- at the Stuyvesant
High School in New York.
The law includes fights such as knowing the criteria a school uses to select preferred
lenders and whether those lenders are paying the school or financial aid officers.
"This graduation gift is not gilt-wrapped or green, but it is valuable," Cuomo said in a
statement.
Nearly three out of five tmdergraduates inthe state took loans to pay for college
education. Higher education costs average $30,367 ayear at four-year plivate colleges
and about $13,000 at public institutions, according to Cuomo’s office.
 Page 852

Nonrespons
From: Yudof, Samara
Sent: June 09, 2007 10:08 AM
To: Private - Spellings, Margaret; Dunn, David; Simon, Ray; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Maddox,
Lauren; Talbert, Kent; Briggs, Kerri; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Halaska, Terrell; Flowers, Sarah;
Gribble, Emily; Herr, John; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; McLane, Katherine; Rosenfelt,
Phil; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tad& Wendy; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; ’tracy_d.
_,voung@who.eop.gov’; Williams, C~thia
Subject: 06.09.07 In the News

Attachments: 060907 In the News.doc

06.09.07 In the News

The Washington Post: A National Test We Don’t Need (Margaret Spellings)

The Washington Post: Measurable Pro~-ess in School; No Child Left Behind is helping. The next step
will take courage. (Editorial)

The Washington Post: Federal Grant to Support Gradual Cha~er Rol|ou~ (Nelson Hernandez)

The Washington Post: Naval Academy Gets New Leader; Superintendent Leaves Legacy Of Tough
Policies (Raymond McCaffrey)

The New York Times: A Plan to Pay for Top Scores on Some Tests Gains Ground (Julie Bosman)

The New York Times: When Second Graders Run Wild, With Federal Approval (Paul Vitello)

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: U.S. funds performance pay for principals in city schools (Joe Smydo)

Leesburg Today: Hah’ick Goes To Capitol Over NCLB (Char|ie Jackson)

Reuters: Cuomo launches New Yo~-k student rights drive

060907 In the
News.doc (75 KB)...
 Page 853
The Washington Post

A National Test We Don’tNeed

By Margaret Spellings

Saturday, June 9, 2007; A17

A quiet revolution of accountability is sweeping public education. We’re measuling students annually, breaking
down scores by student group, and insisting that all children be taught to achieve at grade level or better.
A new study by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy, revealing improved student performance and a
nmTowing achievement gap across most of the country, shows that we’re on the right track.
But while test scores are up, has the academic bat" been raised? An Educafion Department ~released this
week found that state standards for reading and math assessments were generally lower than those of the
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, also known as the Nation’s Report Card). In most cases,
the knowledge required to reach the "proficient" level on state tests was comparable to the "basic" level on
NAEP. Other studies have echoed these findings.
This may fuel a Beltway-based movement for "national standards" and a nafional test created and mandated by
the federal government. Such a move would be unprecedented and unwise.
National standards are not synonymous with higher standards -- in fact, they’d threaten to lower the academic
bar. And they would do little to address the persistent achievement gap.
Why do I believe this approach is wrong?
First, it goes against more than two centmies of American educational tradition. Under the Constitution, states
and localities have the primatsr leadership role in public education. They design the curriculum and pay 90
percent of the bills. Neighborhood schools deserve neighborhood leadership, not dictates from bureaucrats
thousands of miles away.
The l~’oper role of the Education Department is in helping states, districts and schools collect data to di~ve good
decision malting. Infoarnation is ore stock in trade. President Teddy Roosevelt understood this when he called
onthe federal government to provide "the fullest, most accurate [and] most helpful infoianation" about the "best
educational systems."
States that have shown true leadership, such as Arkansas and Massachusetts, can inspire others to act.
Second, the debate over national standards would become an exercise in lowest-cormnon-denominator politics.
We’ve seen it before, most recently during the divisive fight over national histo~ standards in the 1990s.
The lan&nark 1983 report" A Nation at Risk" called for "standardized tests of achievement.., as part of a
nationwide (but not federal) system of state and local standaa’dized tests" to stem the aising tide of mediocrity in
our schools.
Rather than top:dom~ mandates, we are encouraging a race to the top.
Five years ago, many states did not regularly measm’e their students’ performance against the tough NAEP
standmds. Today, all 50 do. The president’s plan to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act calls on states to
post their scores side-by-side with the NAEP results. This would increase transparency and drive up the political
will to raise state standards.
We are already seeing heartening signs of change. States me aligning high school coursework with college and
employer expectations. Manyhave adopted a core curriculum of four years of English and ttnee years each of
math and science. Recently, nine states mmounced a common Algebra II assessment, the largest such effort ever
undertaken.
In addition, all 50 governors have agreed to adopt a common measure of gradation rates to help solve the
dropout crisis. "There is more momentum in the states now than at any time since.., the release of’A Nation at
Risk,’ "reports Achieve Inc., an alliance of governors and business leaders dedicated to high standards.
Our approach is working for students. According to NAEP, more reading progress was made by 9-year-olds
from 1999 to 2004 than in the previous 28 years combined. Math scores have reached record highs across the
board. History scores improved in all three grade levels tested -- fomth, eighth and 12th. And the number of
 Page 854
students taking an Advanced Placement exam in high school has risen 39 percent since 2000.
President Bush wants to build ou this progress. His plan would train more teachers to lead advanced math and
science classes. It would offer incentives for the best teachers to work in the most challenging enviror~nents. It
would also provide more choices and options, such as intensive tutoring and scholarships, to help children in
underperforming schools -- measures opposed by the big teachers unious.
Accotmtability can light the way forward. But only higher standards can take us there. We’ve knocked down the
blackboard wall that once stood between schools and parents. Now we must work with Congress and the states
to share and replicate best practices, not scrap them for an tmtested system.
Ore goal is a punic education system that is transparent and responsive to the needs of parents and chil&en --
not to the whims of Washington.

The writer is the secretary of education.

 Page 855
The Washington Post

Measurable Pro~’ess in School

No Child Lef[ Behind is helpin~ The nex[ s~ep w~H take courage.

Saturday, June 9, 2007; A~16

HAS STUDENT achievement increased under the No Child Left Behind Act? The answer, according to an
objective new report, is a resounding yes. That should give pause to those who seek to derail reauthorization of
the No Child Left Behind legislation.
An exhaustive study by the Center on Education Policy showed students scoring higher on state reading and
math tests and narrowing the achievement gap between white and minority students. The pace of improvement
increased after President Bush signed the legislation in 2002. The report has extra credibility because, as The
Post’s Amit R. Paley wrote, it was mitten by a nonpartisan group that has criticized tile implementation of No
Child Left Behind.
The report is full of caveats about crediting tile 2002 federal law for any improvements, and rightly so. Learning
depends on many factors. It’s clear, though, that many of the elements that lead to student success are in place
because of the requirements of No Child Left Behind. Being held accountable for the performance of all
students leads schools to pay more attention to black and Hispanic students, children with disabilities and those
lem-ning English. The law has spin-red schools across the country to focus on the qualifications and training of
their teachers, to use data to chive instruction and to emphasize results. Testing students to prove their
proficiency and making those results public brought needed accountability to America’s classrooms.
It’s troubling that the gains students show on state tests are not mirrored in the National Assessment of
Educational Progress. The latter, the "national repo~ card," showed some gains, most notably in math, but there
is no match with the state tests. Perhaps some of the diffel"ence is attributable to the difference in nature of the
two tests. Still, it’s cleat, as was documented in a report this week from the U.S. Education Depaltrnent, that
there are wide and unacceptable disparities in state standards. That some states watered down their standards to
make it easier to reach NCLB goals for student proficiency is a hinge failing of the law.
Congress can correct that when it reauthorizes No Child Left Behind. America can no longer afford the quaint
tradition of each state defining success differently. There should be one measure for what it means to be
proficient in a subject and at a grade level. Some have argued, as Education Secretary Margaret Spellings does
on the page opposite today, that this would lead to a lowering of standards. But that would happen only if she or
her successor allowed it. Get the best educational minds together; set the bar high. Algebra is algebra whether in
Wyoming or Tennessee, and parents eve~3avhere desea-ve to know whether thdr children have learned to solve
equations.
 Page 856
The Washington Post

Federal Grant to Suppol~ Gradual Charter Rolloul

By Nelson Hernandez

Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, June 9, 2007; B04

BALTIMORE -- Marvtand will receive an $18.2 million federal grant to fundthe expansion of the state’s
nascent charter school program, state education officials announced yesterday.
The grant may allow the state to launch as many as 30 additional charter schools dining the next three years, a
spokesman for the Maryland State Department of Education said. This would more than double the number of
charter schools in Maryland, which began its cheer program in 2003 as a way of providing alternative methods
of public school instruction.
The grant also will be used to help with the recruitment and certification of staff at charter schools, which are
considered public schools but are run independently. The money will also help ensure that the new schools meet
facility and curriculum requirements.
State Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick announced the grant at the Crossroads School in the Fells Point
neighborhood of Baltimore, one of the most successful of Maryland’s 23 charter schools. Grasmick noted that
Crossroads, responsible for 150 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders, is the only middle school in Baltimore that
met federal standards for adequate yearly progress. Most of its graduates go to either private schools or selective
public high schools.
The school chooses students by lottery, and so it is den~ographically similar to other public middle schools in
the city, 85 percent of its students qualify to receive fiee or reduced-price meals.
Grasmick said the state’s charter schools, which handle about 5,000 students, are generally working because of
the slow and methodical approach to opening them. Other states, she said, have launched ch~u-ter schools at a
much faster pace, but at the cost of quality.
"We don’t want to start charter schools -- as some other states have done -- that exist for two years and then they
collapse," Grasmick said. "I really think for the next several years we ought to continue with our current
approach to this. Most of our charter schools are good."
Most of the schools are so new it is difficult to judge how successful they have been. Some schools, such as
Crossroads, have scored far better than average in Baltimore; others, such as Monocacy Valley Montessori
School in Frederick, score below the county’s averages and have raised questions as to their effectiveness.
Charter schools have gained in populmity nationally, especially as a way of improving perfoirnance in
struggling school systems; nearly 20,000 students in the District attend charters. But tt~ey have not been adopted
without debate. Opponents ofchm-ter schools, including representatives of teachers unions, say they could
siphon resources away from the public school system. They also say that the schools’ academic results have been
uneven.
In Maryland, the main arguments have revolved around the folrnula for funding the schools. Each school board
has varying rifles on funding for building and transportation, employee benefits and special education, leading to
differences in per-pupil spending between charter schools and standard public schools. The Maryland Court of
Appeals is expected to role this stunmer on a case concerning the funding rules.
At Crossroads, the students and teachers said they have been successful because of the small setting, high
expectations and the dedication of the statt: A group of four seventh-graders nodded vigorously when asked if
they wanted to go to college; students showed off their class projects, which are a centerpiece of the hands-on
instmctional method favored by the school.
One of the seventh-graders, Darrian Antonio Mazyck, 13, said Crossroads was a different tmiverse from
Lombard Middle School, the school he had attended the year before.
Lomlx~-d has about 500 students, compared with Crossroads’ 150 students. At Crossroads, 51 percent of the
 Page 857
students were able to pass the state math test; at Lombard, only 4.5 percent passed. But Darfian said low test
scores were the least of Lombard’s problems.
"That was the baddest school," Danian remembered. "They set the batttrooms on fire. They smoked in the
battu’oom."
His classmates said they would never get away with that at Crossroads. One student even said going there was
"a privilege."
 Page 858
The Washington Post

Naval Academy Gets New Leader

Superintendent Leaves Legacy Of Tough Policies

By Raymond McCaffrey

WasNngten Post Staff Writer

Saturday, June 9, 2007;

Almost everything about U.S. Naval Academy superintendent Rodney P. Rempt evoked passionate debate --
from his policies to discourage sexual harassment, to more benign subjects, such as the way he zipped around
the ~ campus in a golf cart outfitted with tiny flags and emblazed with his rifle, "Supe."
Critics and supporters agree that Vice Adm. Rempt, who stepped down yesterday, will be remembered for his
aggressive crackdown on sexual misconduct, alcohol abuse and honor violations by midshipmen.
But they agree on little else, including whether he should be remembered fondly for promoting a culture of
change at a troubled academy or loathed for kowtowing to Congress and liberal women’s groups.
Under Rempt, who is retiring and was replaced by Rear Adin. Jeffrey L. Fowler at a change-of-command
ceremony yesterday, the academy initiated such policies as subjecting midshipmen to routine breathalyzer tests
to support a tough new alcohol policy and requiting them to take classes as part of an effort to prevent sexual
harassment and assault. The result, supporters say, is that the academy is providing outstanding leaders of
character at a time of war.
At yesterday’s ceremony, Rempt was commended for taking a bold stand on gender equality and sexual
harassment issues and for helping to lead the academy out of a Cold War mind-set and toward the challenges of
the future.
"You sea, red as a bridge between two eras," said Adm. Michael Mullen, chief of naval operations.
Critics -- some of whom are academy alumni -- argue that Rempt went too far in prosecuting high-profile sexual
assault cases, such as the one involving forrner Navy star qu~-terback Lamar S. Owens. They have assailed the
superintendent in message groups and even threatened to withhold contt~ibutions to the academy after Rempt
expelled Owens, who was cleared of raping a female ntidshipman but convicted of misconduct for having sex in
a dorm.
As for the golf cart, some view it as the ultimate sign of anogance; others see the avuncular touch of an
academy graduate who liked to mix with midshipmen whenever possible.
"I think being out on that golf cart just adds a little bit of humanness and makes people smile," said J. Bonnie
Newman, chair of the academy board of visitors, an advisory committee that includes members of Congress.
It is Rempt’s tmmanity, not pressure fi’om Congress, that prompted him to tackle sexual misconduct and other
issues, Newman said. "For Rod Rempt, this is a matter of right and wrong."
Rempt is known to be a man of strong opinions. Before the Owens case went to trial, Rempt was faulted for e-
mails sent to the school community that a Navy judge said insinuated the midshipman’s guilt in the alleged rape.
His c~itics see him as a pawn of special-interest grouN. Last year, the Center for Military Readiness nominated
him for its inaugural "Patsy" Award, dispensed to "An Official Whom Feminists Have Used to Impose Their
Policies on the Men and Women of the Milita~N." Rempt, according to the organization’s Web site, was
"nominated for repeatedly using ’double standards involving women’ (DSIW) in disciplinary matters, including
several high-profile prosecutions for alcohol abuse and sexual misconduct by male but not female midshipmen."
The center’s founder, Elaine Donnelly, said: "That’s building a part of his legacy, and it’s not a good legacy."
Rempt, Dounelly said, "went overboard" in response to the congressional pressure from such feminists as Sen.
Barbma A. Mikulski (D-M~[k a member of the academy board of visitors.
Mikulsld issued a statement saying that she believes that Rempt’s "most lasting legacy at the Academy will be
changing the culture regarding sexual misconduct. Under his leadership, we have a renewed emphasis on
 Page 859
accountability and personal responsibility, which is fostering a culture that does not tolerate sexual hmassment
or misconduct."
At yesterday’s event, Rempt called the moral development of the midshipmen "the most important part of our
mission." He said midshipmen should be instilled with "a clear sense of right and wrong."
Surveys indicate higher approval ratings than previously among female and male midshipmen on such issues as
whether the academy provides a positive environment for women. But Donnelly said Rempt pushed "gender
quotas" so that about one in five midshipmen are now women at a time whenthe Navy and Marines
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/related-topics.html/U. S.+Marine+Corps?tid--informline> need more
men to serve in combat.
Critics also say that in targeting Owens, a prominent black midshipman, Rempt lmintenfionally set back the
advancement of African Americans in the Naw. Next year’s prospective graduating Class of 2008 has 253
women, roughly three times the number of female midshipmen in 1980. By compmison, next year’s graduating
class of 2008 has 69 Afi-ican American inductees, four more than in 1980.
Peter Optekar, a former Navy football player, sent a letter to Rempt asldng him to recuse himself from Owens’s
case because Rempt’s handling of it would damage the recruitment of qualified black midshipmen.
"The Naval Academy has had a long history of disparity in the treatment of blacks," said Optekar, who said he
observed racial discrimination when he was playing football during the early 1960s.
Rempt did remove himself from any fitrther consideration of Owens’s legal case, although he said allegations of
his lack of neutrality were untrue. He made the final administrative decision on Owens’s future.
Rempt declined a request to be interviewed. But Rear Adm. Bruce MacDonald, the Navy’s chief lawyer, in a
memo obtained through a Freedom of Info~Tnation Act request, sided with Rempt after Optekar submitted an
affidavit saying that the superintendent insinuated Owens’s guilt during a conversation with him and other
alumni at an Idaho barbecue after the jury verdict.
MacDonald, the judge advocate general, said that Rempt was "reported to have said that the accused was guilty
of sexual assault, tt~at the victim was in the fetal position for two days, and that had this case not been refened
to trial by general corn-t-martial, every feminist group and the ACLU would be ’after us.’ " Although not
conceding that Rempt made the comments, MacDonald wrote: "The fact that he articulated an observation does
not mean he was espousing an improper motivation."
Staff writer Mary Otto contributed to this report.
 Page 860
The Ne~v York Thnes

June 9, 2007

A Plan to Pay for Top Scores on Some Tests Gains Ground

By JULIE BOSMAN

Roland G. Fryer, a 30-year-old Harvard economist known for his study ofradal inequality in schools, is back in
New York to again promote a big idea: Pay students cash for high scores on standardized tests and thdr
performance might improve. And he has captured the attention of Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein and Mayor
Michael R. Bloomberg.
Across the countt% educators have been experimenting with cash incentives. A program in Chelsea, Mass., gave
children $25 for perfect attendance. Some Dallas schools pay children $2 for each book they read.
But the idea is controversial. Many educators maintain, among other objections, that children have to learn for
the love of it, not for cash.
Until now, Professor Fryer’s idea of cash for perfolxnance has had no serious takers. Three years ago, he tried to
implement a pilot program in New York City chm-ter schools that would have given students cash in exchange
for good test scores.
°‘They kicked us out," Professor Fryer said of the schools that first considered the program. And some
Department of Education officials were not enthusiastic, either, he said. °q’hey laughed in my face."
But Mr. Bloomberg has recently shown interest in using payments, raised from the private sector, as a way to
change behavior and reduce poverty.
In September, he proposed giving cash to poor adults to encourage them to do eve~3ahing from keeping their
children in school to seeking preventive medical care. And so, he said yesterday at a news coiff’erence, he was
receptive to Professor Fryer’s idea. °’If we aren’t looking at everything," he said, "shame on us."
This week, Professor F~-yer met with a group of school principals who are considering participating in his
incentives program. Information about the program was first repoiqted yesterday in The Daily News.
Education Depmlxnent officials said that putting the program into effect has a long way to go. "We are still at a
preliminary stage," Debra Wexler, a department spokeswoman, said yesterday. "Neither the mayor nor the
chancellor have approved any program details."
Professor Fryer said that under his program, fourth graders and seventh graders who take the new round of
mandatory standardized tests that the city is introducing in the fall would be rewarded with at least $5. They
would get more money for high scores, with a cap of $25 for fourth graders m~d $50 for seventh graders. In
addition, each participating school would receive $5,000.
Money for the payments will come from private backers, Professor Fryer said, because there would be no public
money available for them.
The txospect of cash introduced into the classroom has made some local educators uneasy.
"It makes me really nervous," said Maggie Siena, the principal of Public School 150 in TriBeCa. ’°I suspect
paying kids for achievement in any way tends not to work."
Ernest Logan, the president of the principals’ union, also expressed concerns. "We are troubled by additional
pressttre being placed on chil&en to achieve perfection," he said. "What really matters in education is continued
student progress, not perfect test scores."
Professor FINer and other educational scholars have m-gued that some children, especially those from
impoverished backgrounds, lack the foresight and role models to be self-motivated.
"The fundamental problem with education and motivating kids to learn what they need to learn is that the
payoffs are so distant," said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. a left-leaning research
organization. "’So it’s very hard to motivate students to do well. Good students get that motivation from
somewhere - from peers, their parents, how they’re raised - but the kids who me umnotivated have a very hard
time understanding that what they do today pays off decades from now."
Eric Nadelstern, the chief executive of the school system’s empowemlent initiative - which gives principals
 Page 861
more autonomy to run their schools - lauded Professor Fryer in a recent e-mail message to principals. "He has
my enthusiastic support," Mr. Nadelstern said. "I encourage you to give the program serious consideration."
Professor Fryer, who is black, has explored racial issues in education extensively. He has written studies on the
gap in test scores between black children and white children, the economic effect of "acting white," how the
mental ability of young children differs by race, and the causes and consequences of attending historically black
colleges and universities.
Professor Fryer, on his Web s~te, americaninequalitylab.com, calls the program "Incentivising: An Experiment
in NYC Public Schools."
In a near-empty cafeteria at Frank Sinatra High School of the Arts in Queens on Wednesday, Professor Fryer
promoted the plan to a dozen principals with an informal speech about povelV, the test score gap, his
professional experience and personal history and his grandmother’s suggestions for the plan.
He persuaded at least one principal to change her mind about the program. "lhior to going into the meeting, I
wasn’t in favor of it," said C1ystal Simmons, the principal of the Academy for Social Action in Harlem. "But
now I think it could work if it is established in the right way. There should be some financial-literacy element,
for instance."
After the meeting, Professor Fryer said in an e-mail message to the principals that more than half the available
spots in the proposed incentive program had been filled.
Mr. Loveless of Brookings said that though cash-incentive programs tend to make people uneasy, he believed
the proposal was worth considering. "I would take it seriously," he said. °’I don’t think we should let our
queasiness over directly awarding ldds with cash prevent us from experimenting. We need to find out if this
works or not."

l0
 Page 862
The New York Times

June 9, 2007

WEST BABYLON JOURNAL

When Second Graders Run Wild, With Federal Approval

By PAUL VITELLO

WEST BABYLON, N.Y., June 8 - As a result of some speeches made and some laws passed some~vhere far
away where the president lives, all the kids in Debra Thuma’s second-grade class at the Tooker Avenue
Elementary School were down on the floor, bicycle-pedaling their legs in the air on Friday morning.
Except for a few of the girls. They stood near their desks.
"It’s the dresses," explained Mrs. Thuma. "At this age, a lot of the girls wear dresses. Isn’t that lovely? But they
don’t necessmily like putting their legs up in the air."
Exercise in most public schools used to happen only during two gym periods a week. But to meet a federal
mandate calling for more supervised physical activity, many schools around the countt7 have begrm daily fitness
workouts like the one in Mrs. Thuma’s class here.
Some are improvised, and others, like Mrs. Thuma’s, are conducted with the help of videotaped programs that
take the kids through a 5- or 10-minute session of jumping jacks, rtmning in place, situps, push-ups and the
above-mentioned bicycle pedaling, which some of the girls, according to Ivlrs. Thtm~a, really hate.
It is a condition of childhood that grown-ups decide what is good for you, however; and following a selies of
studies chronicling the increasing rates of obesity and diabetes in chilch’en, the deciders in the federal
govenunent ordered more activity.
The order was embodied in Section 204 of Public Law 108-265, the Child Nutrition and W.I.C. Reauthorization
Act of 2004, which requires that bythe end of the 2006-7 academic year" - bynow, in other words - schools
provide daily ’~physical activity and other school-based activities designed to promote student wellness."
At Tooker, this means a prodigious amount of foot-stmnping, hand-clapping, jack-flwnping and other types of
otherwise forbidden behavior taking place right in the middle of the morning, between lessons in cursive,
double-digit addition and the science of magnets.
"The idea is that it’s not enough to have an athletic program or gym class twice a week," said Lou Howard Jr.,
the physical education director for West Babylon schools. "Kids need to be physically active during the day,
everyday. This is a proDam that regular teachers can do. You don’t need to be in phys-ed class."
To meet the federal deadline, three weeks ago administrators at Tooker Avenue Elementary introduced a seven-
minute exercise tape produced (and provided fi’ee of charge) by a Long Island company, Kid Fitness.
The company, which produces a children’s exercise show of the same name for public television, hopes to have
its fitness tape used in elementary schools thronghout the country. As part of a promotional effort, it donated
9,800 copies to the New York City school system in Februaw - enough for all classes from kindergarten through
the second grade.
On Friday, the star of the tape, Kid Fitness himself, a very fit 26-year-old actor named Casey Unterman, visited
the elementary school here.
After asking Mrs. Thuma’s 23 students if they were ready to have some fun, Mr. Unterman, diessed in the
superhero costume of his character, provided a crisp, precise demonstration of all the exercises that the children,
facing him, perfo~rned in their own younger, wilder versions.
Mrs. Thuma said that in her 15 years of teaching second graders, she noticed that ’*most kids are pretty fit at this
age" but become less active later on. "By fifkh grade," she said, "you start to see the ovelweight kids."
Stephen J. Virgilio, chai~rnan of the health and physical education department at Adelphi University, and a
consultant to the Kid Fitness company, said that between the fifth and 10th grades, many children become
physically inactive. "Partly it’s because of video-game and television habits," he said, "and partly it’s the
influence of too much organized sports - when the kids drop out of organized sports, they don’t know how to
11
 Page 863
play. They just stop."
That is why promoting nonsports exercise for children at a young age, as the federal law requires, is "suCh a
good idea," he said.
When the kids, sweating and flushed, were done with their exercises for the morning, Mr. Unterman asked if
they did not love feeling "fit and healthy."
They did, they said.
"I like having it first thing in the morning," said Jessica Marmaroff, 7, speaking later to a reporter who asked
about the regimen, "because then, like, you don’t have to do a lot of work.’"
And what about the issue of the dresses?
EmilyTartaglia, 7, explainedthat this was not necessarily the deal breaker that some might have one believe.
"All you have to do is hold your skirt like this," she said, gathering the folds on either side of her skirt and in
two no-nonsense fists. "You just have to not forget."

12
 Page 864
Pittsburgh Post- Gazette

U.S. funds performance pay for principals in city schools

Saturday, June 09, 2007

By Joe Smydo, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Pittsburgh Public Schools Superintendent Mark Roosevelt got a boost yesterday in his bid to have principals
shoulder more responsibility for the district’s academic overt~aul.
The U.S. Depmtment of Education mmounced that it is awarding the Pittsburgh Public Schools a five-year, $7.4
million grant to help fund a pay-for-performance program for the district’s principals.
The money will be used to give sala17 increases and bonuses to principals who meet certain perfomlance goals,
such as increasing student acbievement. It also will be used to pay for Rand Corp. analyses of school progress
and to pay five or more employees to administer the incentive program.
"It’s excellent news," Mr. Roosevelt said.
In all, the program will cost nearly $9 million over five years. The district must come up with $1.4 million in
program costs not covered by the grant.
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said the grant will come from the Teacher Incentive Fund,
established to fired incentive-based compensation plans for teachers and principals in high-poverty districts.
The depar~ent introduced the ftmd last year with 16 grants, including one to the School District of
Philadelphia. Pittsburgh is one of 18 recipients this year, and others include Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in
Nol~uh Carolina, four Florida districts, a group of Texas charter schools and the University of Texas.
Mr. Roosevelt has introduced new cmriculurn and other programs to boost sagging test scores. To ratchet up the
pressure on principals at the district’s 65 schools, he’s doing away with the annual salary increases the~ve
traditionally received regardless of job performance.
Instead, Mr. Roosevelt wants to give annual raises of up to $2,000 to each pIs~cipal who meets, or shows
progress toward, goals in 28 areas such as leadership and cornlnuttity outreach. The raises would be added to the
principal’s base pay.
In addition, he wants to offer principals bonuses of up to $10,000 each for increases in student achievement
dtning the year. A bonus would not be added to the principal’s base pay and could be earned again in following
years.
The distlict is waiting to see whether it will receive a three-year, $6.6 million grant from the Los Angeles-based
Broad Foundation to establish a plincipal recruitment and mentoring program. The pay-for-perfoirnance and
recruitment are part of the district’s broader principal development efforts.

13
 Page 865
Leesburg Today

Hah’ick Goes To Capitol Over NCLB

By Charlie Jackson

Created June 8, 2007

As the U:S. Congress debates the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind laws, superintendents across the
country, including Loudoun’s Edgar B. Hattick, are expressing their reservations about the cutrent regulations.
Hatrick went to Capitol Hill last month as a representative of the American Association of School
Administiators and spoke to senators about changes that could be made to the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act, more widely known as No Child Left Behind.

"My personal concems center around kids," Hatrick said last week. "The nature of this high-stakes testing, it has
become a billion dollar industry. It’s just not good to try to measure what children know based on 45 questions
multiple-choice tests. I’m opposed to the labeling that occurs.

"Our message is that standards are a good thing. Now, we’d like to see money come with the standards."

The federal law, Hatrick said, is intelpreted 50 ways in 50 states. In Vhginia, school districts test their students
almually with Standards of Learning tests. These tests are used to measure the students’ and schools’ progress. If
a school fails to meet benchmarks in specific areas, schools can be placed on probation. In some instances,
parents are allowed to opt out of the public school anduse public money to attend a private school. Hallick
suggests that if private schools are going to take public dollars, they too should be held to strict standards.

One of the many problems with the law, Halaick noted, is that school systems are forced to test students who are
still learning the English language at grrade level. The Virginia Depaltment of Education and its school districts
had a public spat ~vith the U.S. Department of Education earlier this yea concerning English Langnage learners.
Hatrick believes the law, as written, gives U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings latitude inhow she
interla’ets testing of English language learners. Hatlick said school systems are also forced to test spedal needs
students in the same vein.

"Theyneed individualized plans for leaning," he said. "We shouldn’t take those same kids we say can’t succeed
in a regular classroom and tmn around and give them a grade level test. I continue to believe a lot of what is
frustrating people, could have been resolved. We believe that the law gives [Spellings] latitude in the testing of
English language learners."

Hattick said he’d also like to see Congress add additional performance measures to grade schools. Instead ofjnst
test results, Hatrick said schools could be graded on graduation rates and what students do after college.

But the most important change Hatrick would like to see centers around dollars.

"We have a law that is forcing us to spend an awful lot of money to test these kids, and the federal government
is not paying," he said.

14
 Page 866
Reuters

Cuomo launches New York ~udent rights drive

NEW YORK, June 8 (Reutels) - New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo began an effort on Friday to
educate students about their rights under a new state law after a scandal in the $85 billion U. S. student-loan
industry.
Cuomo and congressional investigators have accused major student lenders of paying kickbacks to college aid
officers to curry favor and drum up business among students. Many colleges and companies, including major
lenders such as Sallie Mac (SLM.N: Quote, Profile, Research), Bank of America (BAC.N: ~ Profile,
Research) and Citigroup (C.N: ~.F_9~, Profile, Research), have settled with Cuomo.
The attorney general launched the effort to educate students about the new law -- Student Lending
Accountability, Transparency and Enforcement Act of 2007 -- at the Stuyvesant High School in New York.
The law includes rights such as knowing the criteria a school uses to select preferred lenders and whether those
lenders are paying the school or financial aid officers.
"This graduation gift is not gift-mapped or green, but it is valuable," Cuomo said in a statement.
Nearly three out of five undergraduates in the state took loans to pay for college education. Higher education
costs average $30,367 a year at four-year private colleges and about $13,000 at public institutions, according to
Cuomo’s office.

15
 Page 867

lNonresponsi’ ...
FrOITl: Reich, Heidi
Sent: June 08, 2007 8:41 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerd; Bryant, Jessica; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey;
Dorfman, C~thia; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie;
Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John; Higgins, Kristan; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers,
Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Maguire, Tory; McGrath, John; McLane,
Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Moran, Robert; Morffi, Jessica; Neale,
Rebecca; O’Daniel, Meagan; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey;
Scheessele, Marc; Private - Spellings, Margaret; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie;
Toomey, Liam; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Young, Tracy D. ;
Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken
Subject: National NCES report stories (4)

States Found To Vary Widely On Education (NYT)

’Huge Gap’ Found In States’ Student Testing (WT)
School Standards Vary Widely (AP)
Standards...And Report Politics! Plus, Sins Of The Father... (Eduwonk)

States Found To Vary Widely On Education (NYT)

By Tamar Lewin
The NewYork Times., June 8, 2007
Academic standards vary so drastically from state to state that a fourth grader judged proficient in reading in Mississippi or
Tennessee would fall far short oflhat mark in Massachusetts and South Carolina, the United States Department of Education
said yesterday in a report that, for the first time, measured the extent of the differences.
The wide variation raises questions about whether the federal No Child Left Behind law, President Bush’s signature
education initiative, which is up for renewal this year, has allowed a patchwork of educational inequities around the country, with
no common yardstick to determine whether schoolchildren are learning enough.
The law requires that all students be brought to proficiency by 2014 in reading and math and creates sanctions for failure.
But in a bow to states’ rights it lets each state set its own standards and choose its own tests.
The report provides ammunition for critics who say that one national standard is needed. "Parents and communities in too
many states are being told not to worry, all is well, when their students are far behind," said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president of
the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation who served in the Education Department during Mr. Bush’s first term.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in a statement, ’q-his report offers sobering news that serious work remains to
ensure that our schools are teaching students to the highest possible standards." Still, in a conference call with reporters, she
said it was up to the states, not the federal government, to raise standards.
The report for the first time creates a common yardstick to measure the results on s~ate tests against the National
Assessment of Educational Progress, considered the gold standard of testing.
The report examines the minimum score a student would have to get on each state’s reading and math tests to be deemed
proficient - or at grade level - and then determines what the equivalent score for that level of competency would be on the
national test. Results on the national test are not used to judge schools under No Child Left Behind.
The national test divides students’ scores into three achievement levels, basic, proficient and advanced. Grover J.
Whitehurst, director of the Institute of Education Sciences at lhe Education Department, said the achievement level that many
states called proficient was closer to what the national test rated as just basic. And the report shows that not a single state sets
its reading proficiency levels as high as the national test.
Although results were not available for all states, the Education Department report based on tests given in the 2004-5
school year illustrated starkly the variations in standards.
For example, an eighth grader in Missouri would need the equivalent of a 311 on the national test to be judged proficient.
 Page 868
That is actually more rigorous than the national test. In Tennessee, however, a student can meet the state’s proficiency standard
with a 230, a score well below even the basic level on the national exam.
And while a Massachusetts fourth grader would need the equivalent of a 234, or just below the proficiency mark on the
national test, to be judged as proficient by the state, a Mississippi fourth grader can meet the state’s standard with a state score
that corresponds to a 161 on the national test.
Such score differences represent a gap of several grade levels. New York ranked 9th in grade 4 reading, in terms of the
rigor of its standards. Its proficiency standards corresponded to 207 on the national test. It ranked third in grade 8 reading. But it
was toward the bottom, 29th among 33 states in grade 4 math. And it was 13th in grade 8 math.
New York has since approved new math standards. ’The results in reading are positive for New York relative to other
states, but math is mixed," State Education Commissioner Richard Mills said. ’qhe comparison reminds us of the need over time
to keep raising standards and providing extra help to student&"
The report found that eighth graders in North Carolina had to show the least skill to be considered proficient readers while
those in Wyoming had to show the most skill. Tennessee set the lowest bar on grade 4 math while Massachusetts set the
highest one.
The differences between state proficiency standards were sometimes more than double the national gap between minority
and white students’ reading levels, which averages about 30 points on the national test, Mr. Whitehurst said.
Many education experts criticize No Child Left: Behind, saying it gives states an incentive to set low standards to avoid
sanctions on schools that do not increase the percentage of students demonstrating proficiency each year. Those experts argue
that uniform national standards are needed.
But Congress is unlikely to go that far. Ms. Spellings said, "It’s way too early to conclude we need to adopt national
standards" and added that it is also too early to conclude that state standards are too low.
On Tuesday, a survey of state scores in reading and math, released by the Center on Education Policy, an independent
Washington group, found that since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2002, student achievement had increased and the
racial achievement gap narrowed in many states.
Ms. Spellings said the results showed the law has "struck a chord of success." Her department’s report, though, raises
doubts about just how much progress has been made.
Mr. Petrilli said, "Even if students are making progress on state tests, if tests are incredibly easy, that doesn’t mean much."
’Huge Gap’ Found In States’ Student Testing (W’I)
By Amy Fagan, The Washington Times
The Washinqton Times, June 8, 2007
There are big differences in how states are measuring student achievement in reading and math, and many state test
standards set the bar far lower than national test standards, a new federal report released yesterday shows.
The study -- by the research arm of the Education Department -- is the government’s first official comparison of states’
testing standards since 2002 enactment of the No Child Let~ Behind (NCLB)law.
It will likely play a role in this year’s effort to renew that law, which requires states to test students and set goals to bring all
to proficiency level in reading and math by 2014, but doesnt mandate specific standards or define "proficiency."
Yesterday’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) report found that state definitions of "proficient" for fourth- and
eighth-grade reading and math tests vary greatly from state to state, and most fall far short of the "proficient" level set for national
tests.
In fourth-grade reading, for example, each of the 32 states evaluated by the study set their "proficient" level below the
national proficiency level, and most even set their "proficient" level below the national level for basic reading skills. In fact, only a
few states -- in fourth-grade and eighth-grade math -- set their proficiency levels higher than the national mark.
There’s also "a huge gap between where states are setting their proficiency," said NCES Commissioner Mark Schneider.
The national test used in the study is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which tests students
nationwide in a variety of subjects but doesn’t punish or reward states for the results. The NCES study assigned each state test
standard a number, based on how it compared to the NAEP. This way, researchers could compare very different state test
standards using a common yardstick.
Massachusetts sets it’s fourth-grade reading-proficiency level just below the national proficiency level, but Mississippi’s
proficiency level is a full 73 points lower than Massachusetts’. Missouri’s proficiency level for eighth-grade math is a few points
higher than the national standard. But North Carolina’s proficiency level is a full 64 points lower than Missouri’s.
The report could fuel debate over whether and how lawmakers should aim for more rigorous state standards as they try to
renewthe NCLB lawthis year -- one of President Bush’s top priorities.
 Page 869
Senate education panel Chairman Edward M. Kennedy addressed this yesterday, after seeing the report.
"1 look forward to working in No Child Left Behind to help encourage states to adopt a more consistent and rigorous
definition of what students should know and be able to do, in key subjects," the Massachusetts Democrat said.
Just days ago, supporters of the NCLB law trumpeted a report that found many states have made notable progress in
student achievement since the law’s enactment. Yesterday, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings explained the different
findings.
"States have made significant strides under No Child Left Behind to close our nation’s achievement gap, as evidenced by
the Center on Education Policy study released earlier this week," she said. "But today’s report finds that many states’
assessment standards do not measure up to the rigorous standards of the Nation’s Report Card."
She said it’s clear that states must raise the bar, and added, "1 hope this report will be a catalyst for positive change."
The study prompted a letter to be sent to all of the 2008 presidential candidates by the former chairmen of the Republican
and Democratic National Committees -- Democrat Roy Romer and Republican Ken Mehlman. The two men insisted that there is
"no more important issue to our nation" than education reform, and the study "showed that we are failing to set adequate
education standards for our children."

School Standards Vary Widely (AP)

By Nancy Zuckerbrod
AP, June 8, 2007
State differences likely to fuel national debate.
WASHINGTON - A reading score that rates a fourth-grader "proficient" in Mississippi would be failing in Massachusetts, an
example of state-to-state variations likely to fuel debate about a need for more uniform national standards.
An Education Department report on Thursday compared what it takes to be rated proficient on elementary- and middle-
school state reading and math tests to what it means to hit that mark on national tests. The state tests are a key measure for
enforcement of the federal No Child Left Behind law.
The report found that most of the scores that would label a student proficient on state tests don’t yield that grade on the
national tests.
There also are huge differences in where states set their benchmarks.
Massachusetts sets the proticiency score on its fourth-grade reading test just belowthe proficiency mark on the national
test. But a fourth-grader in Mississippi can be rated proficient with a state test score that is more than 70 points lower. Proficiency
is defined as working at the level expected for that grade.
The tests given by the states are used to judge schools under No Child Left Behind, the five-year-old education law that is
up for renewal this year.
States pick their own tests and set their own achievement scores. When too few students in a school meet proticiency
standards, that school typically faces consequences such as having to swap out principals or teachers. States that set high
standards generally have fewer sE~dents labeled as proficient than states with low standards.
The national test, called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is a dgorous exam given in a variety of subjects
to students nationwide. It doesn’t have consequences attached to it like those linked to the state tests. But it does offer a way to
compare states to one another.
The study did not find a clear relationship between high standards in a state and high performance on the national test by
students in that state.
For example, North Carolina and South Carolina students score about the same on the national tests, but South Carolina
has higher state performance standards than its neighbor.
Susan Fuhrman, president of Columbia University’s Teachers College, says educators have long known that solid
standards aren’t a silver bullet. "It’s not enough to set standards and test achievement on them. There’s a lot of other stuff that
has to happen instructionally," she said.
The discrepancy in state standards has been identified by previous private studies, but the new report is much more
detailed and is considered important because it is being released by the Education Department’s independent research arm
ratherthan by advocacy groups.
Several groups have called for national standards to be written into the education law in light of the discrepancies in state
standards, but Congress is unlikely to go that far because states see education as a fundamentally local prerogative.
"1 think that in principle it is a good idea. It is hard to argue why you have different math in Mississippi and Montana," said
Fuhrman, but she added that states should band together to set common standards and not rely on Washington to do it. There is
some evidence that’s starting to happen; a group of states recently agreed to share an algebra test.
 Page 870
The Education Tn4st, a nonprofit group in Washington that advocates for poor and minority students, has recommended
that if states significantly raise their standards, the government should reward them by loosening rules requiring all kids to be
working on grade level by 2014.
That is among the proposals being considered on Capitol Hill. Massachusetts Democrat Edward M. Kennedy, who chairs
the Senate education committee, also is interested in giving states that raise their standards more money to help with the effort.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings opposes moving away from requiring all students to be at grade level by 2014. She
has said states should be required to publish report cards showing how students did on the states’ tests and on the national
assessment. "1 do think it’s important to kind of amplify that wide variance among states," Spellings said in a conference call with
reporters a day before the report’s public release. "Transparency, in my mind, is always the first place to go."
The report also found:
Eighth-graders in North Carolina had to demonstrate the least knowledge to be considered proficient readers, while
students in Wyoming had to showthe most knowledge.
Tennessee set the lowest bar on the fourth-grade math test, while Massachusetts set the highest one.
In eighth-grade math, Missouri set the highest proficiency standard - 12 points above the national one. Tennessee’s was
the lowest, 69 points below the national bar.
The Education Department’s report was based on tests given in the 2004-05 school year. Scores weren’t available for
some states, because some did not have annual reading and math tests in fourth- and eighth-grade then. All states have them
now.

Standards...And Report Politics! Plus, Sins Of The Father... (Eduwonk)

Eduwonk_, June 7, 2007
There is nothing really new in today’s NCES report on state standards and NAEP in terms of the topline finding: State
standards vary in their rigor. It’s an interesting analysis, but we knewthat. Still, it will fuel the larger debate about No Child Left
Behind. Ed Trust already has a statement out:
’q-he NCES report demonstrates that far too many states have set their proficiency standards at levels below even a basic
knowledge and understanding of core academic subject matter. These findings follow previous research from the U.S.
Department of Education showing that an estimated 75 percent of current high school graduates pursuing post-secondary
education, while one-third of them end up in remedial classes."
But I have to disagree with Sherman Dora’s contention that reports, like the CEP No Child one the other day, never matter
much. They often don’t cause an immediate pivot in a debate, but that shouldn’t be mistaken for not having effect. In the CEP
case, there is a raging debate about the No Child law and Senator Kennedy and Representative Miller are working hard to hold
Democratic support on the law. That’s an easier sell when they can say that, sure, the politics are tough but it’s the right overall
direction for the policy so suck it up. It’s a lot harder if the data show something different. All that said, today’s report doesn’t
matter much!
Update: Referring to the NCES report, in The Times Tamar Lewin writes:
The report supports critics who say the political compromise of the federal No Child Left Behind law, President Bush’s
signature education initiative, has led to a patchwork of educational inequities around the country, with no common yardstick to
determine whether schoolchildren are learning enough.
Fair point except for the "has led" part. That patchwork preceded No Child Left Behind. If anything, put it on Bush’s father
who tried and failed on national standards. The 1994 (Clinton) law subsequently charted the course on state standards. But hard
to see, considering the politics, how either could have done more on the national issue. This Jack Jennings book looks at the
history (but try to score a used copy!). And, the states have always had variance, that’s hardly new. The policy question is
whether a national policy can effectively abate it or needlessly exacerbates it.
Also, while you’re reading The Times story, note the Spellings- Petrilli back and forth. Big fun.
 Page 871

Nonresponsi!_
~rorrl: Reich, Heidi
Sent: June 08, 2007 8:41 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Bryant, Jessica; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey;
Dorfman, Cynthia; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie;
Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John; Higgins, Kristan; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers,
Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Maguire, Tory; McGrath, John; McLane,
Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Moran, Robert; Morffi, Jessica; Neale,
Rebecca; O’Daniel, Meagan; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey;
Scheessele, Marc; Private- Spellings, Margaret; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie;
Toomey, Liam; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Young, Tracy D. ;
Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken
Subject: Advice For U.S. Secretary Of Education Margaret Spellings (BWkly OR)

Advice For U.S. Secretary Of Education Margaret Spellings (BWkly OR)

By Phyllis Schlafly
Bend (’OR) Weekly, June 8, 2007
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, please call your boss and urge him to read your May 9 speech to the National
Summit on America’s Silent Epidemic in Washington, D.C. Your eloquence in describing the silent epidemic was exceeded only
by our shock at the facts you described.
’qhe dropout rate for African-American, Hispanic, and Native American students approaches 50 percent .... Every year
nearly a million kids fail to graduate high school .... The United States has the most severe income gap between high school
graduates and dropouts in the world."
You exhorted us to deal with this problem because "stopping the exodus" is both a "moral imperative" and an "economic
necessity." You lambasted our government’s current "state of denial" and demanded "a state of acknowledgement."
Right on, Secretary Spellings. But your own boss must be one of those in a state of denial. At the same time you were
delivering your call for action, President George W. Bush was demanding passage of the Senate immigration bill that would
dump many more millions of high school dropouts in your lap.
According to the Pew Hispanic Center, 49 percent of illegal immigrants are high school dropouts, compared with 25 percent
of legal immigrants, and only 9 percent of native-born U.S. citizens.
Spellings proclaimed in her speech, "The days when you could earn a good living off the sweat of your brow are
disappearing. In industries ranging from manufacturing to microprocessing, a high school diploma is the bare minimum for
success."
But that’s not what corporate lobbyists are telling members of the U.S. Senate. Lobbyists say that employers need waiters
and dishwashers to work in restaurants, lettuce and strawberry pickers for big agriculture, and grass-cutters and shrub-trimmers
to tend our lawns.
High school dropouts are the kind of workers these employers want to hire. That’s why employers are lobbying to legalize
between 12 million and 20 million illegal immigrants already here and also to bring in hundreds of thousands more in a guest-
worker program.
The CEOs of multinationals publicly announced their dissatisfaction with the Senate bill because it contains some feeble
provisions to give some limited preference, eight years into the future, to foreigners with skills. They would prefer instead to give
preference to the remote relatives of illegal immigrants, those high school dropouts whom the Senate bill would legalize.
Big business employers prefer to import foreigners who are eager for any kind of menial job. They come from countries
where they have endured poverty so severe that it is incomprehensible to even the poorest of U.S. citizens.
Big business employers know that illegal immigrants and guest-workers are willing to work long hours for pay below the
minimum wage. Employers knowthat U.S. taxpayers will supplement those low wages by the handout called the Earned Income
Tax Credit and to pay the costs of medical care, public schooling, school lunches, housing subsidies, and dozens of other tax-
paid benefits that flow to low-income workers.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy research institute based in Washington, D.C., estimates that U.S.
taxpayers pay about $20,000 peryear to every household headed by a high school dropout. That’s even before retirement age
enables the high school dropouts and their imported relatives to cash in on Social Security and Medicare.
In her speech, Spellings coined one apt phrase and borrowed another pertinent phrase from the immigration debate to
 Page 872
describe urban public schools. She called them "dropout factories" and decried the fact that they have been "in the shadows for
so long."
Spellings said it well. It’s not just illegal immigrants who need to be brought out of "the shadows"; it’s the scandal of forcing
taxpayers to pay an average of $10,000 per public school student even though many students are not taught how to read.
Spellings’ solution is to pour more taxpayers’ money into the schools. But that could only address the problem of children
still in school; it does nothing for the dropouts who have given up on schooling and gone out to the streets where they often get
into all sorts of mischief.
What our own high school dropouts need is a job so they can get staffed building a life. Instead of rewarding illegal
immigrants with a "Z visa" to enable them to hold a job legally, Spellings should ask the Senate to authorize a "Z diploma" to
encourage U.S. businesses to hire our own high school dropouts.
The primary result of the Senate immigration bill will be to provide corporations with more high school dropouts, and that’s
exactly what the United States does not need. Secretary Spellings, when you phone President Bush, maybe he will answer if you
press 2 for Spanish.
Phyllis Schlafly is a lawyer, conservative political analyst and the author of the newly revised and expanded "Supremacists." She
can be contacted by e-mail at phytlis@eagleforum.org.© Copley News Service
 Page 873

Nonresponsi
From: Reich, Heidi
Sent: June 07, 2007 8:57 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Bryant, Jessica; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey;
Dorfman, Cynthia; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie;
Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John; Higgins, Kristan; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers,
Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Maguire, Tory; McGrath, John; McLane,
Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Moran, Robert; Morffi, Jessica; Neale,
Rebecca; O’Daniel, Meagan; Pitts, Elizabeth; Private - Spellings, Margaret; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie;
Toomey, Liam; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Young, Tracy D. ;
Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken
Subject: Cuomo/Student Loan stories (4)

Cuomo Plans To Broaden Student-Lending Inquiry (NYT)

Student-Loan Probe Expands Into Possible Discriminatory Practices (WSJ)
NY AG Faults Oversight Of College Loans (AP)
Cuomo Urges Stronger Loan Oversight, Widens Probe (BLOOM)

Cuomo Plans To Broaden Student-Lending Inquiry (NYT)

By Diana Jean Schemo
The NewYork Times., June 7, 2007
WASHINGTON, June 6 - Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, whose scrutiny of student loans has exposed
ties between universities and lenders, said Wednesday that he was broadening his investigation to examine the criteria lenders
use when making loans, and whether they violate civil rights statutes.
Testifying at a Senate Banking Committee hearing on private student loans, which do not carry federal guarantees, Mr.
Cuomo said he was examining whether lenders were discriminating against students based on the institutions they attended or
other factors not directly related to their credit history.
’What criteria are they using in the underwriting of these loans?" Mr. Cuomo asked. "Parental income? Student income?
Student creditworthiness? How about the school you attend? How is that weighted?"
While lenders have the right to consider a borrower’s credit record, he said, ’there are also civil rights and legal
ramifications to what criteria they use, and that’s what we’re looking at."
He suggested that students at historically black colleges and universities were sometimes charged higher interest rates and
fees than other students.
Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who is committee chairman and is running for president, likened
the practice to redlining, in which banks rule out mortgage loans based not on the credit record of potential homeowners but by
whether urban neighborhoods are predominantly black.
The market in private student loans has soared in recent years, tripling to $17.3 billion in the last ~ve years. Such loans
carry variable interest rates, unlike government-backed loans, which have fixed rates.
Mr. Cuomo, whose student-loan "code of conduct" bans secret gifts from lenders to universities became a model for
legislation the House passed overwhelmingly last month, called private student loans the Wild West of consumer lending
because they are largely unregulated and the level of disclosure pales next to that required of the mortgage industry.
Regulations that the federal Education Department issued last week on student lending apply only to loans carrying federal
guarantees. Mr. Cuomo urged Congress to clean tip the private loan industry, but said new legislation was probably not needed.
Rather, he said, the federal agencies charged with oversight, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit
Insurance Corporation and the Federal Trade Commission, have not used the authority the law already gives them.
A number of lenders, including Sallie Mae, which holds more private loans than any other company, consider the institution
 Page 874
a student is attending in determining the interest rate, fees and other terms of loans they extend to students, said Barry W.
Goulding, a Sallie Mae senior vice president who testified.
But Mr. Goulding justified the practice, saying Sallie Mae considered "our experience with the borrowers attending that
school" to only "a nominal extent," which could result in interest rates up to one percentage point higher. More important, he said,
is the credit history of the borrower and the co-signer, usually the students’ parents.
In advance of the hearing, he said, Sallie Mae had looked at the rates it charges students at six historically black colleges
and universities: three received the best rates the company offers students, and three received less attractive rates.
In setting interest rates, Mr. Goulding said, Sallie Mae also considers the "competitive landscape," how aggressively
colleges and universities seek the best deal for their students. Institutions that put together their preferred-lender lists by soliciting
companies for their best terms, he said, typically get up to one percentage point lower interest rates for their students.
That disclosure suggested that colleges and universities that relied on perks - like free trips and lucrative board seats for
university employees - to choose which lenders to recommend had hurt their students by not demanding the cheapest loans.
Mr. Cuomo testified that 90 percent of all students select their lenders from their college’s preferred-lender lists.
Asked how common the perks and revenue sharing agreements were, Mr. Cuomo said, "On the private loan side, it’s
rampant."
Executives from two other major student lenders, First Marblehead Corporation and Bank of America, said they did not
consider an institution’s default history in setting terms for loans. Rather, they said, they only make loans to a list of about 6,500
institutions, determined by factors unrelated to borrower history, like accreditation.
The executives said that they were providing a valuable service, investing in human capital, and giving students with no
credit history or collateral a chance to attend college.
Luke Swarthout, the higher education advocate at the United States Public Interest Research Group, a nonpartisan
consumer group, disputed that account, saying many lenders do not readily disclose the terms of loans, and require students to
sign promissory notes before they know what their interest rates will be.

Student-Loan Probe Expands Into Possible Discriminatory Practices (WSJ)

By Anne Marie Chaker
The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2007
WASHINGTON -- New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said his probe into the student-loan business has expanded
into possible discriminatory practices, and he called for tighter federal oversight to bring the industry in line.
Mr. Cuomo told the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs that the nonfederal student-loan industry is
like the "Wild West" since it isn’t regulated by the Education Department.
The rapidly rising cost of college -- combined with the relatively low borrowing limits on federally guaranteed loans -- has
meant that students and their families are increasingly turning to private lending to fill that gap. Borrowers took out $17.3 billion in
nonfederal loans to finance educations in the 2005-06 academic year, compared with just over $1 billion a decade earlier,
according to the New York nonprofit College Board.
Since private loans carry interest rates that can vary widely and aren~ controlled by the government, they are far riskier for
students and their families.
Mr. Cuomo said he recently began an investigation into the criteria lenders use to underwrite private loans, suggesting
students attending different schools -- using Harvard and historically black colleges as examples -- could be treated differently on
price. ’q-here are civil rights and legal ramifications," Mr. Cuomo said.
Committee Chairman Sen. Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.) compared the practice to discriminatory "redlining," when banks
and other lending institutions refuse loans to residents of certain areas, such as inner-city neighborhoods.
Lawmakers discussed potential changes in federal law to address private student lending more head-on, such as including
more discussion of student loans in the Truth in Lending Act, which requires full disclosure of terms and payments for other
borrowing such as mortgages.
As lawmakers gear up for the process of renewing the Higher Education Act in the coming weeks, Sen. Dodd suggested
forbidding lenders from offering inducements -- such as gifts and trips -- to colleges in exchange for offering private loans. Such
practices are specifically prohibited for federally backed loans, but not for private ones. Sen. Dodd, who is a candidate for the
presidential nomination, also said he would convene banking and consumer regulators to discuss student-loan matters.
Student-loan giant SLM Corp., better known as Sallie Mac, also came under fire, for its pricing techniques and the timing of
its announced acquisition. In April, Sallie Mae agreed to be sold to two private-investment funds and banks J.P. Morgan Chase &
Co. and Bank of America Corp. for $25 billion.
"At a time when we are seeing a greater demand on oversight, it’s interesting that the largest player in this market will
 Page 875
become less transparent going from a publicly traded company to a private entity," said Luke Swarthout, higher education
advocate for the US. Public Interest Research Group.
"We have conducted ourselves with transparency and plan to continue to do that, public or private," responded Barry W.
Goulding, senior vice president ofSallie Mae.
Separately, two university financial-aid directors who came under scrutiny for accepting payments from a lender have
their jobs, the schools announced today. Capella University, an online school, said it would dismiss its financial aid director,
Timothy C. Lehmann, and Widener University of Pennsylvania said financial aid dean Walter Cathie had retired from his post.
-John Hechinger and Keith J. Winstein contributed to this article.
Write to Anne Marie Chaker at anne-marie.chaker@wsj.coml
NY AG Faults Oversight Of College Loans (AP)
By Marcy Gordon
AP, June 7, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Rampant abuses by lenders have followed a boom in higher-priced college loans not guaranteed by the
government, and lax federal oversight has made the situation worse, New York’s attorney general said Wednesday.
Andrew Cuomo told Congress his office has begun investigating lenders for possible discriminatory practices ir~olving the
criteria used for pricing student loans. Such criteria may include where a student lives and what type of college he attends,
Cuomo suggested.
Already, his office has taken on student lenders and college financial aid officials over conflicts of interest. That includes
kickbacks to college officials for steering students toward particular lenders.
Private student loans do not have their interest rates capped, unlike government-backed college loans generally.
The $17 billion market for p~ivate loans is "the fastest-growing segment of the student loan industry and (has) become the
most fertile ground for unscrupulous practices," Cuomo said at a hearing of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs
Committee. "Private loans are the Wild West of the student loan industry."
At the same time, he said, "The Department of Education was asleep at the switch, but so were the banking regulators _
who must now wake up and act."
Cuomo struck a receptive chord with lawmakers.
The committee chairman, Sen. Christopher Dodd, said he would consider writing legislation that would extend to student
loans the sort of fair-lending laws that cover home mortgages.
The committee also will scrutinize the role of banking regulators in overseeing the private student loan industry, said Dodd,
D-Conn.
"We need to examine this thoroughly and carefully," said Dodd, a 2008 presidential candidate. "Our country will pay an
awful price indeed" if students are priced out of the market for college loans.
Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the committee’s senior Republican, said the committee must determine whether stronger
banking laws or penalties are needed to protect students.
On the House side, a bill aimed at curbing conflicts of interest and corrupt practices in college lending won approval last
month.
It would ban gifts from lenders to schools and impose strict controls on schools that publish approved lender lists to guide
students to certain loan companies.
Lenders and schools would have to make their business dealings more transparent to borrowers, disclosing terms,
conditions and any incentives involved.
College tuition costs are soaring and private student loans are carrying rates as high as 20 percent. Lawmakers are
seeking to draw public attention to student lending issues in the way they have spotlighted the distress over high-risk home
mortgages in recent months.
Cuomo and congressional Democrats have criticized the Education Department for what they say is lax oversight of the
student loan industry.
But for the first time at Wednesday’s hearing, Cuomo also blamed federal regulators with authority over lenders: the
Federal Trade Commission, the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit
Insurance Corp.
All of the actions taken by his office in the student loan investigation, which covers more than 100 schools, could have been
made by the regulators, Cuomo said.
In the latest developments in the wide-ranging probe, two universities announced Wednesday that financial aid directors
have left their posts. Capella University said it had fired financial aid director Tim Lehmann for violating the online school’s code
 Page 876
of business conduct by accepting consulting fees from a student lender, and Widener University of Pennsylvania said financial
aid dean Walter Cathie had retired.
The two had been on administrative leave since Cuomo accused them in April of accepting improper payments from a
lender that they recommended to students.
Cuomo has secured settlements with Citibank, student lender Sallie Mae, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Education
Finance Partners as well as, CIT, which is the parent of Student Loan Xpress, and 25 colleges.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has disputed Cuomo’s criticisms. "Not only are we not asleep at the switch, but we
are very much at the helm and managing our business," Spellings said recently.
Spellings noted that many of the abuses uncovered by Cuomo’s investigation have been in the private student loan
industry, over which her department has no jurisdiction.
In that case, the department should have referred suspected cases of abuse by lenders to the banking regulators, Cuomo
said Wednesday.
Bryan Hubbard, a spokesman for the comptroller’s office, said the agency "is following up with national bank lenders to
determine whether they have engaged in any of the unlawful or unethical practices" cited by Cuomo. Many of the largest national
banks that make student loans have signed on to a new code of ethics for college lenders, he said.
Since 2005, the agency has examined nine of the 11 largest student lenders among major national banks, Hubbard said.
Complaints related to national banks’ student loan practices have been a "very small percentage" of total complaints received by
the agency, he said.

Cuomo Urges Stronger Loan Oversight, Widens Probe (BLOOM)

By Matthew Keenan
Bloomberq, June 7, 2007
June 6 (Bloomberg) -- NewYork Attorney General Andrew Cuomo urged the U.S. Congress to step up supervision of
private education lending and said he is widening his investigation of the $85 billion-a-year industry [o examine loan criteria.
Private lending is more subject to abuse because it isn"~ covered by anti-kickback rules in government loan programs,
Cuomo told the U.S. Senate’s banking committee, chaired by Connecticut Democrat Christopher Dodd. Cuomo also said at the
Washington hearing today that lenders may be using improper criteria such as which school borrowers attend to decide whether
to grant a loan.
Dodd is the third congressional committee chairman to review the student-loan industry’s practices. Probes by Senator
Edward Kennedy and Representative George Miller, like Cuomo’s investigation, have found colleges and their financial-aid
officials receiving consulting fees, git~s and stock from lenders their schools recommended to prospective borrowers.
"’The Department of Education was asleep at the switch, but so were the banking regulators, who also must awake and
act," Cuomo, 49, told the committee. He called private lending the "’Wild West" of the student-loan business.
Education-loan providers such as Sallie Mae, the biggest in the U.S., are under scrutiny for providing payments and perks
to colleges and their officials. At the same time, Congress is considering cuts in federal payments for government-backed student
loans [o save money.
Looking for Redlining
Cuomo, a Democrat who took office in January, said today that lenders also may be setting more favorable terms for
students at prestige schools such as Harvard University, compared with students attending historically black institutions.
"’There are civil rights and also legal ramifications," Cuomo told the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban
Affairs.
Dodd, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, said he was concerned "’that some institutions are being, in
effect, redlined."
Education loans may be more susceptible to redlining, the practice of geographical discrimination in lending, because the
field is less regulated and less transparent than the home- mortgage market, Cuomo said.
Sallie Mae, known formally as SLM Corp., bases lending terms in its private-loan programs in par[ on the historic default
rates at schools, Senior Vice President Barry Goulding told the committee.
Varying Rates
In preparation for the hearing, Sallie Mae examined the loan terms of six historically black colleges. The company found
that students at three schools received the lender’s best rate, while those at three other institutions paid between 0.5 percentage
points and 1 percentage point more each year, Goulding said.
"’Obviously I’m not very happy with Sallie Mae’s answer here, when it comes to making decisions raising the cos[ of the
product for some of the students who can least afford it," Dodd told reporters later.
 Page 877
Agencies with jurisdiction over private lending include the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve,
the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Federal Trade Commission, Cuomo said. The trade commission is examining
complaints of deceptive marketing by student-loan providers, according to a letter from the chairman to Miller last week.
Regulation
"’1 believe this is a place where the federal government can and should act and they already have the jurisdiction," Cuomo
said. "’They chose not to act."
Cuomo said no federal regulator has contacted him about student loans since he started his investigation.
The FDIC, an independent agency of the federal government that insures deposits and monitors risks, will coordinate with
the Education Department and other banking regulators, spokesman Andrew Gray said.
"’The reports of abusive student loan practices are troubling," Gray said.
In conducting his probe, Cuomo has collected $14.3 million from colleges and lenders including Sallie Mae for an
informational campaign and to reimburse students who have taken out loans. At least four university financial-aid directors and
three corporate executives have lost their jobs during the investigations, and others have been placed on leave.
Proposed regulations issued last week by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings to restrict certain practices are "’still
inadequate," Cuomo said. The draft rules don"~ require colleges to make decisions on which financial institutions to recommend
based on students’ best interests, he said.
"’They still allow some perks to be dangled in front of financial-aid administrators," Cuomo said.
Cost of Tuition
Executives of Sallie Mae and Bank of America Corp. told the committee they endorse Spellings’ draf~ regulations and a
code of conduct Cuomo devised for education lenders.
The federal government guarantees loans to students and their families through a variety of programs. About 80 percent of
that money is funneled through banks and other private-sector lenders. The government pays the lenders fees and guarantees
repayment of most of the loan value in case of default.
As the cost of tuition has increased, more students and their families have turned to non-guaranteed private loans that
carry higher interest rates not set by the government. Private loans are the fastest-growing part of education lending, increasing
an average of 27 percent a year from 2001 through 2006, according to the College Board.
"’Because private loan rates are not set by Congress and pricing is generally unregulated, the complex array of private loan
products is, to say the least, dizzying," Cuomo said in prepared testimony.
Last year, such loans accounted for $17.3 billion, about 20 percent, of the money parents and families borrowed to cover
college costs, the College Board reported.
Possible Measures
Cuomo’s findings included agreements under which lenders that colleges and universities recommended paid a share of
their revenue to the schools based on the volume of business there. In every case, the improper payments involved private-loan
programs, Cuomo said.
"’There’s clearly a need here for private loans. There’s no question about that," said Dodd, 63, who also serves on
Kennedy’s commi[tee. "’I’m anticipating some action may be necessary."
Congressional measures might include giving federal agencies authority to act and requiring belier disclosure to borrowers
of the terms of their loans, he said.
 Page 878

N°nresp°nsiL ........................
From: Reidl, Heidi
Sent: June 07, 2007 8:55 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Bryant, Jessica; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey;
Dorfman, Cynthia; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie;
Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John; Higgins, Kristan; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers,
Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Maguire, Tory; McGrath, John; McLane,
Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Moran, Robert; Morffi, Jessica; Neale,
Rebecca; O’Daniel, Meagan; Pitts, Elizabeth; Private - Spellings, Margaret; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie;
Toomey, Liam; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Young, Tracy D. ;
Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken
Subject: Taming The Student Loan ’Wild West’ (IHE)

Taming The Student Loan ’Wild West’ (IHE)

By Doug Lederman
Inside H~ June 7, 2007
The market for private student loans has exploded in recent years, fueled by the growing gap between the price of
attending college and the availability of federal grant and subsidized loan funds. And the competition among student loan
companies to provide those non-federal loans, occurring at a time of little or no federal regulation, created an environment in
which some questionable (if not illegal) marketing practices flourished.
That has been one of the starkest conclusions of the student loan controversy that has unfolded over the last three months.
And at a U.S. Senate hearing Wednesday, a slew of witnesses - led by New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, whose
own investigation has spurred inquiries in Congress and elsewhere - discussed the private loan market and what if anything
Congress should do to increase oversight of it. Among the issues debated: Looking back, is there more the federal government
should have done to regulate the private loan industry? And going forward, should federal laws or rules be changed to give
federal agencies more authority to regulate the market?
Wednesday’s hearing was the third in Congress in recent weeks about the cascading student loan scandal, and it had a
decidedly different cant from the earlier ones, both of which took place before the House Education and Labor Committee. In late
April, Cuomo testified and, egged on by the panel’s Democratic leaders, cast significant blame on the U.S. Education
Department for having done too little to regulate the student loan industry generally. In mid-May, before the same House panel,
Secretary Margaret Spellings gamely defended the department’s actions and insisted that the agency had regulated as much as
it could given limitations in federal law on its authority- most notably in the realm of private loans.
The venue and themes of Wednesday’s hearing represented a significant shitt. First, the setting was the Senate Banking
Committee, which generally has not had a role in overseeing the student loan programs. And the topic focused not on student
loan practices in general but specifically the private loan industry, which has seen its share of student borrowing growto nearly
20 percent over the last decade, up from 4 percent. The loans are controversial in part because they tend to have higher rates
and less appealing terms than federally backed loans.
There was very little of the partisan bickering that characterized the House hearings. That was partly because of the nature
of the Senate, where gentility (at least feigned, if not real) usually wins out. But it was also because while discussion of the
federal student loan programs almost inevitably treads onto the partisan subject of the government’s two competing programs -
the Democratic-favored direct loan program and the Republican-preferred guaranteed loan program (to risk oversimplifying
greatly) - there is very little disagreement that private loans are problematic.
The overarching theme of the hearing, which was called by its chairman, Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), was that while
private loans play a role in meeting that growing gap between college students’ costs and the other kinds of aid available to them
(and are therefore probably inevitable if not necessarily desirable), the federal government has not sufficiently regulated
borrowers’ use of them, and must do so more.
That argument was made by the day’s star witness, Cuomo, who once again received the equivalent of a hero’s welcome
by the Democrats who control the panel (for what it’s worth, he earned a lot of praise from the committee’s Republicans, too). He
recounted practices ("rampant," Cuomo said) uncovered by his investigation that he said showed that loan providers had offered
incentives to college financial aid officials that made them less-than-honest brokers in advising the students who come to them
for advice about which lenders to choose. And he argued that the federal government had enabled those practices by failing to
 Page 879
police the private loan industry.
Cuomo, who had lambasted the Education Depaffment in his last visit to Capitol Hill, responded in this one to Spellings’s
argument that her agency had its hands tied (metaphorically)in its ability to crack down on private lenders. If that’s the case, the
New York official said, the department still botched the job because it failed to refer concerns its officials may have had to federal
banking or consumer protection agencies that, he asserted, definitely did have regulatory authority.
’The Education Department said it cannot extend the government’s supervision [over federally guaranteed loans] to the
private loan sector. Then why not refer these actions to the appropriate banking and consumer protection regulators?" Cuomo
asked rhetorically. "It’s clear that the let~ hand didn’t know what the right hand wasn’t doing."
Cuomo insisted that "all of the actions" his office has brought or threatened to bring against lenders and college officials
"could have been brought" under existing federal laws and rules by regulators like the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corp., or the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. (Bank officials disagree with that assertion, saying
there is no evidence that many of the practices Cuomo has c~iticized - revenue sharing agreements between lenders and
colleges, for instance - are illegal under any federal law. But consumer advocates say that colleges’ failure to tell student
borrowers about deals that might influence their referrals to a lender would violate federal consumer fraud laws.)
Dodd embraced Cuomo’s suggestion that the Senate panel have "some of the regulators come in and talk abo~ what they
feel they have the authority to do," and "pursue them aggressively to get them to do what they have the authority to do." But the
Connecticut senator and others also pressed Cuomo on whether he believed the government needed to toughen its laws and
roles to ensure better oversight of the private loan market. ’q-he question for us is, can you do it under existing regulations and
statutes, or does this Congress need to act to give the agencies additional authority that they claim not to have?" Dodd said.
Cuomo reiterated his belief that the government already had the authority to regulate private loans, but he endorsed
applying to the private loan sector toughened standards that Congress and the Education Department have proposed imposing
on lenders and college officials in the federal loan programs.
The NewYork attorney general also revealed that his office was widening its investigation into private loans by looking at
whether the criteria lenders use to award private loans discriminate against students attending less-wealthy institutions, much as
mortgage lenders are sometimes accused of refusing to give loans to, or gouging, borrowers in poor neighborhoods. ’q-here are
civil rights and legal ramifications," Mr. Cuomo said.
The other panelists who spoke Wednesday - including student advocates and officials from Sallie Mae, Bank of America
and First Marblehead, three dominant players in the private loan industry - took varying stances on how much new regulation or
legislation they thought was necessary. Bank officials generally said they thought that the changes being considered by
Congress now, and included in the code of conduct that Cuomo has promulgated, were more than sufficient, and that greater
transparency and public information about loan rates and terms would go a long way toward protecting borrowers.
But Luke Swarthout, higher education advocate for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, called for much more
extensive changes, including changing personal bankruptcy laws so that private loans are discharged when a borrower enters
bankruptcy.
In a related development Wednesday, two more college financial aid directors lost their jobs stemming from charges made
against them in the loan investigation.
Capella University released a statement saying that Tim Lehmann, its director of financial aid, ’~11 be leaving Capella."
Lehmann is among the financial aid officials who received had received stock or payments from a lender, Student Loan Xpress,
who had appeared on its list of preferred lenders. Capella had placed him on leave in April.
And Widener University acknowledged that its aid director, Walter Cathie, had retired, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Student Loan XPress had paid tens of thousands of dollars to a consulting company Cathie runs, and he had been seen as a
central figure in the spread of private loans.
 Page 880

~,~onresponsi L
From: Reich, Heidi
Sent: June 06, 2007 8:41 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Bryant, Jessica; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey;
Dorfman, C~thia; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie;
Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John; Higgins, Kristan; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers,
Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Maguire, Tory; McGrath, John; McLane,
Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Moran, Robert; Morffi, Jessica; Neale,
Rebecca; O’Daniel, Meagan; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey;
Scheessele, Marc; Private - Spellings, Margaret; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie;
Toomey, Liam; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Young, Tracy D. ;
Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken
Subject: Center on Education Policy study- national reports (3 stories)

No Child Left Behind Seems To Be Working (USAT)

Math, Reading Scores Show Rise After Education Law (WT)
Student Test Scores Up Since 2002 (LAT)

No Child Left Behind Seems To Be Working (USAT)

USA Today, June 6, 2007
As Congress prepares to reauthorize the 5-year-old No Child Left Behind education reform law this year, a provocative new
study shows that students seem to be improving in both math and reading - two key goals.
But while kids have improved basic skills virtually across the board, only 13 states have enough data to compare rates of
improvement before and after the law was passed. Of those, nine can claim post-2002 gains greater than those before the law
took effect. Four show that the rate of improvement has slowed since 2002.
The study, released Tuesday by the Washington D.C.-based Center on Education Policy, also shows that achievement
gaps between white and minority students have closed somewhat since 2002.
Center president Jack Jennings cautions against attributing improvements solely to the law. ’You can’t separate out the
effects" of other state efforts, he says. Jennings, a former Democratic staffer for the House education committee, convened a
panel of five testing experts - including two who have been openly critical of the law - to devise a methodology and study data.
Critics f~om both parties say changes are needed. Conservatives say the law intrudes too heavily on local decision-making
abilities; liberals say its annual testing provisions waste precious class time and are unfair to students in low-income areas.
Previous studies have suggested that many schools are spending less time on subjects the law doesn’t test, such as
history and, until recently, science.

Math, Reading Scores Show Rise After Education Law (WT)

By Amy Fagan, The Washington Times
The Washinqton Times, June 6, 2007
A report by the Center on Education Policy released yesterday found that math and reading scores generally have
increased since the No Child Lett Behind Act was implemented -- giving fodder to the administration and lawmakers as they work
to renew the federal law this year.
The report was designed as a comprehensive analysis of data sets from all 50 states, looking at elementary, middle and
high school levels. It was issued while Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and allies on Capitol Hill were trying to renew the
No Child Lett Behind Act of 2002, President Bush’s signature domestic accomplishment.
Mrs. Spellings said the repo~ "confirms that No Child Left Behind has struck a chord of success with our nation’s schools
and students."
Neal McCluskey, education policy analyst at the Cato Institute, disputed Mrs. Spellings’ assertion. "Nothing even
approaching such confirmation can be found in the CEP or any other NCLB report," he said.
Mr. McCluskey said the Center on Education Policy report makes it clear that relatively few states had adequate test data
 Page 881
to obtain a clear picture.
"What we don’t know about NCLB’s effects is much greater than what we do know," he said.
The report found that 13 states submitted enough years of data to specifically compare test trends before and after the
federal education act was implemented. Of those states, nine showed greater average yearly test score gains after the federal
law took effect.
In general, the report said, the number of states showing achievement gains since 2002 "is far greateP than the number
showing declines.
The most improvement was found in elementary math, where 37 of the 41 states with such data showed moderate to large
proficiency gains.
The report noted that it’s "very difficult if not impossible" to credit gains directly to No Child Left Behind, because states,
schools and districts simultaneously enacted other policies to boost achievement. It also found that data sometimes were
inadequate.
The report showed a narrowing of achievement gaps among student subgroups. Fourteen of the 38 states with the
necessary data had narrowed the reading gap between white and black subgroups across all three analyzed grade spans. Still,
the report noted that "sizable" gaps often remained.
Despite efforts by the White House and some lawmakers, education analysts and advocates are skeptical about renewal of
the federal education law.
Congressional Democrats who will play key roles in the process were encouraged by the report yesterday but said much
work remains.
’q-his study offers initial evidence that the hard work of teachers, principals and school administrators across the country is
beginning to pay off," said Rep. George Miller, California Democrat and chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.
"Even with this progress, we still have a long way to go to close the academic achievement gap."
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who leads the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
Committee, said the progress.is encouraging but "we must also do better to promote rigor and relevance in America’s
classrooms."

Student Test Scores Up Since 2002 (LAT)

By Howard Blume, Times Staff Writer
The Los Anqeles Times, June 6, 2007
But the improvements aren’t necessarily due to the No Child Lef~ Behind Act, researchers say.
Student achievement nationwide has increased since the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, but that
federal law is not necessarily the reason, according to researchers who looked at results from 50 states.
These gains fall well short of the law’s goal of getting all students performing at grade level or better by 2014, said the
report, released Tuesday by the Center on Education Policy, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit.
The picture in California is fairly typical: Students’ test scores have improved, but they have far to go, especially to close the
gap that separates white and Asian students from their low-income, Latino or black peers.
The 18-month, nearly $1 -million study attempted to look at data consistently, but information was unevenly available. In
only 13 states - not including California - were researchers able to compare academic gains before and after the law. In nine of
these 13 states, gains were faster atter No Child Left Behind. And "there is more evidence of achievement gaps between groups
of students narrowing since 2002 than of gaps widening. Still, the magnitude of the gaps is often substantial," the researchers
wrote.
The number of fourth-graders who tested "proficient" or better, for example, rose from 39% to 49% in California from 2004
to 2006. But those improved 2006 numbers break down to 73% of Asians, 69% of whites, 37% of blacks, 35% of Latinos and
35% of low-income students. All the numbers were better than 2004, but the achievement gap barely budged.
The researchers claim independence from partisans battling over No Child Left Behind, which is up for reauthorization by
Congress this year. Their only expressed opinion is regarding the need for better, more consistent and more transparent data.
Researchers declined to credit or criticize No Child Lef~ Behind, noting that states and school districts also have been
carrying out their own reforms.
But a statement from federal Education Secretary Margaret Spellings praised the news. "Under President Bush’s
leadership.., in five short years, w’ve seen encouraging results, especially in our elementary schools. Students are making
remarkable gains in reading and math, and the achievement gap that once seemed intractable is now narrowing in many of our.
nation’s schools." She added: "Now is the time to reauthorize" the law.
In an earlier interview, Spellings said the law had pushed many states to take meaningful measurement of student learning
 Page 882
and compelled schools to address the achievement gap.
Even so, at this pace, thousands of schools will fall well short of the law’s 2014 full proficiency target.
Critics say the law is undefended, overly punitive and unrealistic in its goals.
Some changes are in order, said California Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell. "1 strongly agree with the goals of No
Child Lef~ Behind," he said, but the federal rules give "no credit for even significant gains in achievement by students who have
not yet reached the high bar of proficiency.
"Also, because state standards vary widely, states such as California that expect more of their students are more likely to
fall short of the federal accountability goal, while states that held lower expectations may appear to be doing better. That is both
misleading and unfair."

howard.blume@latimes.com
 Page 883

Nonresponsi L__
From: Reich, Heidi
Sent: June 06, 2007 8:41 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Bryant, Jessica; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey;
Dorfman, C~nthia; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie;
Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John; Higgins, Kristan; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers,
Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Maguire, Tory; McGrath, John; McLane,
Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Mesecar, Doug; Moran, Robert; Morffi, Jessica; Neale,
Rebecca; O’Daniel, Meagan; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey;
Scheessele, Marc; Private - Spellings, Margaret; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie;
Toomey, Liam; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Young, Tracy D. ;
Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken
Subject: Kansas City Regional Higher Ed Summit Stories (2)

Spellings Outlines Higher Education Proposals (AP)

By Caryn Grant
The AP, June 6, 2007
KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- College applicants seeking federal financial aid otten search through a dizzying array of Web sites,
toll-free phone numbers and government programs - a system labeled by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on Tuesday as
"a mess."
Spellings, in Kansas City for a summit on higher education, highlighted her proposals to improve college access,
affordability and accountability in the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. The Act has been eligible for renewal since
2003 and is set to be addressed by Congress later this month.
’q-co many Americans are being left behind at a time when it has never been more important to have post-secondary
education," Spellings said. "Our competitive economy is making new and greater demands every day."
Spellings said that by 2012 there will be an estimated 3 million more jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree and there won’t be
enough graduates to fill the positions.
The issues begin on the elementary and secondary education levels, Spellings said, where "too many of our high schools
are failing to provide students adequate preparation for college or for the workplace."
Through the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, school districts are working to better align high school
coursework with the expectations of college and the work force after that, she said.
Spellings also called on Congress to enact President Bush’s call for the largest Pell Grant increase in 30 years. The
increase would raise the annual grant to $4,600 next year and $5,400 over the next ~ve years from the current $4,050, she said.
Spellings is proposing $25 million to expand a program aimed at helping states and institutions collect and analyze college
student data. That information would be made available to parents and students so they can make better decisions about where
to attend school.
Undersecretary Sara Martinez Tucker said pilot programs are in progress in Kentucky, Minnesota and Florida. The states
are attempting to create consumer-friendly Web databases "to test what information consumers - particularly low-income and
nontraditional students - what information they need to see," she said.

Shake-up I.n Higher Education Pushed (KCStar)

By MARA ROSE WILLIAMS
The Kansas City Star, June 6, 2007
Cabinet member, in visit to KC, says she wants college to be more accessible, affordable.
The nation’s top education official on Tuesday called for changes in the federal Higher Education Act to help more people
attend college.
In an appearance in Kansas City, U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings outlined her plan for larger federal grants to
help pay for college, simplified federal financial assistance forms, increased enrollment in high school advanced-placement
courses and measuring what college students learn.
She said the Education Department also would push Congress for a $25 million pilot program to create a database to help
all types of college students design their postsecondary plans. The department also will create a blueprint for removing barriers
to transferring college credits to other institutions.
 Page 884
The current Higher Education Act of 1998, Spellings said, is focused mainly on money - and howto spend it.
’tAt a minimum, the new bill should be more comprehensive, addressing access and accountability, as well as affordability,"
she said.
Spellings visited Kansas City to talk with education, civic and business leaders, and politicians from 13 states at a regional
summit held to address ways to strengthen higher education.
The Kansas City meeting was the first of lye to be held around the country. Others will be in Boston, Atlanta, Phoenix and
Seattle.
The summit series is a continuation of what Spellings sfarted in 2005 when she formed the bipartisan Commission on the
Future of Higher Education and opened a national dialogue on making college more affordable and more accessible to more
Americans.
Spellings’ commission found several problems that the nation should address to improve higher education. Among them:
¯ Aligning high schools’ curriculums with what colleges expect students to know.
¯Providing underserved populations, such as minorities and low-income students, with easier access to college.
,Making college more affordable.
The ultimate goal of this effort, Spellings said, is to create a better-educated work force and improve the country’s
competitive position in the global marketplace.
’tA lot of teaching of the public needs to go on about what is at stake, because only about a third of Americans have a
college education and about two-thirds ought to," Spellings said, to address the needs of the 21 st-century economy.
Reginald Robinson, president of the Kansas Board of Regents, said Spellings’ message was "strong and positive. She
recognizes how vital access to some postsecondary education is if we are going to remain competitive and maintain the quality
of life we have in this country."
One point of tension in her message, he said, is talk of moving toward holding colleges and universities accountable for
what students learn.
College and university officials, Robinson said, "are not afraid of accountability. They welcome measuring student learning
outcomes. They are nervous that it could be done in a wrong way."
In her proposal, announced at the H&R Block world headquarters downtown, Spellings said she wanted Congress to enact
President Bush’s request to raise the maximum Pell grant allowed from $4,050 to $4,600 next year and to $5,400 over the next
five years. Pell grants help low-income students pay college costs.
And she proposes that people be able to apply for such grants anytime during the year to accommodate adults going to
school and juggling other life responsibilities.
Spellings criticized the cumbersome federal financial aid application process, calling it "redundant, confusing, Byzantine
and broken.., a maze of 60 Web sites, dozens of toll-free numbers and 17 different programs."
To deal with obstacles that make transferring college credits difficult, Spellings proposes bringing together state education
officials with university leaders to establish an easier credit transfer process.
"Every year, millions of students who attempt to transfer are forced to spend more money and time repeating coursework,"
Spellings said, wasting billions of dollars. "The most costly education is one not begun.., or the one you have to pay for twice."
To contact Mar~ Rose Williams, call 816-234-4419 or send e-mail to mdwilliams@kcstar.com
 Page 885

Nonresponsi ¯

: June 06, 2007 6:32 AM

To: Warder, Larry; scott m. stanzel@who.eop.gov; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Ruberg,
Casey; Colby, Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Dodman, Cynthia; Dunckel, Denise;
Eve-s, Bill; Gribble, Emily; Kuzmich, Holly; La Force, Hudson; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin,
Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private - Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mesecar, Doug; Moran,
Robert; Neale, Rebecca; Reich, Heidi; rob Saliterman; Yudof, Samara; Scheessele, Marc;
Halaska, Terrell; Toner, Jana; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Young, Tracy; Ditto, Trey; Tucker, Sara
Martinez; Zeff, Ken
Subject: New Study Finds Gains Since No Child Lef~ Behind (NYT)

June 6, 2007
New Study Finds Gains Since No Child Left Behind

By SAM DILLON
Student achievement has increased and test score gaps between white students and black and
Hispanic students l~ve narrowed in many states since President Bush signed the No Child
Left Behind law in 2002, according to a new survey of state scores in reading and math.

But the study, released yesterday by the Center on Education Policy, an independent
Washington group that closely monitors the la~, cautioned that "it is difficult if not
impossible to determine the extent to which these trends in test results have occurred
because of N.C.L.B."

"In most states with three or more years of comparable test data, student achievement in
reading and math has gone up since 2002," the study found, even as it warned repeatedly
against concluding that the federal law alone produced the results.

In the decade before the law was passed, many states had adopted policies aimed at raising
achievement, like broadening access to early childhood programs, that could also be
responsible for gains.

The study also acknowledged that the increases in achievement recorded by many state tests
had not been matched by results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress,
nationwide reading and math tests administered by the federal Department of Education.

Those results bmve been mixed. For example, on the national tests given in 2005, fourth-
grade math scores showed an important increase over the previous test administration in
2003, and eighth-grade ~ath scores rose slightly. But fourth-grade reading scores were the
same on the nationwide test in 2005 as in 2002, and eighth-grade reading scores declined.

Despite its caveats, the new report is likely to be closely studied as Congress debates
whether to reauthorize the law this year, partly because the report may be the most
comprehensive study of state test scores in many years. The law is widely considered
President Bush’s most important domestic policy achievement.
"This study confirms that No Child Left Bel~nd has struck a chord of success with our
nation’s schools and students," Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said yesterday.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, who worked closely with the
administration on the law, said the report "proves tl~at the goals at the heart of the No
Child Left Behind Act -- a dedication to accountability and standards, a colmmitment to
closing the achievement gap and a pledge to improve public schools ~ are still the right
ones for moving America forward."

Merely collecting the test data from 50 states proved to be a complex and frustrating task
because n~ny states’ education departments are overworked and their test archives are
flawed by missing or inconsistent data, the report said. "The house of data on which
N.C.L.B. is built is at times a rickety structure," it said.

Those and other limitations notwithstanding, Jack Jennings, the center’s president, said
 Page 886
state test scores "remain a more accurate barometer of what kids know" than the r~tional
assessment, often referred to as the NAEP (pronounced nape).

"The NAEP shouldn’t be taken as the gold standard,"

Mr. Jer~nings said.

Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California at Berkeley who has
compared state and federal achievement scores, said the report "displays methodological
weaknesses which lead to exaggerated inferences" about student progress.

In analyzing state scores, the researchers who carried out the study did not consider all
recent data from all states because, the report said, new tests and other factors in some
states made it impossible to compare scores from one year with others. But Professor
Fuller said the researchers appeared to have eliminated testing periods in some states
that showed predominantly falling scores after 2002.

"It’s like calculating the annual rate of economic growth over the past century after
excluding the Great Depression years," Professor Fuller said. "It upwardly biases their
estimate of annual growth in test scores."

Robert L. Linn, an education professor emeritus at the University of Colorado at Boulder

and a frequent critic of the law, served on a panel of five prominent testing and
educational policy experts who advised the center on the study.

"I was a little surprised that things were generally as positive as they were, so it may
be that I would say that N.C.L.B. is contributing more positively than I had given it
credit for," Professor Linn said. But he urged readers to pay attention to the report’s
mmny caveats.

"The reason for all the caveats is that it is impossible to reach the conclusion that if
scores go up, it is because of N.C.L.B.," he said. "There are so many other factors that
could lead to rising scores, including state efforts to raise achievement, and also, some
of these gains may be artificial. So my worry is that people who come at it and don’t read
the caveats will come away with an exaggerated impression."

Laura S. H~lilton, a senior behavioral scientist for the Rand Corporation who also served
on the panel of experts, said, "Most people want to know if N.C.L.B.
as a policy has resulted in improved student achievement," but added, "It’s a question
that isn’t answerable." She explained, "To test whether some policy is effective, you’d
want to compare what happened under that policy to what would have happened if the policy
hadn’t been enacted, and we can’t do that with N.C.L.B. because all public schools in the
nation were subject to its provisions."

Yahoo! oneSearch: Finally, mobile search that gives answers, not web links.
http://mobile.yahoo.com/mobileweb/onesearch?refer=lONXIC
 Page 887

June 06, 2007 6:05 AM

To: Warder, Larry; scott m. stanzel@who.eop.gov; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Ruberg,
Casey; Colby, Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Dorfman, Cynthia; Dunckel, Denise;
Evers, Bill; Gribble, Emily; Kuzmich, Holly; La Force, Hudson; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin,
Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private - Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mesecar, Doug; Moran,
Robert; Neale, Rebecca; Reich, Heidi; rob Saliterman; Yudof, Samara; Scheessele, Marc;
Halaska, Terrell; Toner, Jana; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Young, Tracy; Ditto, Trey; Tucker, Sara
Martinez; Zeff, Ken
Su~t: Reading, math scores up since NCLB, report says (AP)

Reading, math scores up since NCLB, report says

June 6, 2007
By Nancy Zuckerbrod Associated Press

WASH~GTON -- Students are doing better on state reading and math tests since the No Child
Left Behind Act was enacted five years ago, according to a report Tuesday.

Students made the most progress on elementary-school math tests, according to the report
by the Center on Education Policy, a natiorml nonprofit policy group.

The report focused on states where trend data are available. Some states have changed
tests in recent years, making it impossible to compare year-to-year results.
Moderate to large gains were found in 37 of the 41 states with trend data on the
percentage of kids hitting the proficient mark on elementary-school math tests. None of
the states showed comparable declines.

A goal of the No Child Left Behind law is for all kids to be proficient in reading and
math, or working on grade level, by 2014.

Another goal is to narrow achievement gaps between children from low-income families and
wealthier ones and between minorities and white students. The new report found achievement
gaps have narrowed since the law was passed.

Specifically, the study foi~d in 14 of 38 states with relevant trend data, gaps narrowed
on the reading tests between black and white students at the elementary and secondary
levels. No state reported a comparable widening of the gap.

In math, a dozen states showed a narrowing of the racial achievement gap at the elementary
and secondary grade levels. Only Washington state showed a widening of that gap.

Results were generally similar for Hispanic and low-income groups, according to the
report.

Just 13 states had enough data to examine ~hether the pace at which students improved has
quickened since No Child Left Behind was enacted.

In nine of those states students improved at a greater rate after 2002 than before:
Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington
and Wyoming.

In the other four states -- Delaware; Massachusetts, Oregon and Virginia -- gains were
greater before 2002 than afterward. One possible explanation is that more students, such
as those with disabilities or immigrants, were included in NCLB-era tests but not in the
earlier ones, according to the researchers.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said the study shows No Child Left Behind is
working, but the report itself doesn’t assign credit to the law for the improvements made.
It states that other state and local initiatives have taken place during the s~ne period
 Page 888
that might deserve some of the credit.

"You can’t tease out the effects of any one of the reform efforts, because they all
overlap on one another," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy.

Ross Wiener, vice president for program and policy at Education Trust, a group that
advocates for poor and minority children, said he saw good news in the study.
"These trends are encouraging. There’s something to celebrate that’s going on in our
schools," he said.
The rigor of tests varies from state to state, according to Bruce Fuller, a professor of
education and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley.

He said states generally set the proficiency bar low, since schools face tough
consequences R such as having to fire teachers or administrators -- if their students do
poorly on the tests.

But Jennings said California, Massachusetts and Florida are examples of states with high
standmrds.

Jern%ings and Fuller agreed some of the gain~ may reflect what teachers are focusing on in
their classrooms.
"The teachers teach to the test, and that’s a rational response by classroom teachers
under pressure to raise scores," Fuller said.

On the Net:
Center on Education Policy: http: /wm~.cep-dc.org/

Park yourself in front of a world of choices in alternative vehicles. Visit the Yahoo!
Auto Green Center.
http://autos.yahoo.com/green_center/
 Page 889

lNonresponsi
From: Reich, Heidi
Sent: June 05, 2007 8:31 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Bryant, Jessica; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey;
Dorfman, Cynthia; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Maguire, Tory; McGrath, John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar,
Doug; Moran, Robert; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pltts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Private - Spellings, Margaret; Tada,
Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia;
Young, Tracy; Young, Tracy D. ; Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken
Subject: San Antonio TIF grant stories (2)

Charter School District Wins $684,000 (SAENewsTX)

Education Department Awards $3.2 Million Grant To School Of Excellence (SABJrnl TX)

Charter School District Wins $684,000 (SAENewsTX)

By Michelle M. Martinez
San Antonio Express-News, June 5, 2007
San Antonio’s largest charter school district has won a $684,000 federal grant to launch a pay system that rewards
teachers based on their students’ academic performance.
The oversized check, presented Monday to the School of Excellence in Education by a U.S. Department of Education
official and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, came with a promise of more money - a total of $3.2 million over five years - if
Congress continues to fund the grant program, called the Teacher Incentive Fund.
The fund, separate from similar programs operated by the state, is designed to boost academic performance among the
nation’s poorest and minority students by giving schools with high numbers of those students the means to attract qualified,
experienced teachers.
In addition to giving educators bonuses based on student performance, the School of Excellence in Education charter
district will use the money to boost salaries for math and science teachers with the hope of luring qualified educators to those
hard-to-fill positions.
"We knowthat nationwide our most experienced and qualified teachers are far more likely to be found in affluent schools
and affluent communities, but (in) high-poverty middle and high schools, only half of math teachers majored or minored in the
subjects they’re teaching," said David Dunn, chief of staff to U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.
Dunn and Cornyn presented Superintendent Ricky Hooker with an oversized check at Rick Hawkins High School, one of
six campuses in the charter district.
The district was one of two Texas institutions and 18 nationwide to receive a piece of the $38 million the federal
government awarded in a second round of Teacher Incentive Fund money. In all, Congress appropriated $99 million in incentive
~.~nding. Last week, the University of Texas System was awarded a $1.4 million grant.
Charter schools are taxpayer-funded schools open to all students. The state gives charters more leeway than traditional
public schools with the hope that more innovation, coupled with the competition charters create, will improve education.
They are funded by the state based on student attendance and do not receive additional money to pay for facilities.
Hooker said everyone, from the custodian to administrators, will have a shot at extra cash next year, depending on how
well students do on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.
Everyone at the school, he said, plays a role in student success. But teachers will also be able to earn additional money
based on how far along they bring struggling students and whether they accomplish professional goals.
"We have people on our statf that work from their heart, and sometimes it breaks my heart not to,be able to compensate
them correctly," Hooker said.
Hooker is the public face of~he charter school system, which enrolled about 2,400 students last year.
His appearance on morning television ads promoting the school seems to be working- a seventh campus is scheduled to
 Page 890

open in the fall, and Hooker said he recently received permission from the state to open an additional three schools by 2009.
The charter district’s annual budget is about $I 7 million.
The idea of paying some educators based on how well they do in the classroom, as opposed to their years of experience,
isn’t new. But it’s a controversial idea that has been gaining momentum in recent years in light of the increased educational
standards imposed by the federal No Child Le~ Behind Act of 2002.
Earlier this year, four San Antonio schools rejected incentive funding under a similar state program for fear it would divide
the campus and n.iin teamwork.
But Valade Walker, principal at Burch Elementary School in the School of Excellence in Education chaffer district, said
she’s happy about the federal funding.
"It’s just awesome to be able to add just a little something," she said. "They’re going to spend it all back in the classroom anyway,
most of them. But to be able to do that is awesome."

Education Department Awards $3.2 Million Grant To School Of Excellence (SABJrnl TX)
San Antonio Business Journal, June 5, 2007
The School of Excellence in Education in San Antonio will benefit from a five-year, $3.2 million grant from the U.S.
Depaffment of Education to provide financial incentives for principals and teachers who improve student achievement in high-
poverty schools.
The Education Department’s Chief of Staff David Dunn joined U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, in making the award to the
char~er school.
’This funding is used to encourage school districts and states to develop and implement innovative performance-based
compensation systems that reward teachers and principals for raising student achievement and for taking positions in high-need
schools. The initiative helps our children and it works," Comyn says.
The School of Excellence in Education, which meets at several campuses throughout the city, will use the grant to recruit
qualified teachers to six schools in high-poverty areas. This grant will support 2,300 students in San Antonio.
The grant will focus on recruiting teachers for hard-to-staff subjects like math, science and special education.
The School of Excellence in Education will receive $684,373 of the grant for the initial year of the program. Dunn presented
the award on behalf of U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.
"If we expect results for every child, as we do with No Child Le~ Behind, then we must support teachers who get the job
done in America’s toughest classrooms," Spellings says.
’These grants will help encourage our most effective teachers to work in challenging schools where they can make a real
difference in the lives of young people," she says.
The grant is part of President Bush’s Teacher Incentive Fund program -- which provides compensation for teachers and
principals where at least 30 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-priced lunch.
 Page 891

Nonresponsiv
From: Reich, Heidi
Sent: June 05, 2007 8:28 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Bryant, Jessica; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey;
Dorfman, Cynthia; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Maguire, Tory; McGrath, John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar,
Doug; Moran, Robert; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pttts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Private - Spellings, Margaret; Tada,
Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia;
Young, Tracy; Young, Tracy D. ; Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken
Subject: Spellings In Push To Boost College Access (FT)

Spellings In Push To Boost College Access (FT)

By Rebecca Knight
Financial Times., June 5, 2007
Margaret Spellings, the US secretary of education, will today recommend reforms to increase the access to, and
affordability of, America’s colleges and universities, as Congress prepares to renew the Higher Education Act later this month.
"Higher education has gone from a ’nice to have’ to a ’must have’ [credential] in this global economy," said Ms Spellings, in
an interview with the Financial Times. "You hear that American higher education is the finest in the world today, but I wonder will
it be the finest in the future? If we keep doing the same things were always done, the answer is: no."
Ms Spellings has come under fire recently from the NewYork State attorney-general and members of Congress over
conflicts of interest in the student loan industry. Some colleges and college officials have allegedly taken kickbacks and giEs from
lenders in return for steering borrowers their way.
On Friday, the Department of Education- which has been accused of careless oversight of the programmes - issued a set
of proposed changes that would create stringent regulations for the use of preferred-lender lists and spell out what constitutes a
"prohibited inducement" under federal law.
’qhe system is broken from top to bottom," said Ms Spellings. "It’s complex, it’s Byzantine and it’s un-user friendly. It makes
the home-buying process look easy. It’s all the things that go against making college affordable."
Over the next two weeks, Ms Spellings will attend six regional higher education summits around the US, laying out her
agenda. "We’re losing ground every year on affordability and completion," she said.
"We have to make sure kids - particularly poor and minority students - are getting o~ of high school ready to be successful
in higher education."
One of Ms Spellings’ proposals is to increase the accountability of primary and secondary education by putting more
emphasis on maths and science competencies.
She will also call for greater transparency on completion rates in high schools, as well as "information about the productivity
of our higher education institutions".
"You can find out a heck of a lot about the football record at Notre Dame, but not very much with respect to its academic
output," she said.
"We need more information about the value-added nature of higher education, and we need to know howwell we are
serving our customers."
Ms Spellings said she was committed to making higher education more affordable. The Department of Education recently
launched a new forecaster tool to give high school juniors early notification of their potential financial aid eligibility for college.
 Page 892

Nonresponsi
From: Reich, Heidi
Sent: June 05, 2007 8:28 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerd; Bryant, Jessica; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey;
Dorfrnan, Cynthia; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Maguire, Tory;, McGrath, John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar,
Doug; Moran, Robert; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Private - Spellings, Margaret; Tada,
Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tucker, Sara Martinez; VVilliams, Cynthia;
Young, Tracy; Young, Tracy D. ; Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken
Subject: Education Official Visits KC (KCStar)

Education Official Visits KC (KCStar)

By MAR,& ROSE WILLIAMS
The Kansas City Star, June 5, 2007
Sara Martinez Tucker is in town to discuss ways that more students can attend college.
Getting more and better-educated students through college and into the work force just might take a village.
U.S. Undersecretary of Education Sara Martinez Tucker is visiting Kansas City this week and talking to students,
educators, and civic and business leaders about what Missouri and Kansas are doing to prepare more high school graduates for
college, keep tuition costs down, and provide scholarships and grants for poor students.
They also will talk about what more can be done and the best ways to do it.
Tucker made several stops on Monday, at the University Academy Charter School in Kansas City, the University of
Missouri-Kansas City and The Kansas City Star, where she talked with the newspaper’s editorial board.
"So much of what has to happen has to happen outside of the federal government," she told the editorial board.
The federal government’s role, she said, might be to shine a light on the problem and let state and local institutions come
up with solutions.
’There can’t be a prescriptive answer from the federal government," Tucker said. ’There is a role for each of us and a
shared responsibility.., to commit to work together.., to ensure that higher education remains the way to a better life for more
Americans."
Tucker’s visit is part of a multistate tour during which she and her staff at the U.S. Department of Education intend to talk
up the importance of postsecondary education in providing a more educated work force and improving the country’s competitive
position in the global marketplace.
The tour continues what Education Secretary Margaret Spellings started in 2005 when she formed the bipartisan
Commission on the Future of Higher Education and opened a national dialogue on the issue.
Spellings’ report identified several problems that need fixing to improve higher education: aligning high schools’ curricula
with what colleges expect students to know, providing underserved populations such as minorities and poor students with better
access to college, and making college affordable for the poor.
Tucker will lead a regional summit in Kansas City today at which politicians, business and civic leaders, philanthropists,
students, educators and others from 13 states will begin coming up with ways this region might address problems.
Spellings is expected to speak to the gathering during the summit, which is not open to the public.
On Monday afternoon at UMKC, education officials and civic leaders met with Tucker and talked about programs on both
sides of the state line. The programs are designed to do a better job preparing children for kindergarten, encourage more
students to study math and science in high school, train teachers to work in urban schools, increase financial assistance for poor
students, and convince more of the business community to get involved in supporting higher education.
’This is a huge work force issue," said Guy Bailey, UMKC’s chancellor, adding that it’s everyone’s problem.
To reach Ma~ Rose Williams, call 816-234-4419 or send e-mail to mdwilliams@kcstar, com.
 Page 893

WEEKEND NEWS SUMMARY

June3,2007

1. Clarence Page: The president’s spin doctor for schools (DMN)

2. Partnering might help rural schools (CNO)
3. Why are so many students adng some SOL tests? (VP)
4. Does NCLB Create Unfair Haying Ndd?
5. Let children be children; Is your 5-yor-old stressed out because so much is
ex pected?

1. Clarence Page: The president’s spin doctor for schools

Spellings’ role as a communicator often more important than her credentials as an
educator
Dallas Morning Nexvs
June 2, 2007

It was the day before she would appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, whose host
is a lmown liberal critic of the Bush administration. But in an interview in her office,
Secretary of Education Margaret Spelling~ put a happy face on it.

"This completes my pop culture trifecta," she said.

Indeed. she recently attended a taping of American Ido! and last fall made history as the
first sitting Cabinet secretary to appear on Jeopardy. She also became the first education
secretary to lose on Jeopardy. She lost to actor Ivlichael McKear~ best known as Lenny
on the old Laverne and Shirley television show. The loss provided ample fodder for her
detractors.

Ms. Spell~gs says she agreed to do The Daily Show several months ago at the urging of
her two daughters. It just happened to come at an awkward time for her department.
Congress is investigating conflict-of-interest complaints involving the federal student
loan program and the Bush administration’s Reading First program.
You lmow those loans that students increasingly need in order to pay for college? When
choosing a lender, many students rely on the "preferred" status list offered by their
college or tmiversity. Now federal and state regulators say some of the lenders in the $85
billion industry earned their preferred status thanks to kickbacks that they offered to the
schools.

Reading First, a key $1 billion-a-year reading program in President Bush’s 2002 No Child
Left Behind education reform, is alleged to have given preferential treatment to materials
favored by top advisers who also had their own reading textbooks or tests to sell. Much
of this happened before Ms. Spellings took over in early 2005, but congressional critics
are accusing her of failing to take action to investigate and clear up the alleged conflicts.
 Page 894

Such a difference a Democratic-controlled Congress makes. Were it not for the Bush
administration’s bigger headline-making headaches over the firing of U.S. attorneys, Ms.
Spellings’ depamnent might well be getting alot more attention these days.

The irony of the Reading First controversy is that, regardless of the allegations, reading
scores for students in the program have dramatically improved. The percentage of first-
graders ~vho met or exceeded proficiency standards on reading fluency grew from 43
percent to 57 percent in a study of 2004 to 2006, and thJ_rd-graders who improved grew
from 35 percent to 43 percent.

Ms. Spellings’ role as a communicator - getting the information out about successes -
actually is more important in many ways than her credentials as an educator. She
acknowledged in a congressional hearing that she lacks an education degree. She has a
bachelors degree in political science andjottmalism from the University of Houston, and
her only formal classroom experience was as an uncertified substitute teacher in Texas.

But, as she showed in our interview and on The Daily Show, she speaks up forcefully for
a large group that too o/ten feels shortchanged in school debates: the parents.

I laid on her my biggest complaint about standardized tests: Doesn’t every child learn
differently?

"Yes, but I think sometimes that’s used as an excuse for masking underachievement."

Then she got personal: "I’ll tell you what, Clarence .... I’ve yet to meet a parent who didn’t
want their kid to be reading at anything less than grade level - this year! Not in 2014 [the
goal year set by the administration for closing that academic achievement gaps]. This
year! And that’s not an unreasonable expectation for parents to have of their schools and
their kids."

Many parents have learned the hard way ~vhat President Bush means when he speaks of
"the soft bigotry of low expectations," especially for minority students. Many schools and
teachers perform magnificently, but too often the system rewards mediocre teachers and,
in effect, punishes those who are willing to put extra effort into their job. The Bush
administration’s pay incentives for high-performing teachers and principals move in the
right direction.

I’m still skeptical of emphasizing tests too much. But we all need to set goals in life, and
we need good yardsticks for progress. That’s as good a lesson as any for Margaret
Spellings to teach. No joke.

Clarence Page is a Chicago Tribune columnist. His e-mail address is cpage@

tribune.com.

2. Partnering might help rural schools

 Page 895

Charlotte News & Observer

By- Marti Maguire
June 2, 2007

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings xdsited Cary Academy on Friday as part
of anational tour leading up to the expected reauthorization of the federal No Child Left
Behind Act later this year. Here are excerpts of her interview with staff writer Marti
Maguire. To hear more, go online to www.newsobserver.com.
Q: What made you choose to come here, aprivate school?

A: [Cary Academy] is a true laboratory of innovation, particularly in the use of

technology. They feel part of their missionis to help develop practices that can be shared
and used not only here but in the public sector as wel! .... These divisions between private
and public schools are really blurring.

Q: You spoke today with school officials about the importance of math, science,
technology and engineering education. But North Carolina schools are facing a severe
shortage of qualified math and science teachers, particularly in more rural areas. What
can be done about that?

A: We can use technology, of course, to expand and broaden the flo~v of expertise so that
a teacher here at Cary Academy might be partnering with a rural school district and,
through technology, getting additional teaching help more broadly expanded. The other
thing we can dois to start to use resources in our commtmities beyond just the traditional
teaching core. You have many fine universities in this state. Why don’t we find ways for
those folks to come into our public schools?

Q: North Carolina students have. shown essentially no improvement on state tests since
the first year No Child Left Behind act went into effect. How can NCLB deliver on its
promise of closing the achievement gap?

A: One of the things that’s been so important about NCLB is that ~ve have brought real
data to bear about the status of our schools. Who’s being left behind? Who isn’t? Where
are the schools that are challenging what the president calls the "soft bigotry of low
expectations"? Going back to the ostrich approach of burying our heads in the sand,
putting the money out and hoping for the best is the wrong direction Obviously, we need
to pickup the pace. We need to confront those facts. But when I look at the North
Carolina data. in some very key ways, we are really making progress. We’re making
progress in the white-black achievement gap in reading in grades three and four and six
and seven. North Carolina is one of the leaders on Advanced Placement, really double the
national average on the opportunity that kids have to take rigorous coursework.

Q: I saw you on "Jeopardy!" when you lost to Michael McKean, the actor who played
Lenny on ’%averne and Shirley."
A: That was his third time on the showy, not to be bitter. And it’s all about the buzzer.
 Page 896

3. Why are so many students acing some SOL tests?

The Vir~ nian-Hlot
June 3, 2007
By Amy Jetter

Last spring, 50 third-graders took the history Standards of Learniug exam at Norfolk’s
Dreamkeepers Academy at J.J. Roberts Elementary School.

More than half of them received a 600, the highest score possible.

Miles away in Chesapeake, the same thing happened at Southeastern Elementary School:
56 percent of the third-graders aced the test. And across the state, 1 in 5 students did.

Perfect scores were far less common in other subjects, such as math and English. In
science, fe~ver than 6 percent of students taking the tests in the state earned the highest
score.

Educators said students’ success in history showed how well Virginia’s standards are
being taught and learned. Others wondered whether the tests are too easy.
"The obvious question," said Steve Dunbar, an education professor at the University of
Iowa, "is, Are kids in tNrd grade in Virginia really better in social studies than anything
else?"

When the Standards of Learning exams were designed in the late 1990s, little thought
was given to h~v many students should be acing them.

In the traditional bell curve - what statisticians call a "normal distribution" of scores -
most students would be inthe middle of the range. About 2.5 percent would receive the
highest mark.

But Virginia’s standardized tests are not graded on a curve. They’re supposed to gauge
how well students know the Standards of Learning, and the hope is that as many students
as possible are proficient.

"The more kids who are getting the perfect score, the better," said Doris Redtield, an
education consultant who headed the Virginia Depamnent of Education’s assessment and
reporting division in the late 1990s.

Before the SOLs are given, a scale is set that links each possible number of correct
answers to a score. The scale changes slightly each year when test questions change.

A 600 means the student missed either zero, one or two questions, depending on the test.
On the elementary science tests last year, students needed to be perfect. On the history
tests, they could miss one or two.
 Page 897

While 600s sound impressive, principals, administrators and state officials are most
concerued with pass rates - the percentage of students scoring 400 or above. Pass rates
are important in determining ~vhether a school is accredited by the state and whether it
meets academic goals under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

The Virginia Department of Education doesn’t routinely report the actual scores received
on the SOL tests. At the request of The Virginian-Pilot, officials released the number of
600s on all SOL tests in 2005-06 and the scores of all tests taken by third- and fifth-
graders in South Hampton Roads.

Usually when a series of tests is developed, the scoring patterns tend to be the same from
subject to subject, said the University of Iowa’s Dunbar.
The number of Virginia students who passed history and science was similar, with the
rates each at about 90 percent for third-graders and at about 85 percent for filth-graders.
But the difference in the number of perfect scores was much more pronounced. So was
the variation in students scoring "pass/advanced" - a 500 or above. In third grade, 57
percent earned that score on history coml:~red with 40 percent for science; in filth grade,
it was 45 percent for history and 23 percent for science.

There are two disadvantages when lots of students earn the highest score on a test.
Teachers can’t determine the finer details of what students haven’t learned, and there’s no
room left to improve.

"If you’re getting kids who are close to the ceiling or hitting the ceiling, they have
nowhere to go," said Brace Bracken, an education professor at The College of William
and Mary.

Students haven’t always sailed through the SOL history exams.

In the early years, scores were so low in several grade levels that in 2001 the Virginia
Board of Education took the unusual step of lowering the number of questions that
students neededto answer correctly to pass some of the tests. Ttmt included the filth-
grade exam.

"The one thing we’ve always heard is the history tests are too hard," said Charles Pyle, a
spokesman for the VirginiaDepa~tment of Education.

The tests were l~sed on standards from 1995, which required elementary students to
know the basics of economics, geography, civics and history. Before, they had started out
learning about family and community, then eased into state, national and world history.
 Page 898

Teachers felt that the SOL tests covered too much ground in one year and that the
standards were unclear.
When the state’s history and social science standards came up for a seven-year review in
2001, committees consisting mostly of teachers recommended a rewire of the
curriculum. Among their suggestions: pare back the information covered.

By 2003-04, the entire test had been changed to meet those new standards.
Historically, scores have dropped in the first year or so of new or revised tests.

But that year, the percentage of perfect scores in third-grade Iffstoryjumped to 16 percent
from 2.6 percent. For fifth-graders, the number increased to 9 percent from 2.4 percent.
State officials say that doesn’t mean the tests are too easy.

"There were some legitimate concerns that had to be addressed about the teachability of
the standards," Pyle said. "Our history and social studies teachers are finding that the
2001 standards are teachable. They’re rigorous, but they’re teachable."

The new tests feature more dear-cut questions and more illustrations, some teachers said.
The ans~ver options for the multiple-choice tests often include at least one that seems
implausible.

Patty Costis, a teacher at Dreamkeepers, approved of the changes.

"The tests were meant to be broad strokes of the genera! knowledge instead ofjust these
individual details," Costis said. "Not, ~Do you remember a line, minute detail of first
grade, second quarter?.’ "
Educators said the large number of high scores last year could be due to the age of the
test.

"Once the test has been out for a while, you have years and years to perfect what you do -
with the instruction, with the strategies, just equipping the students with the knowledge,"
said Patricia S. Williams, principal of Westhaven Elementary in Portsmouth.

At Dreamkeepers, Principal Doreatha White has score improvement down to a science.

She identifies which concept tripped up her students the most in each subject area and has
her teachers include lessons on that concept every week.

In history, tiffs years concept is geography. Maps of the ~vorld in glitter, paint and
colored pencil line the hallways, and students inside the classrooms constantly drill the
names of oceans and continents.
 Page 899

"We don’t wait until 1anuary to start test preparation," White said. "We start in
September."

In nine years, the elementary-level science SOL tests have never been significantly
revised.

Elementary students don’t seem to have trouble passing the exams, yet the percentage of
perfect scores statewide has rem~ned relatively !o~w. 5.4 percent for third graders last
year and 2.3 percent for fitlh graders.

Why is it harder for students to ace this test?

It could be the type of questions. Science tends to require problem-solving rather than
fact memorization.

In an example from last years exam, third-graders were given four pictures of animals on
a seesaw and asked, "Which of these shows that the toy cow is lighter than the toy
horse?"
Fifth-graders were shown four pictures and asked ~vhich depicted the type of cloud that
would most likely be seen dining a thunderstorm.

"They have to know the concept, and they have to be able to apply it," said Ashanda
Bickham, a teacher at Norfolk’s Chesterfield Academy of Math, Science and Technology.
"It’s a higher level of thinldng."

Some teachers, such as Bickham, must also figure out how to relay science concepts to
students who have weak reading skills.

She solved the problem by chucking the thick textbooks. Instead, she uses work sheets
from a prepared curriculttm to help students create an "interactive notebook."

The children paste paragraphs and pictures into a spiral notebook in which they also write
notes and draw pictures. Bickham walks the students through the texts, asking
increasingly difficult questions.

Said fourth-grader Lytaja Brown, "You get to draw what it’s about, and it stays in your
head."
More hands-on activities and lessons that promote inqttiry will help students improve in
science, said P~mla Klonowski, a science specialist with the Virginia Department of
Education.

More time in class ~vould also help, teachers say.

 Page 900

The most common complaint from elementary teachers is they don~ have enough time in
their schedules to teach science effectively, Klonowsld said.
Costis, at Dreamkeepers Academy, said sdence lessons require more supervision from
teachers and o/ten can’t be intezrupted.

"To have enough time to set up and put down a fall-blown science experiment," she said,
"you’re kind of up a creek."
Additionally, teacher training programs sometimes give sho~t shril[ to science, said
Veronica Haynes, Norfolk’s senior coordinator for the subject.
"I think they’re afraid of science," she said, "and all the hands-on that comes with doing
science education."

Virginia’s standards in U.S. history and ~vorld history have been rated highly by the
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington think tank.

Standards aren’t necessarily linked to test scores, though. In Georgia, another state with
solid ratings, 120,166 third-graders took the state’s standardized social studies test last
year, andjnst 43 received the highest marlc

Virginia has the chance to revise the history and social science guidelines - and possibly
change the tests -tNs year, as they come up for review again. The science standards,
which also drewpraise from the Fordham Foundation, are up for review in 2010.

Pyle said the history and social science standards are unlikely to change a lot, given the
overhaul in 2001.

Mark Emblidge, president of the state B oard of Education, said scores are one of many
factors considered when standards are reviewed. Ultimately, he said, the goal is for al!
students to pass. But high achievers also should have something substantial to strive for.

Despite the focus on pass rates, some educators are now encouraging students to shoot
for scores higher than 400.

One Southeastern Elementary teacher has a "500 club," and Costis tells her high-
achieving students that "pass/advanced is for sissies."

For 600 scores, some schools offer rewards including trophies, boomboxes and passes to
Busch Gardens.

The ever-rising scores put increasing pressure on teachers and administrators, who are
oilen expected to show improvement eachyear. But parents and children say scoring a
600 is like mcldng up bonus points: good for bragging rights but not much else.
 Page 901

"I didn’t tell any of my friends," said Edward Grant, a Dreamkeepers fourth-grader who
scored a 600 on the history test last year. "I was just talking about it in my head. I was so
happy."

4. Does NCLB Create Unfair Haying Field?

By Chris Cosier
Stamford Advocate
June 3, 2007

STAMFORD - Last week’s visit by federal Education Secretary Margaret Spellings dre~v
new attention to an old, and festering, issue: the evaluation of school districts based on a
test some students have trouble reading.

The federal No Child Left Behind act requires testing of all student~ including those who
are still learning English. to hold school districts accountable for students’ progress. It’s a
sore spot for urban districts such as Stamford, which absorb a lot of immigrants.

With the landmark education law up for reauthorization in Washington, Connecticut

officials and educators are pressing for changes to the testing rules, calling them tmfair
because of the sanctions the law places on districts that don’t measure up.

"The test results of these students have animpact on the schools’ ability to make adequate
yearly progress (under No Child Leit Behind), so you want to make sure it’s done fairly,
and it’s an accurate measure," said Bob lVlurphy, policy director for the Connecticut
Education Association, an organization representing teachers.
Stamford Schools Superintendent Joshua Start said "it hurts our standings" and called it
one of many problems with the law.

Stamford’s immigrant students had varied reactions to the Connecticut Academic

Performance Test, used to measure schools’ compliance with the lave, a few weeks alier
taking the test in early March.

Marco Bravo, a Stamford High School sophomore, immigrated 16 months ago from
Mexico and understood about half the words on the test, he said.

Another Stamford High sophomore, Karen Chaguay, said she understood most of it but
thinks she failed the reading test.

"It’s frustrating, because you want to do well," said Karen, who came to the United States
from Ecuador alittle over a year ago.

Dominican Republic native Eliana Lithgow, also of Stamford High, didn’t have much
trouble. But she said she heard a different story from other immigrant students.
 Page 902

"I heard them say it was really difficult to them," she said.

Some accommodations are provided. Some students, for instance, were allowed to use
dictionaies that translated words but did not give a deletion. They also were given extra
time to take the tests.

Stamford is a diverse district with an abow-average number of students needing help

with English.

Thirty-five percent of Stamford students spoke a language other than English at home in
the 2005-06 school year, compared with 13 percent statewide, state data show. Two
thousand Stamford students -t~of about 15,000 -g are classified as English-language
learners, said Judith Singer, research director for Stamford public schools.

When students fall short under federally required tests, schools must take corrective
measures, such as allowing students to transfer to better-performing schools within the
district. Management changes also could be required.

Schools can fail federal standards because of the performance of English-language

learners or other student subgroups. Nearly all of Stamford’s public schools have fallen
short to varying degrees under NCLB.

In Connecticut, high schoolers are tested on math, science, reading and writing under the
Connecticut Academic Performance Test; grade school and middle school students take
the Connecticut Mastery Test, with sections on math, reading and writing.

Immio~Fant students have one school year before their scores must be reported to the
federal government for evaluating their schools. All must be initi!lly assessed on their
English skills, said Tom lVIurphy, spokesman for the Connecticut Department of
Education.

Spellings, appearing Tuesday in Stamford at a round-table discussion with business,

educational and community leaders, said the federal government offers help to states in
testing English-language learners.

"There is flexibility there, and I ~vould invite the good people of Cormecficut to take us
up on some of that," she said in an interview.

More than 20 states have entered parmeN~ips with the federal government that give them
other options, she said. States may use tests in students’ native languages, or alternative
assessments such as work samples or portfolios.
State and local educators have other ideas. Murphy said it would be difficult for
Connecticut -~a small state with small budgets, compared with other statesl~-~to develop
tests in all the languages spoken here. More than 140 languages are spoken in
Connecticut schools, he said.
 Page 903

"Celtainly the preponderance ofnon-English-spealdng students speak Spanish, but that is

not the only large group," Mushy said.
Stamford students speak 57 languages. The top three are English, Haitian Creole and
Spanish, but there are blocks of students spealdng other languages. Polish is spoken by
202 students; 93 speak Albanim~ 109 speak Russian; and 96 speak Bengali, d~strict data
show.

Murphy said the department favors giving districts three years, not just one, before they
are evaluated on English-lan~gu~age learners’ test results. Students need time -~seven
years, some research showsE-Eto acquire the more formal English used in tests, and
many have trouble learning English because they have limited s~s in their native
language, he said.
A U.S. Education Department official disputed the idea of a three-year wait, saying it
~vonld defeat NCLB’s pro’pose of making student achievement transparent.

"These students are in the country now. They’re part of the school system, and they have
the ability to learn, and we should use this data for better instruction," department
spokesman Chad Colby said.

"The school diStlict can learn from this data to improve instruction," he said.

He provided an editorial, written by Spellings, calling it a myth that most English-

language lemalers are new arrivals to the United States and are disadvantaged. Eighty
percent have lived here at least five years, she wrote. Reading scores for English-
language learners nationally grew by 20 points from 2000 to 2005, she wrote.

Singer praised the law for displaying all students’ achievement levels and making sure
they don’t fall through the cracks. But she supported one change - letting English-
language learners continue to be classified that way after meeting federal standards.
Students now leave that category once they are considered proficient.

With a change, she said, "the evaluation of that group would have half a chance to show
progress and success."

5. Let cNldren be children; Is your 5-y~tr-old stressed out became so much is

expected?
Penelope H. Bevan
June 3, 2007

I was watching one of my second-grade girls try unsuccessfnlly to tie her shoes the other
day, and I thought, "This is a person who is supposed to be learning plural possessives?" I
think not.
 Page 904

We’ve just finished test time again in the schools of California. The mad frenzy of testing
infects everyone from second grade through high school. Because of the rigors and
threats of No Child LelI Behind, schools are desperate to increase their scores. As the
requirements become more stringent, we have completely lost sight of the children taking
these tests.

For 30 years as a teacher of primary kids, I have operated on the Any Fool Can See
principle. And any fool can see that the spread between what is developmentally
appropriate for 7- and 8-year-old children and what is demanded of them on these tests is
widening. A lot of what used to be in the first-grade curriculum is nc~v tanglg in
kindergmten. Is your 5-year-old stressed out? Perhaps this is why.

Primary-grade children have only the most tenuous grasp on how the world ~vorks.
Having been alive only seven or eight years, they have not figured out that in California
there is a definite wet and dry season. They live in high expectation that it will snow in
the Bay Areain the winter. They reasonably conclude, based on their limited experience
with words, that a thesaurus must be a dinosaur. When asked to name some of the planets
after he heard the word Earth, one of my boys confidently replied, "Mars, Sattm~,
Mercury, Jupiter and Canada!" to which a girl replied, "No, no, no, you gotta go way far
outer than that."
Research has shown that it takes appro~mately 24 repetitions of a new concept to imprint
on a young brain. The aforementioned plural possessives come up twice in the
curricnlmn, yet they are supposed to knowit when they see it. This is folly.

Ctm:ently, 2 1/2 uninterrupted hours are supposed to be devoted to language arts and
reading every morning. I ask you, ~vhat adult could sustain an interest in one subject for
that long? Yet the two reading series adopted by the state for elementary education
require that much time be devoted to reading in the expectation that the scores will shoot
up eventually. Sho~v me a 7-year-old who has that ldnd of concentration. Show me a 64-
year-old teacher who has it. Not I.

The result of this has been a decline in math scores at our school, because the emphasis is
on getting them to read and there isn’t enough time to fit in a proper curricnlum. Early
math education should rely heavily on messing about with concrete materials of
measurements, mass, volume and length, and discovering basic principles through play.

There is no time for this. The teaching of art is all but a subversive activity. Teachers
whisper, "I taught art today!" as if they would be reported to the Reading Police for
stealing time from the reading curriculum, which is what they did.

It is also First Communion time in second grade. Yes, I teach in a public school, but First
Communion happens in second grade, and it is a big deal, the subject of much discussion
in the classroom. The children are exalted.
 Page 905

A fe~v months back one of my gifts exclaimed, "Jeez, I have a lot to do alier schoo!
today, Teacher. I gotta do my homework, go to baseball practice and get baptized." I
laughed to myself at the priorities of this little to-do list, so symbolic of the life of one
second-grader. But there was a much larger issue here. What is happening to their souls?
You may ask, what business it is of the schools what is happening to the souls of these
little children?

I will tell you. Any fool can see that those setting the standards for testing of primary-
grade children haven’t been around any actual children in a long time. The difference
between what one can reasonably expect an 8-year-old to know and what is merely a
party trick grows exponentially on these state tests.

Meanwhile, children who kno~v they are bright and can read well are proved wrong time
and again because of the structure of these tests. Teachers spend inordinate amounts of
time trying to teach the children to be careful of the quirky tricks of the tests when they
should be simply teaching how to get on in the world.
Twenty years ago, I had a conference with a parent, a SiktL whose child was brilliant. I
was prepared to show him all her academic work, but he brushed it aside and said, "Yes,
yes, I know she is quite smart, but I want to know how her soul is developing."

The present emphasis on testing and test scores is sucldng the soul out of the primary
school experience for both teachers and children. So much time is spent on testing and
measuring reading speed that the children are losing the joy that comes but once in their
lifetime, the happy messiness of paint, clay, Tinkertoys and jumping rope, the quiet
discovery of a shiny new book of interest to them, the wonders of a magnifying glass.
The teachers around them, under constant pressure to raise those test scores, radiate
urgency mid pressure. Their smiles are grim. They are not enjoying their jobs.

Our children need parents and teachers ~vho, like Hamlet, know a hmvk from a hand saw,
who know foolishness ~vhen they see it and are strong enough to defend these small souls
from the onslaught of escalating developmeutally inappropriate clalXrap. The great
unspoken secret of primary school is that a lot of what is going on is arrant nonsense, and
it’s getting worse. Any fool can see.
 Page 906

Nonresponsive
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: June 03, 2007 11:55 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David;
Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela;
Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.;
Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele,
Marc; Simon, Ray; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Uam; tracy_d.
_.young@who.eop.gov; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Yudof, Samara
Subje~t: WEEKEND NEWS SUMMARY, 6.3.07

Attachments: 6.3. wknd news summary.doc

WEEKEND NEWS SUMMARY

June 3, 2007
1. Clarence Page: The president’s spin doctor for schools (DNIN)
2. Partnering might help rural schools (CNO)
3. Why are so many students acing some SOL tests? (VP)
4. Does NCLB Create Unfair Playing Field?
5. Let children be children; Is your 5-year-old stressed out because so much is expected?

1. Clarence Page: The president’s spin doctor for schools

Spellings’ role as a communicator often more important than her credentials as an educator
Dallas Morning News
June 2, 2007

It was the day before she would appear on The Daily Showwith Jon Stewart, whose host is a known liberal critic of the
Bush administration. But in an interview in her office, Secre[ary of Education Margare~ Spellings put a happy face on it.

’q-his completes my pop culture trifecta," she said.

Indeed, she recently attended a taping of American Idol and last fall made history as the first sitting Cabinet secretary to
appear on Jeopardy. She also became the first education secretary to lose on Jeopardy. She lost to actor Michael
McKean, best known as Lenny on the old Laverne and Shirley television show. The loss provided ample fodder for her
detractors.

Ms. Spellings says she agreed to do The Daily Show several months ago at the urging of her two daughters. It just
happened to come at an awkward time for her department. Congress is investigating conflict-of-interest com plaints
involving the federal student loan program and the Bush administration’s Reading First program.

You know those loans that students increasingly need in order to pay for college? When choosing a lender, many students
rely on the "preferred" status list offered by their college or university. Now federal and state regulators say some of the
lenders in the $85 billion industry earned their preferred status thanks to kickbacks that they offered to the schools.

Reading First, a key $1 billion-a-year reading program in President Bush’s 2002 No Child Left Behind education reform, is
alleged to have given preferential treatment to materials favored bytop advisers who also had their own reading textbooks
or tests to sell. Much of this happened before Ms. Spellings took over in early 2005, but congressional critics are accusing
her of failing to take action to investigate and clear up the alleged conflicts.

Such a difference a Democratic-controlled Congress makes. Were it not for the Bush administration’s bigger headline-
making headaches over the firing of U.S. attorneys, Ms. Spellings’ department might well be getting a lot more attention
these days.

The irony of the Reading First controversy is that, regardless of the allegations, reading scores for students in the program
have dramatically improved. The percentage of first-graders who met or exceeded proficiency standards on reading
fluency grew from 43 percent to 57 percent in a study of 2004 to 2006, and third-graders who im proved grew from 35
percent to 43 percent.
 Page 907

Ms. Spellings’ role as a communicator- getting the information out about successes- actually is more important in many
ways than her credentials as an educator. She acknowledged in a congressional hearing that she lacks an education
degree. She has a bachelor’s degree in political science and journalism from the University of Houston, and her only
formal classroom experience was as an uncertified substitute teacher in Texas.

But, as she showed in our inter~ew and on The Daily Show, she speaks up forcefu ll y for a large group that too often feels
shortchanged in school debates: the parents.

I laid on her my biggest complaint about standardized tests: Doesn’t every child learn differently?

"Yes, but I think sometimes that’s used as an excuse for masking underachievement"

Then she got personal: "1’11 tell you what, Clarence .... I’ve yet to meet a parent who didn’t want their kid to be reading at
anything less than grade level -this year! Not in 2014 [the goal year set by the administration for closing that academic
achievement gaps]. This year! And that’s not an unreasonable expectation for parents to have of their schools and their
kids."

Many parents have learned the hard way wh at President Bush means when h e speaks of "th e soft bigotry of low
expectations," especially for minority students. Many schools and teachers perform magnificently, but too often the system
rewards mediocre teachers and, in effect, punishes those who are willing to put extra effort into their job. The Bush
administration’s pay incentives for high-performing teachers and principals move in the right direction.

I’m still skeptical of emphasizing tests too much. But we all need to set goals in life, and we need good yardsticks for
progress. That’s as good a lesson as any for Margaret Spellings to teach. No joke.

Clarence Page is a Chicago Tribune columnist. His e-mail address is cpage@ tribune.com.

2. Partnering might help rural schools

Charlotte News & Observer
By I~arti I~laguire
June 2, 2007

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings visited CaryAcademy on Friday as part of a national tour leading up to the
expected reauthodzation of the federal No Child Left Behind Act later this year. Here are excerpts of her interview with staff
writer Marti Maguire. To hear more, go online to www.newsobserver.com.
Q: What made you choose to come here, a private school?

A: [Cary Academy] is a true laboratory of innovation, particularly in the use of technology. They feel part of their mission is
to help develop practices that can be shared and used not only here but in the public sector as well ....
These divisions
between private and public schools are really blurring.

Q: You spoke today with school officials about the importance of math, science, technology and engineering education.
But North Carolina schools are facing a severe shortage of qualified math and science teachers, particularly in m ore rural
areas. What can be done about that?

A: We can use technology, of course, to expand and broaden the flow of expertise so that a teacher here at CaryAcademy
might be partnering with a rural school district and, through technology, getting additional teaching help more broadly
expanded. The other thing we can do is to start to use resources in our communities beyond just the traditional teaching
core. You have many fine universities in this state. Why don’t we find ways for those folks to come into our public schools?

Q: North Carolina students have shown essentially no improvement on state tests since the first year No Child Left Behind
act went into effect. How can NCLB deliver on its promise of closing the achievement gap?

A: One of the things that’s been so important about NCLB is that we have brought real data to bear about the status of our
schools. Who’s being left behind? Who isn’t? Where are the schools that are challenging what the president calls the "soft
bigotry of low expectations"? Going back to the ostrich approach of burying our heads in the sand, putting the money out
and hoping for the best is the wrong direction. Obviously, we need to pick up the pace. We need to confront those facts.
But when I look at the North Carolina data, in some very key ways, we are really making progress. We’re making progress
in the white-black achievement gap in reading in grades three and four and six and seven. North Carolina is one of the
leaders on Advanced Placement, really double the national average on the opportunity that kids have to take rigorous
coursework.

Q: I saw you on "Jeopardy!" when you lost to Michael McKean, the actor who played Lenny on "Laverne and Shirley."
2
 Page 908

A: That was his third time on the show, not to be bitter. And it’s all about the buzzer.

3. ~ are so many students acing some SOL tests?

The Virginian-Pilot
June 3, 2007
By Amy Jetter

Last spring, 50 third-graders took the history Standards of Learning exam at Norfolk’s Dream keepers Academy at J.J.
Roberts Elementary School.

More than half of them received a 600, the highest score possible.

Miles away in Chesapeake, the same thing happened at Southeastern Elementary School: 56 percent of the third-graders
aced the test. And across the state, 1 in 5 students did.

Perfect scores were far less common in other subjects, such as math and English. In science, fewer than 6 percent of
students taking the tests in the state earned the highest score.

Educators said students’ success in history showed how well Virginia’s standards are being taught and learned. Others
won dered wh ether the tests are too easy.

’q-he obvious question," said Steve Dunbar, an education professor at the University of Iowa, "is, Are kids in third grade in
Virginia really better in social studies than anything else?"

When the Standards of Learning exams were designed in the late 1990s, little thought was given to how many students
should be acing them.

In the traditional bell curve - what statisticians call a "normal distribution" of scores - most students would be in the middle
of the range. About 2.5 percent would receive the highest mark.

But Virginia’s standardized tests are not graded on a curve. They’re supposed to gauge how well students knowthe
Standards of Learning, and the hope is that as many students as possible are proficient.

’q-he more kids who are getting the perfect score, the better," said Doris Redfield, an education consultant who headed the
Virginia Department of Education’s assessment and reporting division in the late 1990s.

Before the SOLs are given, a scale is set that links each possible number of correct answers to a score. The scale
changes slightly each year when test questions change.

A 600 means the student missed either zero, one or two questions, depending on thetest. On the elementary science
tests last year, students needed to be perfect. On the history tests, they could miss one or two.

While 600s sound impressive, principals, administrators and state officials are most concerned with pass rates- the
percentage of students scodng 400 or above. Pass rates are important in determining whether a school is accredited by
the state and whether it meets academic goals under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

The Virginia Department of Education doesn’t routinely report the actual scores received on the SOL tests. At the request
of The Virginian-Pilot, officials released the number of 600s on all SOL tests in 2005-06 and the scores of all tests taken by
third- and fifth-graders in South Hampton Roads.

Usually when a series of tests is developed, the scoring patterns tend to be the same from subject to subject, said the
University of Iowa’s Dunbar.

The number of Virginia students who passed history and science was similar, with the rates each at about 90 percent for
third-graders and at about 85 percent for fifth-graders.

But the difference in the number of perfect scores was much more pronounced. So was the variation in students scoring
"pass/advanced" - a 500 or above. In third grade, 57 percent earned that score on history compared with 40 percent for
science; in fifth grade, it was 45 percent for history and 23 percent for science.

There are two disadvantages when lots of students earn the highest score on a test. Teachers can’t determine the finer
 Page 909
details of what students haven’t learned, and there’s no room left to improve.

"If you’re getting kids who are close to the ceiling or hitting the ceiling, they have nowhere to go," said Bruce Bracken, an
education professor at The College of William and Mary.

Students haven’t always sailed through the SOL history exams.

In the early years, scores were so low in several grade levels that in 2001 the Virginia Board of Education took the unusual
step of lowering the number of questions that students needed to answer correctly to pass some of the tests. That
included the fifth-grade exam.

’qhe one thing we’ve always heard is the history tests are too hard," said Charles Pyle, a spokesman for the Virginia
Dep artm ent of Education.

The tests were based on standards from 1995, which required elementary students to know the basics of economics,
geography, civics and history. Before, they had started out learning about family and community, then eased into state,
national and world history.

Teachers felt that the SOL tests covered too much ground in one year and that the standards were unclear.

When the state’s history and social science standards came up for a seven-year review in 2001, committees consisting
mostly of teachers recommended a rewrite of the curriculum. Among their suggestions: pare back the information covered.

By 2003-04, the entire test had been changed to meet those new standards.

Historically, scores have dropped in the first year or so of new or revised tests.

But that year, the percentage of perfect scores in third-grade history jumped to 16 percent from 2.6 percent. For fifth-
graders, the number increased to 9 percent from 2.4 percent.

State officials say that doesn’t mean the tests are too easy.

’q-here were some legitimate concerns that had to be addressed about the teachability of the standards," P~e said. "Our
history and social studies teachers are finding that the 2001 standards are teachable. They’re rigorous, but they’re
teachable."

The new tests feature more clear-cut questions and more illustrations, some teachers said. The answer options for the
multiple-choice tests often include at least one that seems implausible.

Patty Costis, a teacher at Dreamkeepers, approved of the changes.

’q’he tests were meant to be broad strokes of the general knowledge instead of just these individual details," Costis said.
"Not, ’Do you remember a little, minute detail of first grade, second quarter?’"

Educators said the large number of high scores last year could be due to the age of the test.

"Once the test has been out for a while, you have years and years to perfect what you do - with the instruction, with the
strategies, just equipping the students with the knowledge," said Patricia S. Williams, principal of Westhaven Elementary in
Portsmouth.

At Dream keepers, Principal Doreatha White has score improvement down to a science. She identifies which concept
tripped up her students the most in each subject area and has her teachers include lessons on that concept every week.

In history, this year’s concept is geography. Maps of the world in glitter, paint and colored pencil line the hallways, and
students inside the classrooms constantly drill the names of oceans and continents.

’M#e don’t wait until January to start test preparation," White said. ’~/e start in September."

In nine years, the elementary-level science SOL tests have never been significantly revised.

Elementary students don’t seem to have trouble passing the exams, yet the percentage of perfect scores statewide has
remained relatively low: 5.4 percent for third graders last year and 2.3 percent for fifth graders.
 Page 910
Why is it harder for students to ace this test?

It could be the type of questions. Science tends to require problem-solving rather than fact memorization.

In an example from last year’s exam, third-graders were given four pictures of animals on a seesaw and asked, "Which of
these shows that the toy cow is lighter than the toy horse?"

Fifth-graders were shown four pictures and asked which depicted the type of cloud that would most likely be seen during a
thunderstorm.

’q-hey have to know the concept, and they have to be able to apply it," said Ashanda Bickham, a teacher at Norfolk’s
Chesterfield Academy of Math, Science and Technology. "It’s a higher level of thinking."

Some teachers, such as Bickham, must also figure out howto relay science concepts to students who have weak reading
skills.

She solved the problem by chucking the thick textbooks. Instead, she uses work sheets from a prepared curriculum to
help students create an "interaclJve notebook."

The children paste paragraphs and pictures into a spiral netebook in which they also write notes and draw pictures.
Bickham walks the students through the texts, asking increasingly difficult questions.

Said fourth-grader Lytaja Brown, "You get to draw what it’s about, and it stays in your head."

More hands-on activities and lessons that promote inquirywill help students improve in science, said Paula Klonowski, a
science specialist with the Virginia Department of Education.

Moretime in class would also help, teachers say.

The most common complaint from elementary teachers is they don’t have enough time in their schedules to teach science
effectively, Klonowski said.

Costis, at Dreamkeepers Academy, said science lessons require more supervision from teachers and often can’t be
interrupted.

’qo have enough time to set up and put down a full-blown science experiment," she said, "you’re kind of up a creek."

Additionally, teacher training programs sometimes give short shrift to science, said Veronica Haynes, Norfolk’s senior
coordinator for the subject.

"1 think they’re afraid of science," she said, "and all the hands-on that comes with doing science education."

Virginia’s standards in U.S. history and world history have been rated highly by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a
Washington think tank.

Standards aren’t necessarily linked to test scores, though. In Georgia, another state with solid ratings, 120,166 third-
graders took the state’s standardized social studies test last year, and just 43 received the highest mark.

Virginia has the chance to revise the history and social science guidelines - and possibly change the tests - this year, as
they come up for review again. The science standards, which also drew praise from the Fordham Foundation, are up for
review in 2010.

P~e said the history and social science standards are unlikely to change a lot, given the overhaul in 2001.

Mark Emblidge, president of the state Board of Education, said scores are one of many factors considered when
standards are reviewed. Ultimately, he said, the goal is for all students to pass. But high achievers also should have
som ething substantial to strive for.

Despite the focus on pass rates, some educators are now encouraging students to shoot for scores higher than 400.

One Southeastern Elementary teacher has a "500 club," and Costis tells her high-achieving students that "pass/advanced
is for sissies."
 Page 911
For 600 scores, some schools offer rewards including trophies, boomboxes and passes to Busch Gardens.

The ever-rising scores put increasing pressure on teachers and administrators, who are often expected to show
improvement each year. But parents and children say scodng a 600 is like racking up bonus points: good for bragging
rights but not much else.

"1 didn’t tell any of my friends," said Edward Grant, a Dreamkeepers fourth-grader who scored a 600 on the history test last
year. "1 was just talking about it in my head. I was so happy."

4. Does NCLB Create Unfair Playing Field?

By Chris Gosier
Stamford Advocate
June 3, 2007

STAMFORD - Last week’s visit by federal Education Secretary Margaret Spellings drew new attention to an old, and
festering, issue: the evaluation of school districts based on a test some students have trouble reading.

The federal No Child Left Behind act requires testing of all students, including those who are still learning English, to hold
schod districts accountable for students’ progress. It’s a sore spot for urban districts such as Stamford, which absorb a lot
of immigrants.

With the landmark education law up for reauthorization in Washington, Connecticut officials and educators are pressing for
changes to the testing rules, calling them unfair because of the sanctions the law places on districts that don’t measure up.

’qhe test results of these students have an impact on the schools’ ability to make adequate yearly progress (under No
Child Left Behind), so you want to make sure it’s done fairly, and it’s an accurate measure," said Bob Murphy, policy
director for the Connecticut Education Association, an organization representing teachers.

Stamford Schools Superintendent Joshua Starr said "it hurts our standings" and called it one of many problem s with the
law.

Stamford’s immigrant students had varied reactions to the Connecticut Academic Performance Test, used to measure
schools’ compliance with the law, a few weeks after taking the test in early March.

Marco Bravo, a Stamford High School sophomore, immigrated 16 months ago from Mexico and understood about half the
words on the test, he said.

Another Stamford High sophomore, Karen Chaguay, said she understood most of it but thinks she failed the reading test.

"It’s frustrating, because you want to do well," said Karen, who came to the United States from Ecuador a little over a year
ago.

Dominican Republic native Eliana Lithgow, also of Stamford High, didn’t have much trouble. But she said she heard a
different story from other immigrant students.

"1 heard them say it was really difficult to them," she said.

Some accommodations are provided. Some students, for instance, were allowed to use dictionaries that translated words
but did not give a definition. They also were given extra time to take the tests.

Stamford is a diverse district with an above-average number of students needing help with English.

Thirty-five percent of Stamford students spoke a language other than English at home in the 2005-06 school.year,
compared with 13 percent statewide, state data show. Two thousand Stamford students-I~of about 15,000-Eare classified
as English-language learners, said Judith Singer, research director for Stamford public schools.

When students fall short under federally required tests, schools must take corrective measures, such as allowing students
to-transfer to better-performing schools within the district. Management changes also could be required.

Schools can fail federal standards because of the performance of English-language learners or other student subgroups.
Nearly all of Stamford’s public schools have fallen short to varying degrees under NCLB.

In Connecticut, high schoolers are tested on math, science, reading and writing under the Connecticut Academic
Performance Test; grade school and middle school students take the Connecticut Mastery Test, with sections on math,
 Page 912
reading and writing.

Immigrant students have one school year before their scores must be reported to the federal government for evaluating
their schools. All must be initially assessed on their English skills, said Tom Murphy, spokesman for the Connecticut
Depa[tm ent of Education.

Spellings, appearing Tuesday in Stamford at a round-table discussion with business, educational and community leaders,
said the federal government offers help to states in testing English-language learners.

’There is flexibility there, and I would invite the good people of Connecticut to take us up on some of that," she said in an
interview.

More than 20 states have entered partnerships with the federal government that give them other options, she said. States
may use tests in students’ native languages, or alternative assessments such as work samples or portfolios.

State and local educators have ether ideas. Murphy said it would be difficult for Connecticut -t~a small state with small
budgets, compared with other statesl~-~to develop tests in all the languages spoken here. More than 140 languages are
spoken in Connecticut schools, he said.

"Certainly the preponderance of non-English-speaking students speak Spanish, but that is not the only large group,"
Murphy said.

Stamford students speak 57 languages. The top three are English, Haitian Creole and Spanish, but there are blocks of
students speaking other languages. Polish is spoken by 202 students; 93 speak Albanian; 109 speak Russian; and 96
speak Bengali, district data show.

Murphy said the department favors giving districts three years, not just one, before they are evaluated on English-language
learners’ test results. Students need time-l~seven years, some research showsl~-E~to acquire the more formal English
used in tests, and many have trouble learning English because they have limited skills in their native language, he said.

A U.S. Education Department official disputed the idea of a three-year wait, saying it would defeat NCLB’s purpose of
making student achievement transparent.

’q-hese students are in the country now. They’re part of the school system, and they have the ability to learn, and we
should use this data for better instruction," department spokesman Chad Colby said.

’qhe school distdct can learn from this data to improve instruction," he said.

He provided an editorial, written by Spellings, calling it a myth that most English-language learners are new arrivals to the
United States and are disadvantaged. Eighty percent have lived here at least five years, she wrote. Reading scores for
English-language learners nationally grew by 20 points from 2000 to 2005, she wrote.

Singer praised the law for displaying all students’ achievement levels and making sure they don’t fall through the cracks.
But she supported one change- letting English-language learners continue to be classified that way al~er meeting federal
standards. Students now leave that category once they are considered proficient.

With a change, she said, ’the evaluation of that group would have half a chance to show progress and success."

5. Let children be children; Is your 5-year-old stressed out because so much is expected.’?
Penelope H. Bevan
June 3, 2007

I was watching one of my second-grade girls try unsuccessfully to tie her shoes the other day, and I thought, "This is a
person who is supposed to be learning plural possessives.’?’ I think not.

Wek/e just finished test time again in the schools of California. The m ad frenzy of testing infects everyone from second
grade through high school. Because of the rigors and threa~s of No Child Lef~ Behind, schools are desperate to increase
their scores. As the requirements become more stringent, we have completely lost sight of the children taking these tests.

For 30 years as a teacher of primary kids, I have operated on the Any Fool Can See principle. And any fool can see that
the spread between what is dev~opmentally appropriate for 7- and 8-year-old children and what is demanded of them on
these tests is widening. A lot of what used to be in the first-grade curriculum is now taught in kindergarten. Is your 5-year-
old stressed out? Perhaps this is why.
 Page 913
Primary-grade children have only the most tenuous grasp on how the world works. Having been alive only seven or eight
years, they have not figured out that in California there is a definite wet and dry season. They live in high expectation that it
will snow in the Bay Area in the ’,einter. They reasonably conclude, based on their limited experience with words, that a
thesaurus must be a dinosaur. When asked to name some of the planets after he heard the word Earth, one of my boys
confidently replied, "Mars, Saturn, Mercury, Jupiter and Canada!" to which a girl replied, "No, no, no, you gotta go way far
outer than that."

Research has shown that it takes approximately 24 repetitions of a new concept to imprint on a young brain. The
aforementioned plural possessives come up twice in the curriculum, yet they are supposed to know it when they see it.
This is folly.

Currently, 2 1/2 uninterrupted hours are supposed to be devoted to language arts and reading every morning. I ask you,
what adult could sustain an interest in one subject for that long? Yet the two reading series adopted by the state for
elementary education require tha~ much time be devoted to reading in the expectation that the scores wil! shoot up
eventually. Show me a 7-year-old who has that kind of concentration. Show me a 64--year-old teacher who has it. Not I.

The result of this has been a decline in math scores at our school, because the emphasis is on getting them to read and
there isn’t enough time to fit in a proper curriculum. Early math education should rely heavily on messing about with
concrete materials of measurements, mass, volume and length, and discovering basic principles through play.

There is no time for this. The teaching of art is all but a subversive activity. Teachers whisper, "1 taught art today!" as if they
would be reported to the Reading Police for stealing time from the reading curriculum, which is what they did.

It is also First Communion time in second grade. Yes, I teach in a public school, but First Communion happens in second
grade, and it is a big deal, the subject of much discussion in the classroom. The children are excited.

A few months back one of my girls exclaimed, "Jeez, I have a lot to do after school today, Teacher. I gotta do my
homework, go to baseball practice and get baptized." I laughed to myself at the priorities of this little to-do list, so symbolic
of the life of one second-grader. But there was a much larger issue here. What is happening to their souls? You may ask,
what business it is of the schools what is happening to the souls of these little children?

I will tell you. Any fool can see that those setting the standards for testing of prim ary-grade children haven’t been around
any actual children in a long time. The difference between what one can reasonably expect an 8-year-old to know and
what is merely a party tdck grows exponentially on these state tests.

Meanwhile, children who know they are bdght and can read well are proved wrong time and again because of the structure
of these tests. Teachers spend inordinate amounts of tim e trying to teach the children to be careful of the quirky tricks of
the tests when they should be simply teaching how to get on in the world.

Twenty years ago, I had a conference with a parent, a Sikh, whose child was brilliant. I was prepared to show him all her
academic work, but he brushed it aside and said, "Yes, yes, I know she is quite smart, but I want to know how her soul is
developing."

The present emphasis on testing and test scores is sucking the soul out of the primary school experience for both
teachers and children. So much time is spent on testing and measuring reading speed that the children are losing the joy
that comes but once in their lifetime, the happy messiness of paint, clay, Tinkertoys and jumping rope, the quiet discovery
of a shiny new book of interest to them, the wonders of a magnifying glass. The teachers around them, under constant
pressure to raise those test scores, radiate urgency and pressure. Their smiles are grim. They are not enjoying their jobs.

Our children need parents and teachers who, like Hamlet, know a hawk from a hand saw, who know foolishness when
they see it and are strong enough to defend these small souls from the onslaught of escalating developmentally
inappropriate claptrap. The great unspoken secret of pdmary school is that a lot of what is going on is arrant nonsense,
and it’s getting worse. Any fool can see.

6.3. wknd news

summa’,/.doc (58...

Rebecca Neale
U.S. Department of Education
Deputy Press Secretary
 Page 914

(~b)(’@Y:l ....
" "" rebecca.neale@ed.~ov
 Page 915

WEEKEND NEWS SUMMARY

Saturday, June2, 2007

1. U.S. Tackles Student Lending (WSJ)

2. Education Depaxtment Issues Rules for Student Loans (NYT)
3. Bush admin, shakes up student aid, proposes rules (Renters)
4. US official proposes limits on lenders, colleges (Bloomberg)
5. U.S. Student Loan Office Gets New Rules and a New Chief (W. Post)
6. Bush proposes rules to curb abuse in student !oan industry (AP)
7.Bush Approves Charter Change for Takeover of Schools (W. Post)

1. U.S. TACKLES STUDENT LENDING; PROPOSALS TAKE AIM AT FIRMS’

PAYMENTS TO SCHOOL OFFICIALS
By Anne Marie Chaker
June 2, 2007

The U.S. Depmtment of Education proposed to clamp down on payments from lending
companies to college financial-aid officials, saying that such inducements are
’Jeopardizing" the rights of student borrowers.

Under the department’s long-awaited rules, which are expected to be finalized in the
coming months and take effect next year, lenders would be prohibited from pa)dng for
everything from entertainment expenses to lodging and training registration fees for
school officials. They would also be barred from providing staffing and other assistance
to college financial-aid offices.

"Special relationships between schools and lenders have developed," the department said
in amore than 200-page document containing the proposed rules, ’Jeopardizing a
borrowers fight to choose a...lender and undermining a student financial aid
administrators role as an impartial and informed resource for students and parents."

The proposed rules would also limit colleges’ practice of listing certain lenders as
"preferred." A national investigation by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has
found that certain preferred lenders provided stock and other inducements to college
financial-aid officers. Several well-known schools have let go financial-aid officials who
accepted such payments or stock from lenders.

The report cites "increasing evidence" that preferred lender lists at many schools "do not
represent the result ofnnbiased research," and that some schools "have been restricting
the ability of borrowers to choose" by providing an electronic link to only one lender.

The new rules wottld reqt~e a school using a preferred-lender list to include at least three
lenders. It would also require the school to disclose how those lenders were chosen, and
advise potential borrowers that they aren’t required to use the listed lenders.
 Page 916

Some critics of cozy relationships between lenders and colleges said the restrictions on
preferred-lender lists don’t go far enough. The three-lender rule "is a bare minimum, and
ideally there should be more," said Mark Kantrowitz, a Pittsburgh-based financial-aid
expert.

The document also makes clear that lenders can’t skirt the anti-inducement provisions by
offering payments or other benefits to "school-affiliated" organizations, such as alumni
groups. It would also ban other inducements to universities, such as computer hardware
and printing services. Lenders would also be prohibited from providing scholarships and
other financial contributions to colleges in return for preferred status.

The student-loan scandal also appears to have cost three lending executives their jobs. ’
CIT Group Inc. quietly fired three senior management officials of its Student Loan
Xpress Inc. unit who had been previously placed on administrative leave. Student Loan
Xpress settled hst month with Mr. Cuomo’s office for providing stock or other payments
to several college financial-aid officials who recommended their loans to students. Mr.
Cuomo’s office is conducting an investigation of the three executives, in which CIT has
agreed to cooperate.

2. EDUCATION DEPARTMENT ISSUES RULES FOR STUDENT LOANS

The New York Times
June 1, 2007
By Jonathan D. Gtater

The federal Education Department released new rules for federal student loan programs
today that would require uNversities to include at least three lenders on any list
recommended to students and that wouldban many of the incentives loan companies
have been offering colleges and university officials to ~vin student business.
The action represented a change in direction for the department which for years had
failed to respond to calls by its inspector general, Democratic lawmakers and even some
loan-industry officials for it to be more aggressive in policing the $85 billion student loan
industry and defining what practices are banned.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings created a task force in April to draw up the
regulations after the collapse of an effort in the winter to win consensus on new rules
among representatives of students, lenders and academic institutions in a process known
as "negotiated role making."
"The secretary is amending these regulations to strengthen and improve the
administration of the loan programs," states the proposal which the department
announced today.

The proposed regulations, ~vhich were sent to the federal register on Thtwsday, come on
the heels of investigations in the states andin Congress, led by the Ne~v York State’s
 Page 917

attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, that turned up an array of undisclosed relationships

between universities and lenders as well as conflicts of interest on the part of financial aid
officers. Some university officials who were promoting particular lenders had received
stock on favorable terms, consttlting payments or gifts from loan companies.

Just this week. the Education Department’s own inspector general reported to Congress
that the department had made "minimal" progress in dealing with complaints about abuse
in the nation’s system ofgovermnent-backed student loans. An earlier report by the
inspector general, in 2003, criticized the department for failing to provide any guidance
on prohibited inducements since 1995.

Department officials have said repeatedly in the past that they did not have the authority
to oversee many of these practices because they involved private loans that are not
federally guaranteed and wanted financial-aid officers and the loan industry to police
themselves.

The proposed regulations, which will be published in the federal register for a 60-day
comment period, identify specific practices that would be barred, including "offering,
directly or in4hectly, any points, premiums, payments, or other benefits to any schoo! or
other party to secure" student loan volume, in the federa!ly guaranteed loan program.
They would also ban a college’s "access to a lender’s other financial products, computer
hardware, and payment of the cost of printing and distribution of college catalogs and
other materials at less than market rate,"

In addition, the rules would require that auniversity’s list of recommended or "preferred"
lenders include at least three loan companies and exclude any lenders that provided
inducements. Perhaps most importantly for students, the rules ~vould reqttire universities
both to explain how and why they recommend specific lenders and to ensure that all
students, not just a few, receive benefits offered by a lender on a preferred list.

The regulations are likely to meet little resistance. The Consumer Bankers Association
indicated that it accepted the need for additional regulation. And on Thursday the trade
group representing college financial aid officers agreed to bar its members from
accepting most lender gifts and to stop allowing lenders to sponsor its conferences.

5. BUSH ADMIN. SHAKES UP STUDENT AID, PROPOSES RULES

Reuters
June 1, 2007; 6:53 PM
By- Kevin Drm~l)augh

*NOTE: ran in The Washington Post

WASHINGTON ~enters) - The U.S. Department of Education on Friday put its college
student financial aid office under a temporary, new leader and proposed a raft of new
rules amid a scandal in the $85 billion student loan business.
 Page 918

The department said Lawrence Warder will be acting chief operating officer of federal
student aid. W~rder has been chief financial officer of the department since July 2006.
He ~1 fill both roles while a search continues for a permanent head of the federal
student aid (FSA) office.

An accountant and management consultant, Warder for now will rtm an office that
delivers $77 billion of financial aid annually to more than 10 million students and their
families.

"Larry brings extensive management expertise .... He is ready to hit the ground running at
this important time at FSA," said Education Secretary Margaret Spellings in a statement.

The department last month announced the resignation of the previous FSA chief, Terri
Shaw. She letl on Monday after critics of the department said it had not done enough
over the years to police the student loan industry.
Spellings also released on Friday a 225-page packet ofproposedrules aimed at fLxing
some of the problems uncovered recently by investigators who allege conflicts of interest
and kickback schemes among lenders and college aid officers.

Investigators allege that lender banks have given payments and gifts to college officials
to curry favor and drum up business by winning spots on "preferred lender lists" shown
to students who need to borrow money for their education.

The Education Department’s proposals address both lender lists and the payments and
gilts, known as inducements.

Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy, who chairs the Senate education
committee, called the proposed rules "a positive development from the Department of
Education."
A department spokeswoman said final rules are expected to be completed by November !
to take effect in July 2008.

The rules would affect how business is done by leading student loan groups such as Sallie
Mae, Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase.

"Although ~ve have not yet had an opportunity to thoroughly review over 200 pages of
rules that ,vere released today, we are pleased that the Department of Education has
finally joined us in our efforts to clean up the student loan industry," said California
Democratic Rep. George Miller in a statement.
 Page 919

Miller chairs the House of Representatives education committee, which has helped lead
the investigations, along with Kennedy’s panel and New York Attorney General Andre~v
Cuomo.
"Given the extent of the corruption within these programs that has been highlighted by
ongoing investigations ... it is long past time for the department to start acting in the best
interests of students and their families," Miller said.

On May 9, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill that would crock down on student
loan market misconduct, tackling many of the issues addressed in the Education
Department proposals.

The Senate has not acted, although Kennedy said he expects "strong, bipartisan support
for lender-ethics provisions" in an upcoming education spending measure.

The Senate Banking Committee said on Friday it will hold a hearing on student loans and
college affordability on June 6. The plarmed sale of Sa~e Mae will also be a topic, it
said.

4. US OFFICIAL PROPOSES LIMITS ON LENDERS, COLLEGES

Bloomberg
June 2, 2007

US Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, criticized for her oversight of the $85
billion-a-year student-loan industry, proposed banning company gifts to colleges and
establishing rules for how schools recommend lenders.

Spellings submitted 225 pages of draft regulations yesterday for publication and public
comment, the department said yesterday in a statement. The proposed rules include a
provision requiting colleges that recommend lenders to students to have at least three
unrelated companies on their lists.
The draft rules follow criticism from Ne~v York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and
Democratic congressional leaders investigating financial arrangements between lenders
and colleges. Their inquiries have found colleges and student-aid officials accepting
undisclosed payments from lenders the schools recommended.

"Our investigation has repeatedly and clearly uncovered rampant conflicts of interest in
the student loan industry," Cuomo said yesterday in a statement. "We will review these
proposals, but it is clear now that the department should have acted with much greater
speed and seriousness."

Department investigations recently found that some schools selected lenders based on
"prohibited inducements" in the form of payments or other benefits, according to the
draft. The department’s inspector general warned in August 2003 that such inducements
were "becoming an increasing problem."
 Page 920

"Preferred-lender lists maintained by many schools do not represent the result of

unbiased research by the school to identify the lenders providing the best combination of
service and benefits to borrowers," the draft said.

Separately, US Senator Christopher Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the

Senate’s banking committee, yesterday said he plans to examine issues including private
student loans, the fastest-growing segment of the industry, and the proposed $25 billion
takeover of Sallie Mae, the largest US education-loan provider.

5. U.S. STUDENT LOAN OFFICE GETS NEW RULES AND A NEW CHIEF
Washington Post
June 2, 2007; A05
By Amit IL Paley

The Bush administration, fending off criticism tl~t it has failed to provide adequate
oversight to the student loan industry, proposed regulations yesterday that would prohibit
lenders from sho~vering universities with Ntis to drum up business.

The rules, announced by the Education Department, amount to the administration’s

strongest response so far to a nationwide investigation of the $85 billion-a-year business
that has exposed financial ties among lenders, school officials and government regulators.

Also yesterday, Lawrence Warder, the depaxtment’s chief financial officer, became the
acting head of its student lo~m office, after Theresa S. Shaw resigned last month amid
controversy. E~rlier th~ week, the agencgs inspector general said in a report to Congress
that the loan office and the department "have taken only minimal steps to address our
recommendations" to fix problems with student loan programs.

Some Democrats and consumer advocates said the department has taken too long to
develop the roles, which would not take effect until at least July 2008. The agency ldlled
a similar proposal in 2001 that had been drafted dttring the Clinton administration, and
Congress is expected to pass stricter limits on the industry this summer.

"These roles are too little, too late," said Luke Swarthout, an advocate for the U.S. Public
Interest Research Group Higher Education Project.

The proposed regulations emerged after Education Secretary Margaret Spellings initiated
a mlemaking process last year. A committee charged with creating rules on lender gifts
failed to reach consensus, which allowed the department to unilaterally draft the rules
announced yesterday.

Katherine McLane, a department spokeswoman, said the process, although long and
cumbersome, is the only way the agency can change policy. She said the depamnent
could not just wait and hope that Congress takes action.
 Page 921

"We are not resting on our laurels," she said. "We have to move forward."

The rules would prevent lenders from offering payments or other inducements to schools
as away to generate business. The proposal also requires schools that create lists of
preferred lenders to put at least three companies on the lists and provide detailed
explanations of how the lists were created.

In a preamble to the proposed regulatious, the department used some of its starkest
language to date in describing the crisis enveloping the loan industry. It said questionable
business practices are ’Jeopardizing a borrowel~S fight to choose a [lxivate] lender and
undermining the student financial aid administrator’s role as an impartial and informed
resource for students and parents."

The proposed roles also disclosed that recent agency investigations have found cases in
which schools recommended a lender in exchange for prohibited inducements. McLane
said she could not immediately provide more details.

6. BUSH PROPOSES RULES TO CURB ABUSE IN STUDENT LOAN

INDUSTRY
Associated Press
June 2, 2007

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration has proposed new roles aimed at
clamping down on conflicts of interest inthe student loan industry.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings had previously said she would issue the rules
about this time. The action comes amid high-profile investigations into the student loan
industry by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and lawmakers in Congress.

They have accused the Education Depamnent of failing to police improper relationships
between student lenders and colleges or their employees.
Cuomo’s investigation unveiled arrangements between mniversities and lenders in which
schools received some of the money lenders made from !oans at those schools. And in
some cases, the investigators found schools or loan officials were given incentives to
place loan companies on a school’s preferred-lender list.

7. BUSH APPROVES CHARTER CHANGE FOR TAKEOVER OF SCHOOLS;

CITY ASKS COURT TO OVERTURN ELECTION BOARD DECISION AND
DISALLOW REFERENDUM
Washington Post
June 2, 2007
By David Nakamura
 Page 922

President Bush approved a District charter anlondment yesterday that takes power a~vay
from the Board of Education and advances Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s plan to control the
punic schools.

Fenty ~) must ~vait until June 12 -- ~vhen the standard congressional revie~v period for
his takeover legislation expires -- to assume full authority over the struggling 55,000-
student system.

And Fenty’s plan still could be derailed by a cha!lenge from residents. Yesterday, D.C.
Attorney General Linda Singer asked a D.C. Superior Court judge to overturn a decision
by the city’s Board of Elections and Ethics that would give residents a chance to force a
referendum on the mayor’s takeover plan.

The board ruled last month that a referendum would be held in August if residents can
gather signatures from 5 percent of registered voters, about 20,000 people, by the June 12
expiration of the revie~v periock The residents may begin collecting signatures Tuesday.

In her court filing, Singer said a referendum would be improper for two reasons:
Congress has approved the Home Rule Charter amendment that Bush signed yesterday;
and Fenty has signed legislation that funds positions created under the takeover plan and
places the schoo! budget under the control of the mayor and D.C. Council.

"The Board’s acceptance of the Referendum would result in immediate and continuing
uncertainty," she wrote, as officials "prepare for the 2007-2008 academic year."

The case was assigned to Judge Lynn Leibovitz. Mayoral aides said the city and election
board have agreed to an expedited schedule under which the court would hear arguments
Wednesday.

Kenneth McGhie, an attorney for the elections board, was out of the office yesterday and
did not return a message left with an assistant.

The election board had ruled in favor of Mary Spencer, a D.C. resident who argued that
she should have a fight to vote to ovelmrn the takeover legislation approved by the
council. Spencer has two grandchildren in the public schools.

Matthe~v Watson, a lawyer who advised Spencer, called Singers argument "imaginative
but wrong," noting that the mayor’s fiscal 2008 budget has not been approved by
Congress.

"It’s a budget request, not a budget," Watson said.

In an interview, Singer said the budget "expresses the will of the council and mayor. It is
a change of aplaropriations. What the [school] board used to control, the mayor and
council ~q_ll now control."
 Page 923

Singer’s court cha!lenge comes a day after she sent a letter to the election board asking it
to reconsider last week’s n~ng. The board had not responded to that letter, Fenty aides
said yesterday.
 Page 924 Page ! of 8

~~
onresponsi
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: June 02, 2007 11:35 AM
To: Cariello, Dennis; Halaska, Terrell; Dunn, David; Terrell, Julie; Rosenfelt, Phil;
Pitts, Elizabeth; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Ruberg, Casey; Kuzmich, Holly;
Scheessele, Marc; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Flowers, Sarah; Williams, Cynthia;
Toomey, Liam; Tada, Wendy; tracy_d.__young@vvho.eop.gov; Reich, Heidi;
Landers, Angela; Talbert, Kent; Colby, Chad; Briggs, Kerri; McLane, Katherine;
Simon, Ray; Private -Spellings, Margaret; Neale, Rebecca; Herr, John; Ditto,
Trey; Maddox, Lauren; Beaton, Meredith; Yudof, Samara; Gdbble, Emily
Subject: WEEKEND NEWS SUMMARY, 6.2.07
Attachments: 6.2.07_wknd news summary.doc

WEEKEND NEWS SUMMLARY

Saturday, June 2, 2007

!. U.S. Tackles Student Lending (WSJ)

2. Education Department Issues Rules for Student Loans ~YT)
3. Bush admin, shakes up student aid, proposes rules (Reuters)
4. US official proposes limits on lenders, colleges (B!oomberg)
5. U.S. Student Loan Office Gets New Rules and a New Chief(W. Post)
6. Bush proposes roles to curb abuse in student loan industry (AP)
7. Bush Approves Charter Change for Takeover of Schools (W. Post)

1. U.S. TACKLES STUDENT LENDING; PROPOSALS TAKE AIM AT FIRMS’

PAYMENTS TO SCHOOL OFFICIALS
By Anne Marie Chaker
June 2, 2007

The U.S. Department of Education proposed to clamp down on payments from lending
companies to collie financial-aid officials, saying that such inducements are "jeopardizing"
the fights of student borrowers.

Under the departrnengs tong-awaited rules, which are expected to be finalized in the coming
months and take effect next year, lenders would be prohibited from paying for everything
from entertainment expenses to lodging and training registration fees for school offidals.
They would also be barred from providing staffing and other assistance to college financial-
aid offices.
"Special relationships between schools and lenders have developed," the department said in a
more than 200-page document containing the proposed rules, "j eopardizing a borro~ver’s right
to choose a...lender and undermining a student financial aid administrator’s role as an
impartial and inform ed resource for students and parents."
The proposed rules would also limit colleges’ practice of listing certain lenders as "preferred."
A national investigation byNew York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has found that
certain preferred lenders provided stock and other inducements to college financial-aid
officers. Several well-known schools have let go financial-aid officials ~vho accepted such

06/05/2008
 Page 925 Page 2 of 8

payments or stock from lenders.

The report cites "increasing evidence" that preferred lender lists at m~ny schools "do not
represent the result of unbiased research," and that some schools "have been restricting the
ability of borrowers to choose" by providing an electronic link to only one lender.

The new rules would require a school using a preferred-lender list to include at least three
lenders. It would also require the school to disclose how those lenders were chosen, and
advise potential borrowers that they aren’t required to use the listed lenders.

Some critics of cozy relationships between lenders and colleges said the restrictions on
preferred-lender lists don’t go far enough. The three-lender rule "is a bare minimum, and
ideally there should be more," said Mark K~ntrowitz, a Pittsbur~tt-based fmandal-aid expert.

The document also makes dear that lenders can’t skirt the anti-inducement provisions by
offering payments or other benefits to "school-affiliated" organizations, such as alumni
groups. It would also ban other inducements to universities, such as computer har&vare and
printing services. Lenders would also be prohibited from providing scholarships and other
financial contributions to colleges in return for preferred status.
The student-loan scandal also appears to have cost three lending executives their jobs. CIT
Group Inc. quietly fired three senior management officials of its Student Loan Xpress Inc.
unit who had been previously placed on administrative leave. Student Loan Xpress settled
last month with Mr. Cuomo’s office for providing stock or other payments to several college
financial-aid officials who recommended their loans to students. Mr. Cuomo’s office is
conducting an investigation of the three executives, in which CIT has agreed to cooperate.

2. EDUCATION DEPARTMENT ISSUES RULES FOR STUDENT LOANS

The New York Times
June 1, 2007
By Jonathan D. Glater

The federal Education Department released new rules for federal student loan programs today
that ~vould require universities to include at least three lenders on any list recommended to
students and that would ban many of the incentives loan companies have been offering
colleges and university officials to ~in student business.
The action represented a change in direction for the department which for years had failed to
respond to calls by its inspector general, Democratic lawmakers and even some loan-industry
officials for it to be more aggressive in polidng the $85 billion student loan industry and
def~ng what practices are banned.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings created a task force in Aptil to dra~v up the
regulations after the collapse of an effort in the winter to win consensus on new rules among
representatives of students, lenders and academic institutions in a process known as
’~negotiated nge making."
’°The secretary is men~g’t~e~e regulations to strengthen and improve the administration of
the loan programs," states the proposal which the department announced today.

The proposed regulations, which were sent to the federal register on Thursday, come on the
heels of investigations in the states and in Congress, led by the New York State’s attorney

06/05/2008
 Page 926 Page 3 of 8

general, Andrew M. Cuomo, that turned up an array of undisclosed relationships bet~veen

universities and lenders as wel! as conflicts of interest on the part of financial aid officers.
Some university officials who were promoting particular lenders had received stock on
favorable terms, consulting payments or gitts from loan companies.
Just this week, the Education Depar~rnent’s own inspector general reported to Congress that
the department had made ~5ninima!’" progress in dealing with complaints about abuse in the
nation’s system of government-backed student loans. An earlier report by the inspector
general, in 2003, criticized the deparh-nent for failing to provide any ~onidance on prohibited
inducements since 1995.
Department offidals have said repeatedly in the past that they did not have the authority to
oversee many of these practices because they involved private loans that are not federally
guaranteed and wanted finandal-aid officers and the loan industry to police themselves.

The proposed regulations, which will be published in the federal register for a 60-day
comment period, identify specific practices that would be barred, including "offering, directly
or indirectly, any points, premiums, payments, or other benefits to any school or other party
to secure" student loan volume, in the federally guaranteed loan program.
They ~vould also ban a college’s °’access to a lender’s other financial products, computer
hardware, and payment of the cost of printing and distribution of college catalogs and other
materials at less than market rate."

In addition, the rules would require that a university’s hst of recommended or ’~preferred"
lenders include at least three !oan companies and exclude any lenders that provided
inducements. Perhaps most importantly for students, the rules would require universities both
to explain how and why they recommend specific lenders and to ensure that all students, not
just a few, receive benefits offered by a lender on a preferred list.
The r%onlations are likely to meet little resistance. The Con~er Bankers Association
indicated that it accepted the need for additional regulation. And on Thursday the trade group
representing college financial aid officers agreed to bar its members from accepting most
lender gifts and to stop allowing lenders to sponsor its conferences.
3. BUSH ADMIN. SHAKES UP STUDENT AID, PROPOSES RULES
Reuters
June 1, 2007; 6:53 PM
By Kevin Drawbaugh

*NOTE: ran in The Washington Post

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Education on Friday put its college
student financial aid office under a temporary, new leader and proposed a raft of new rifles
amid a scandal in the $85 billion student loan business.

The department said Lawrence Warder will be acting chief operating officer of federal
student aid. Warder has been chief financial officer of the department since July 2006.

He will fill both rdes while a search continues for a permanent head of the federal student
aid (FSA) office.

06/05/2008
 Page 927 ~ge 4 of 8

An accountant and management consultant, Warder for now will run an office that delivers
$77 billion of financial aid annually to more than 10 million students and their families.
"Larry brings extensive management expertise .... He is ready to hit the ground running at
this important time at FSA," said Education Secretary Margaret Spellings in a statement.

The deparkment last month announced the resignation of the previous FSA chief, Terri Shaw.
She left on Monday after critics of the department said it had not done enough over the years
to police the student loan industry.

Spellings also released on Friday a 225-page packet of proposed rules aimed at fixing some
of the problems uncovered recently by investigators who allege contlicts of interest and
kickback schemes among lenders and college aid officers.

Investigators allege that lender banks have Nven payments and gifts to college officials to
curry favor and drum up business by winnhtg spots on "preferred lender lists" shown to
students ~vho need to borrow money for their education.

The Education Department’s proposals address both lender lists and the payments and gifts,
known as inducements.
Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy, who chairs the Senate education
committee, called the proposed rules "a positive development from the Department of
Education."
A deparhnent spokeswoman said fin!l rules are expected to be completed by November 1 to
take effect in July 2008.

The rules would affect how business is done by leading student loan groups such as Sallie
Mae, Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase.

"Although ~ve have not yet had an opportunity to thoroughly review over 200 pages of rules
that were released today, we are pleased that the Departxnent of Education has finatlyj oined
us in our efforts to clean up the student loan industry," said California Democratic Rep.
George Miller in a statement.

Miller chairs the House of Representatives education committee, which has helped lead the
investigations, along with Kennedy’s panel and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.
"Given the extent of the corruption within these programs that has ben highli~hted by
ongoing investigations ... it is long past lJxne for the department to start acting in the best
interests of students and their families," Miller said.
On May 9, the House ove~vhelmingly passed a bill that would crack down on student loan
market misconduct, tackling many of the issues addressed in the Education Depmlrnent
proposals.

The Senate has not acted, although Kennedy said he expects "strong, bipartisan support for
lender-ethics provisions" in an upcoming education spending measure.

The Senate Banking Committee said on Friday it will hold a hearing on student loans and
college affordability on June 6. The planned sale of Sallie Mac will also be a topic, it said.

06/05/2008
 Page 928 Page 5 of 8

4. US OFFICIAL PROPOSES LIMITS ON LENDERS, COLLEGES

Bloomberg
June 2, 2007

US Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, criticized for her oversi~t of the $85 billion-a-
year student-loan industry, proposed banning company gifts to colleges and establishing rules
for how schools recommend lenders.

Spellings submitted 225 pages of draft regulations yesterday for publication and public
comment, the department said yesterday in a statement. The proposed roles include a
provision requiting colleges that recommend lenders to students to have at least three
unrelated companies on their lists.
The draft roles follow criticism from New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and
Democratic congressional leaders investigating financial arrangements bet~veen lenders and
colleges. Their inquiries have found colleges and student-aid officials accepting undisclosed
payments from lenders the schools recommended.

"Our investigation has repeatedly and clearly uncovered rampant conflicts of interest in the
student !oan industry," Cuomo said yesterday in a statement. "We will review these
proposals, but it is clear now that the department should have acted with much greater speed
and seriousness."
Department investigations recently found that some schools selected lenders based on
"prohibited inducements" in the form of payments or other benefits, according to the draft.
The departmenfs inspector general warned in August 2003 that such inducements were
"becoming an increasing problem."

"Preferred-lender lists maintained by many schools do not represent the result of unbiased
research by the school to identify the lenders providing the best combination of service and
benefits to borrowers," the draft said.
Separately, US Senator Christopher Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut ~nd chairman of the
Senate’s banking committee, yesterday said he plans to examine issues including private
student loans, the fastest-growing segment of the industry, and the proposed $25 billion
takeover ofSallie Mae, the largest US education-loan provider.

5. U.S. STUDENT LOAN OFFICE GETS NEW RULES AND A NEW CHIEF
Washington Post
June 2, 2007; A05
By Amit IL Paley
The Bush administration, fending offcriticism that it has failed to provide adequate oversi~ht
to the student loan industry, proposed regulations yesterday that would prohibit lenders from
showering tmiversities with Ntis to drum up business.

The rules, announced by the Education Department~ amount to the administration’s strongest
response so far to a nationwide investigation of the $85 billion-a-year business that has
exposed financial ties among lenders, school officials and government regulators.
Also yesterday, Lawrence Warder, the department’s chief financial officer, became the acting

06/05/2008
 Page 929 Page 6 of 8

head of its student loan office, after Theresa S. Shaw resigned last month amid controversy.
Earlier this week, the agency’s inspector general said in a report to Congress that the loan
office and the department "have taken only minimal steps to address our recommendations"
to fix problems with student loan programs.
Some Democrats and consumer advocates said the department has taken too long to develop
the rifles, which would not take effect until at least July 2008. The agency killed a similar
proposal in 2001 that had been drafted during the Clinton administration, and Congress is
expected to pass slricter limits on the industry this summer.

"These rales are too little, too late," said Luke Swarthout, an advocate for the U.S. Public
Interest Research Group Higher Education Project.

The proposed regxtlations emerged after Education Secretary Margaret Spellings initiated a
rulemaking process last year. A committee charged with creating rules on lender ~fts failed
to reach consensus, which allowed the department to unilaterally draf[ the rules announced
yesterday.

Katherine McLane, a department spokeswoman, said the process, although long and
cumbersome, is the only way the agency can change policy. She said the department could
not just wait and hope that Congress takes action.

"We are not resting on our laurels," she said. "We have to move forward."
The rules would pi~vent lenders from offering payments or other inducements to schools as a
way to generate business. The proposal also requires schools that create lists of preferred
lenders to put at least three companies on the lists and provide detailed explanations of how
the lists were created.

In a preamble to the proposed regulations, the department used some of its starkest langa~age
to date in describing the crisis enveloping the loan industry. It said questionable business
practices are "jeopardizing a borrower’s ri~t to choose a [private] lender and undermining
the student financial aid administrators role as an impartial and informed resource for
students and parents."
The proposed rules also disclosed that recent agency investigations have found cases in
which schools recommended a lender in exchange for prohibited inducements. McLane said
she could not immediately provide more details.
6. BUSH PROPOSES RULES TO CURBABUSE IN STUDENT LOAN INDUSTRY
Associated Press
June 2, 2007

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration has proposed new roles aimed at damping
down on conflicts of interest in the student loan industry.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings hadprevionsly said she would issue the rules about
this time. The action comes amid high-proNe investigations into the student loan industry by
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and lawmakers in Congress.

They have accused the Education Department of failing to police improper relationstfips
between student lenders and colleges or thek employees.

06/05/2008
 Page 930 Page 7 of 8

Cuomo’s investigation unveiled arrangements between universities and lenders in w1~ch

schools received some of the money lenders made from loans at those schools. And in some
cases, the investigators fotmd schools or loan officials were given incentives to place loan
companies on a school’s p~eferred-lender

7. BUSH APPROVES CHARTER CHANGE FOR TAKEOVER OF SCHOOLS; CITY

ASKS COURT TO OVERTURN ELECTION BOARD DECISION AND DISALLOW
REFERENDUM
Washington Post
June 2, 2007
By David Nakamura

President Bush approved a District charter amendment yesterday that takes power away from
the Board of Education and advances Mayor Adrian M. Fent2is plan to control the public
schools.

Fenty (D) must ~vait until June 12 -- when the standard congressional revie~v period for his
takeover legislation expires -- to assume fin authority over the struggling 55,000-student
system.
And Fenty’s plan still could be derailed by a challenge from residents. Yesterday, D.C.
Attorney General Linda Singer asked a D.C. Superior Court judge to overturn a decision by
the city’s Board of Elections and Ethics that would give residents a chance to force a
referendum on the mayors takeover plan.

The board ruled last month that a referendum would be held in August if residents can gather
signatures from 5 percent of registered voters, about 20,000 people, by the June 12 expiration
of the review period. The residents may beNn collecting signatures Tuesday.
In her court filing, Singer said a referendum would be improper for two reasons: Congress
has approved the Home Rule Charter amendment that Bush signed ye,~terday; and Fenty has
signed legislation that funds positions created under the takeover plan and places the school
budget under the control of the mayor and D.C. Coundl.

"The Board’s acceptance of the Referendum would result in immediale and continuing
uncertainty," she ~vrote, as officials "prepare for the 2007-2008 academic year."

The case was assigned to Judge Lynn Leibovitz. Mayoral aides said the dty and decfion
board have agreed to an expedited schedule under which the court would hear arguments
Wednesday.
Kenneth McGhie, an attorney for the deetions board, was out of the office yesterday and did
not retun~ a message left with an assistant.

The election board had ruled in favor of Mary Spencer, a D.C. resident who argued that she
should have a right to vote to overturn the takeover leNslation approved by the council.
Spencer has two grandchildren in the public schools.
Matthe~v Watson, a lawyer ~vho advised Spencer, called Singer’s argument "imaNnafive but
wrong," noting that the mayors fiscal 2008 budget has not been approved by Congress.

06/05/2008
 Page 931 Page 8 of 8

"It’s a budget request, not a budget," Watson said.

In an interview, Singer said the budget "extxesses the will of the counc~ and mayor. It is a
change of appropriations. What the [school] board used to control, the mayor and council wil!
now control."

Singer’s court challenge comes a day aRer she sent a letter to the election board asking it to
reconsider last week’s ruling. The board had not responded to that letter, Fenty aides said
yesterday.
###

06/05/2008
 Page 932

Nonresponsi !
From: Reich, Heidi
Sent: May 31, 2007 8:58 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Bryant, Jessica; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey;
Dorfman, Cynthia; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Maguire, Tory;, McGrath, John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar,
Doug; Moran, Robert; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Private - Spellings, Margaret; Tada,
Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia;
Young, Tracy; Young, Tracy D. ; Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken
Subject: Time To Foster Innovation (PHI)

Time To Foster Innovation (PHI)

By Paul Kimmelman
The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 31, 2007
The parade of witnesses testifying at Education Committee hearings in the House and Senate on the reauthorization of the
No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is a red flag, warning that Congress may be lulling itself into the belief that simply tweaking
NCLB will raise the quality of U.S. schools.
This false sense of security means that the real direction in which we must take schools - beyond compliance and toward
innovation for a 21 st-century education system - is being ignored. The next frontier for Americans’ lives and livelihoods in the
knowledge economy is a world-class education system that truly works for all students.
Don’t get me wrong: NCLB, as written, has its virtues. Chief among them is that it put teeth into school reform. Over the
years, business leaders had convened summits, academics had written white papers, and policy makers had advocated for
school reform. Although these groups were well-intentioned, it still took the passage of NCLB, a federal law, to make schools
accountable for results.
Congress now has an opportunity to reauthorize NCLB as a policy that supports innovation and responds to the urgency
felt across the country to keep the United States an economic force in the world. When it passed NCLB in 2001, Congress
accomplished its most important goal by creating a culture change within the education profession. Consider that Education
Secretary Margaret Spellings announced recently to a gathering of education writers that 70 percent of the nation’s schools were
in compliance with NCLB standards. This gives me confidence that many educators are ready for the next step - moving schools
beyond a compliance mentality and toward innovation.
Stimulating the education sector to innovate will not be easy, but nothing will contribute more to our nation’s vitality. We can
start with a few simple steps:
Invest in research and development to improve practices in math and science education that emphasize discovery and
problem solving.
Invite more collaboration among business, academia, research organizations and education leaders to stimulate new
approaches to vexing challenges, not the least of which is the need to harness new technologies.
Offer merit-based grants to states that develop winning approaches to teacher preparation, instructional methods and
publictprivate partnerships to disseminate their know-how across the profession.
Education is never short on challenges, but NCLB has led to real changes in the way schools are approaching them. The
experts testifying before Congress should be focusing on a federal policy that encourages innovation. Think of this parallel: After
Congress imposed higher gas-mileage requirements on the auto industry, several automakers responded with revolutionary
hybrid vehicles.
The new NCLB must address how schools will strive toward excellence, not simply meet the minimum requirements of the
law. Hours spent tweaking the mandates of NCLB will not yield a more competitive workforce. What will is developing a forward-
looking agenda to prepare our children for the world they will inherit.
Paul Kimmelman (paul.kimmelman@comcast.net)is author of"Implementing NCLB: Creating a Knowledge Framework to
Support School Improvement."
 Page 933

Nonresponsi
From: Reich, Heidi
Sent: May 31, 2007 8:52 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Bryant, Jessica; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey;
Dorfrnan, Cynthia; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Maguire, Tory;, McGrath, John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar,
Doug; Moran, Robert; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Private - Spellings, Margaret; Tada,
Wendy; Talber~, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toom ey, Liam; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia;
Young, Tracy; Young, Tracy D. ; Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken
Subject: A Lesson For Spellings: Educators, Leaders Grill U.S. Education Chief (STAMADV CT)

A Lesson For Spellings: Educators, Leaders Grill U.S. Education Chief (STAMADV CT)
By. Chris Gosier
The Stamford (CT) Advocate, May 31, 2007
STAMFORD - During a visit yesterday with U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, educators and community
leaders called for changes to the federal law that pushes schools to raise standardized test scores.
The No Child Let~ Behind Act is up for reauthorization this year, and Spellings is holding meetings nationwide to hear ideas
about how to improve it.
She got an earful yesterday at the Stamford campus of the University of Connecticut, where educators said the law should
reflect the progress of students even if their test scores aren’t at the standard.
Students grow a lot before reaching the standard dictated by the law, and the law should account for that, said Dudley
Williams, a board member with Stamford Achieves, a community group that works to improve education.
Wilton schools Superintendent Gary Richards said it’s demoralizing for parents and teachers to make improvements in
education but still see their schools designated as failing. He favored a "growth model" that reflects progress.
’1 am very much supportive of this sort of notion," Spellings said, but it calls for a "graduate-level type of accountability"
because of the data involved.
There’s a push toward more nuanced accountability, and distinguishing between schools that chronically underperform and
those that nearly meet the standards, Spellings said.
"We can make some distinctions like that now" because of the data that’s been gathered since No Child Left Behind was
passed in 2002, she said.
In Connecticut, the law requires schools to meet the state goal on the Connecticut Mastery Test, given in elementary and
middle school, and the Connecticut Academic Performance Test, given in high school.
Schools that have substandard test scores for a few years must let students transfer to schools that score better, change
school leadership and meet other standards.
Spellings said the law is narrowing the achievement gap between white and minority students, and the government is
poised to improve it after five years of seeing how it has worked.
"We learned some things, no doubt about it;" she said.
The Rev. Lindsay Curtis, president of the Norwalk NAACP chapter, said children are being left behind in spite of the law,
and there are too many students in some classes. Part of the answer lies with community groups such as the Norwalk Achieves
Partnership, he said.
"It appears to be testing versus learning" in some classrooms, Curtis said. ’q-hat continues to be a major concern in our
communities."
Another concern is that states and cities don’t get enough federal money to meet No Child Left Behind requirements,
educators and officials said.
"Always feel free to send money," Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy said.
"Mayor, resources are a perennial issue in Washington," Spellings replied.
Connecticut and other states have sued the federal education department over the costs of No Child Let~ Behind.
Spellings said she was gratitied after a federal judge ruled against Connecticut in September on three of four claims raised
in the suit.
But Connecticut Attomey General Richard Blumenthal said the issue is alive because of the fourth claim, which has yet to
1
 Page 934

be addressed.
He released a statement yesterday welcoming Spellings to Connecticut, saying she "needs to listen to administrators and
teachers in the trenches who know first-hand the devastating impact of unfunded mandates."
Christopher Poulos, Connecticut’s Teacher of the Year, gave Spellings and U.S. Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Bridgeport, 10
proposed changes that the national Teachers of the Year organization drew up. Members of the group would like to be non-
voting members of Congress’s education committees, he said.
"We want teachers at the table," said Poulos, a teacher at Joel Barlow High School in Redding.
Spellings and Shays also met with the Business Council of Fairfield County to discuss improving higher education.
 Page 935

Nonresponsi

To:
.. ............................. .........................
May31, 2007 5:11 AM
scott m. stanzel@who.eop.gov; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Ruberg, Casey; Colby,
Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Dorfman, Cynthia; Dunckel, Denise; Evers, Bill;
Gribble, Emily; Kuzmich, Holly; La Force, Hudson; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie;
Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mesecar, Doug; Moran,
Robert; Neale, Rebecca; Reich, Heidi; rob Saliterman; Yudof, Samara; Scheessele, Marc;
Halaska, Terrell; Toner, Jana; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Young, Tracy; Ditto, Trey; Tucker, Sara
Martinez; Zeff, Ken
Co: McLane, Katherine
Subject: USAT editorial: Our view on education reform: How to fix ’No Child’ law

Our view on education reform: How to fix ’No Child’

law
Act’s sanctions, aid should be targeted at most-troubled schools.

In Florida last year, only 29% of schools made "adequate yearly progress" under the
federal No Child Left Behind law. Can Florida schools really be that bad?

Most likely not. The problems at more than half of the lagging schools are probably easily
fixed. And yet those schools get lumped together with seriously failing ones.

That guilt-by-association is a serious problem for the No Child law, which took effect in
2002 and badly needs friends as Congress decides whether to renew President Bush’s
signature education reform.
Mmny Democrats hate the law because teachers’ unions hate it. Many Republicans dislike it
because they don’t want the federa! government meddling in local schools. Teachers and
parents dislike the testing, which is designed to ensure that all students are learning.

All the opposition is unfortunate, because already the law has helped thousands of poor
and minority students whose teachers and principals are now held accountable for their
education. In years past, these students were allowed to slide through school unti! they
either dropped out or "graduated" with marginml skills.

Fixing the law’s flaws requires narrowing its focus

to:

* Snag fewer schools. Nationally, about 20% of all schools run afoul of the law’s
accountability measures by failing to make adequate progress two years in a row. Many
education experts estimate that less than half of those schools are truly troubled.

The rest are schools with manageable problems.

Appomattox Elementary School in Appomattox County, Va., for example, always did well with
its white students, who make up 68% of the school population, but fell into trouble in
2004 when black and poor students failed to make adequate progress. Teachers scrambled,
and not only did the school get off the troubled list, but two weeks ago it won a state
"distinguished schoo!" award.
The Education Trust, which lobbies on behmlf of poor schools, has a worthy idea: Designate
schools such as Appomattox as needing "focused" reforms and require the worst schools to
undergo "comprehensive" reform.

* Concentrate the assistance. In theory, schools with long track records of failure face
radical restructuring, but most of those schools merely tinker with cosmetic reforms.

Solving this requires state officials to sort out which of the failing schools are in the
deepest trouble and work first with them. For their part, Washington officials have to
squeeze more school rescue money out of Congress, which to date has chipped in a relative
pittance to a school turnaround fund.

The foes of No Child Left Behind
fact: For many students, this is
why Education Secretary Margaret
to boost the law’s effectiveness
Page 936
miss one important
their last, best chance to get a decent education. That’s
Spellings and congressional backers need to act quickly
before its many enemies kill it off.

Poor progress
States with the highest number of "chronically troubled" schools under the No Child Left
Behind law:

i. California (357)
2. New York (166)

3. Illinois (138)

4. Pennsylvania (69)

5. Hawaii (50)

Source: U.S. Department of Education

Posted at 12:21 AH/ET, May 31, 2007 in Education - Editorial, Law/Judiciary - Editoria!,
Politics, Government - Editorial, Reforming Washington - Editoria!, USA TODAY editorial
Permalink

Fussy?
Opinionated? Impossible to please? Perfect. Join Yahoo~’s user panel and lay it on us.
http:!/surveylink, yahoo.com/gmrs/yahoo_panel_invite.asp?a=7
 Page 937

Nonresponsi
From: Reich, Heidi
Sent: May30, 2007 9:33 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerd; Bryant, Jessica; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Dil~o, Trey;
Dorfman, C~thia; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddo×,
Lauren; Maguire, Tory;, McGrath, John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar,
Doug; Moran, Robert; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pttts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Private - Spellings, Margaret; Tada,
Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia;
Young, Tracy; Young, Tracy D. ; Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken
Subject: The Education Dept. On The Loan Scandal (NYT)

The Education Dept. On The Loan Scandal (1 Letter) (NYT)

By Margaret Spellings
The NewYork Times, May 30, 2007
To the Editor:
VVhen it comes to protecting college students from shady lending practices, the Department of Education is on the case
("Educating the Education Secretary," editorial, May 14).
Fixing the student loan system is a top priority. We have closed a loophole that allowed some private lenders to game the
system. And we are continually conducting audits and review~
But to change the game we need to change the law.
Current law inhibits enforcement, because of a high burden of proof. It forces the department to demonstrate that a lender’s
actions were clearly intended to result in loan applications. Your editorial does not point out this key fact.
We are committed to injecting more choice, competition and transparency into the federal student aid process.
Our plan would ensure that every borrower has the right to choose any lender, and would require schools with preferred
lender lists to disclose how and why those lenders were chosen.
We’re already taking steps to ban gitts in exchange for loans and to limit deceptive marketing. And we are working closely.
with Congress and the many agencies with partial oversight of the private student loan process.
One final note: To ensure that college remains affordable for as many families as possible, President Bush has proposed
the largest increase in federal Pell Grants in 30 years. We are pleased that Congress is working with us to accomplish this goal.
Margaret Spellings
Secretary of Education
Washington, May 25, 2007
 Page 938

Nonresponsi
From: Reich, Heidi
Sent: May30, 2007 9:01 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Bryant, Jessica; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey;
Dorfman, Cynthia; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Maguire, Tory;, McGrath, John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Mesecar,
Doug; Moran, Robert; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pttts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Private - Spellings, Margaret; Tada,
Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia;
Young, Tracy; Young, Tracy D. ; Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken
Subject: SMS LTE in Washington Post

Making Progress On Student Loans (WP)

The Washin,qton Post, May 30, 2007
I appreciate The Post’s editors agreeing with me that the student loan and financial aid system "needs a lot of work beyond
tightening ethics rules" ["Belated Insight," editorial, May 20]. But it must be added that we are taking action.
This is not a new story. In 2001, the Bush administration inherited a problem-filled system. Millions of dollars of Education
Department money could not be accounted for. Too many student loan borrowers were defaulting. Federal student aid programs
had not received a clean audit opinion in years, earning placement on the high-risk list of the Government Accountability Office
(GAO).
Today, we are far better able to monitor questionable practices, an improvement that can aid state attorneys general in
their investigations. The student loan default rate has fallen, and we’ve had five consecutive clean financial audit opinions. As a
result, in 2005 the GAO took student aid programs off its high-risk list.
We are committed to injecting more choice, competition and transparency into the federal student aid process. Our plan
would ensure that every borrower has the right to choose any lender and would require schools with preferred lender lists to
disclose how and why lenders were chosen. Recently, we closed a regulatory loophole that had allowed some private lenders to
game the system.
We’re also focused on the consumers of education -- students and their families. With tuition outracing family incomes, we
proposed the largest increase in federal Pell Grants in 30 years. And our Commission on the Future of Higher Education has
offered new ways to make a college education more accessible and affordable.
But we have a long way to go. Stopping questionable lending practices will require a long-term commitment by Congress,
the federal government, colleges and universities, and the private lenders themselves. Fortunately, that effort is well underway.
MARGARET SPELLINGS
Secretary, U.S. Department of Education
Washington
 Page 939

Nonresponsive [
From: Reich, Heidi
Sent: May30, 2007 8:50 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Bryant, Jessica; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey;
Dorfrnan, Cynthia; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Maguire, Tory;, McGrath, John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar,
Doug; Moran, Robert; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Private - Spellings, Margaret; Tada,
Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toom ey, Liam; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia;
Young, Tracy; Young, Tracy D. ; Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken
Subject: Sen Wyden, Schools Chief Castillo Pledge To Overhaul ’No Child Let~ Behind’ Act (OPB OR)

Sen Wyden, Schools Chief Castillo Pledge To Overhaul ’No Child Left Behind’ Act (OPB OR)
By Rob Manning
Ore,qon Public Broadcastinq, May 30, 2007
PORTLAND, OR 2007-05-29 Senator Ron Wyden and state schools chief Susan Castillo promised Tuesday morning to
help overhaul the federal No Child Lef~ Behind Act. The law, often shorthanded as "NCLB" comes before Congress this year.
Lawmakers and many advocates praised NCLB when it was signed into law more than five years ago. But for nearly as long,
critics have called the law inflexible and underfunded. Some teachers even call it harmful. As Rob Manning reports, Wyden and
Castillo, are leading meetings around Oregon as a step toward reforming the law.
It’s hard to argue with the intent of No Child Left Behind. to close the notorious gap between white kids who tend to do well
in school and minority kids who often don’t. The law has been controversial for how it attempts to get there.
Senator Wyden says the law has fallen far short.
Ron Wyden: "The promise of the law was realistic funding and realistic accountability, and unfortunately there hasn’t been
enough of either."
Next to funding, the biggest complaint among educators is that the law is too rigid. The law tracks specific sub-groups of
students, like low-income kids and foreign language speakers. It’s up to schools to get a high percentage of students in each
group to reach the same high benchmark. If any one sub-group misses, the entire school misses. Sanctions can result.
As this week’s set of listening sessions begin, Senator Wyden promised to push for a model that would judge whether
schools are working or not, not against a fixed benchmark, but based on whether students are making gains overall.
Ron Wyden: "In the past, I think there has been an interest in the federal government, in setting an arbitrary standard, and
everybody trying to figure out howto teach to that. What we’re interested in here, in Oregon, is in making sure all our students
are making substantial growth."
Wyden told educators at a morning round table that with Democrats in control, there should be "dramatic changes" to a law
he called "grotesque and mindless." For years, though, the Bush administration has defended the law, though that may be
changing.
The "growth model" Wyden advocates is an example. In a 2004 interviewwith OPB, then Assistant Secretary of Education
Gene Hickock advocated the current system.
Gene Hickock: "To me, it’s not as big of a problem as some other accountability systems, say ’growth.’ And they want to
see how much students improve over a year, and to reach a certain target, they’ll focus on the ones who are most likely to
improve. No Child Left Behind doesn’t do that. One of the other challenges of a growth model is that you get credit if you get a
child from an ’F,’ for lack of a better term, to a ’D.’ That’s movement, but it’s not grade level."
Fast-forward three years. Hickock and Secretary Rod Paige have left. New secretary Margaret Spellings delivered a very
different message recently. She appeared last week on Comedy Central’s "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart".
Jon Stewart: "Is there something in it you feel like you’d like to tweak?"
Margaret Spellings: "Well, sure, we passed the best lawwe could ~e years ago, that’s why we have re-authorizations --"
Jon Stewad: "What would you do?"
Margaret Spellings: "We can be more precise about howwe measure kids, looking at their progress over time, it’s called
the ’growth model.’"
Spellings has allowed a fewstates to try out growth models, though not Oregon. But not all school leaders are sold on if_
Among them, Centennial superintendent Bob McKean. He cautioned Senator Ron Wyden that the model may lose track of
 Page 940
thousands of students who move from school to school.
McKean says it’s no cure-all for No Child Lett Behind.
Bob McKean: "It’s certainly not the solution to all that ails it. I think as a society, we’re struggling howto measure
adequately, success for students in all schools, but I would just say that the Byzantine model, convoluted model we have, is
certainly not adequate."
Educators made their recommendations at Atkinson Elementary, where there’s a program to teach both English and
Spanish to kids who come from both language backgrounds. As teachers and advocates made their case, kids who speak
English at home were in the halls, practicing Spanish.
(sound of students speaking Spanish)
Atkinson’s principal argued that languages take years to learn, and kids learning English need more time than the current
law allows. Special ed advocates also lobbied for more flexibility for students with disabilities. Some argued for scrapping the taw
entirely.
State schools superintendent Susan Castillo said she’s ready to junk the law’s punitive nature.
Susan Castillo: "Right now, the law is very focused on punishment, rather than support for improvement, and we’ve been
doing a lot of work not only in Oregon but across the country on school improvement, we~’e learned a lot, and things we can to
help our schools be successful. But the first options under this law are punishment."
After Portland, Wyden and Castillo head to Bend, Eugene, and Medford. They’re likely to hear about another problem
there.
Rural districts say that getting enough "highly qualified teachers" under the federal definition can be close to impossible.
Portland teachers also suggested making that part of the law more flexible.
Administrators cautioned, though, that like many aspects of NCLB, making time to help the law work gets back to the first,
most common, complaint: It’s going to take more funding.
 Page 941 Page 1 of 8

LN,~onresponsi [
From: Ditto, Trey
Sent" May 25, 2007 11:53 AM
To: ’katherine mclane’; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Ruberg, Casey; Colby, Chad;
Williams, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Dorfman, Cynthia; Evers, Bill; Kuzmich, Holly; La
Force, Hudson; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private -
Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mesecar, Doug; Moran, Robert; Neale, Rebecca;
Reich, Heidi; rob Saliterman; Yudof, Samara; Scheessele, Marc; Halaska, Terrell;
Toner, Jana; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Young, Tracy; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Zeff, Ken
Subject: RE: Howto Fix No Child Left Behind (TIME)

Here is the "printer friendly version." My blackberry battery died from all the scrolling on the first one.

How to Fix No Child Left Behind

By Claudia Wallis, Sonja Steptoe

Ilts countdown dine in Philadelphia’s public schools. Just 21 days remain before the state
reading and math tests in March, and the kids and faculty at James G. Blaine Elementary, an
all-black, inner-city school that spans pre-K to eighth grade, have been drilling for much of
the day. At 2:45 in the afternoon, Rasheed Abdullah, the kinetic lead math teacher, stages
what could be called a prep rally with 11 third-graders. The kids, who are at neither the top
nor the bottom of their class, have been selected for intensive review--as has a contingent
from other grades--because the~ test scores hold the key to putting the school over the top on
the pivotal Pennsylvania System of School Assessments (PSSAS). Last year, after a history
of failure, the school, under new leadership, managed to meet the federal goal for adequate
yearly pro~ess (AYP) on the state tests for the first time. If it does so again, Blaine moves
offthe dreaded list of failing schools, no longer a target for intensive oversight and sanctions
that could include replacing the staff.

Abdullah, who has an easy rapport with students, issues a quick reminder to sign up for
"Super Saturday" review classes and then begins his math-athon with a rousing recitation of
the school’s declaration of education. "We believe that we can learn at high levels," the
children chant. "We believe we can reach our learning potential ... We believe that Blaine
wi!l become a high-performing institution."

Quite a mouthful for an 8-year-old. And there’s more. Abdullah starts pumping his fists as the
kids finish with passionate vows.
’TI1 never give up[" he shouts.

"I’11 never give up!" they echo.

"Even on the PSSA test!"

"Even on the PSSA test["

’"Cause winners never lose, and I am the best["

06/05/2008
 Page 942 Page 2 of 8

For the next 15 minutes, the kids, divided into teams, compete to win points by solving math
problems, with Abdullah acting as a combination game-show host and math coach. There are
giggles and cheers and plenty of correct answers, but everyone in the room knows the fate of
the school is at st~e.

To understand the impact of the 2001 Elementm7 and Secondary Education Act, indelibly
rebranded as No C1~d Left Behind (NCLB), you need to visit a school like Blaine. The
astonish~gly ambitious law, the Bush Administration’s proudest domestic achievement, was
crat~ed with high-poverty, low-achieving schools like this one in mind. NCLB proponents
and critics alike a~ee that the law’s greatest accomplishment has been shining an unforgiving
spotlight on such languishing schools and demanding that they do better. At Blaine, for
instance, only 13% of fifth- and eighth-graders were reading on grade level or above in 2004-
-a number that has since risen to 36%.

Under the law’s most visible stipulation, states must test public school students in reading and
math every year from third through eighth grade, plus once in high school, and reveal the
results for each school or face a loss of federal funds. Just as critical, schools must break out
test results for certain groups: blacks, Hisparfics, English-langaage learners, learning-disabled
students. This has embarrassed many a top suburban school where high-flying majorities
have masked the low achievement of minorities and special-ed students. The law insists--
with consequences for failure--that schools make annual progress toward closing the
achievement gap between rich and poor, black and white, and bring all students to grade-
level proficiency in math and reading by 2014, ending what the President memorably called
"the soft bigotry of low expectations."

Ask almost any school administrator, education policymaker or think-tank wonk about
NCLB, and you’re guaranteed to get at least one sunny metaphor about ho~v the law opened a
window, raised a curtain or otherwise illuminated the plight of the nalion’s underserved kids.
This is NCLB’S biggest achievement and the best reason for Congress to reauthorize the law.
"At the end of the day, who can argue with holding schools accountable for all children?"
asks Paul Vallas, outgoing chief executive of Philadelphia’s schools and incoming head of the
New Orleans school district. "Who can argu~ with not tolerating failJ_ng schools or with
giving poor kids the kinds of choices that wealthier kids have? Ills a dvil fights issue."

There’s plenty of argm-nent, ho~vever, about how the law seeks to achieve these goals. NCLB
takes the Federal Government--which contributes only 9¢ of every $1 spent on U.S. schools--
where ifs never gone before: telling the states how to measure school success, specifying
interventions for failure, mandating qualifications for teachers and even telling the nation
ho~v to teach reading. This year, as the five-year-old la~v comes up for debate, an unforgiving
spotlight will be focused on its impact thus far, including its numerous unintended
consequences. Many teachers are enraged by the lady’s reliance on high-stakes exams that
lead schools like Blaine to focus relentlessly on boosting scores rather than pursuing a
broader vision of education. More than 30,000 educators and concerned citizens have signed
an online petition calling for the repea! of the 1,100-page statute. Some offer comments like
this one from a former superintendent of schools in Ohio: "NCLB is like a Russian novel.
ThaWs because it’s long, it’s complicated, and in the end, everybody gets killed."

Whether NCLB is achieving its objectives remains an open question. Fourth-grade reading
scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) rose sharply from 1999
to 2004, but most of the gains occurred before the law took effect The achievement gap
appears to be narrowing in some spots--fourth- and eighth-grade math scores for minorities,
for instance--but not others. The gap between white and black eighth-graders has widened

06/05/2008
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slightly in math, for example. Gains for eighth-graders in general remain stubbornly elusive.

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who has been advising the President on education
since his days as Texas Governor, notes that the law went into fi~ effect only last year and
that more time is needed for it to work. Still, she and the Administration have proposed a
large number of adjustments to a law she once compared to Ivory soap, saying "Ifs 99.9%
pure." "We wrote the very best bill we could five years ago," Spellin~ told TIME, "but we’ve
learned from our experiences." Meanwhile, members of Congress have their own fix-it
agendas, as do state education officials and, of course, the teachers unions.

Much of the debate over renewing the law is focused on five areas of controversy:

oAYP on reading and math tests: Is it the right tool for measuring learning and raising
achievement in the nation’s schools?

°Are the 50 states, each of which devises its own annual tests and cundculum standards,
setting the bar high enough for students, and if not, what should be done about it?

¯ Is the focus on reading and math distorting and narrowing education?

¯ Do the la~v’s requirements for teacher qualifications make sense, and are they raising the
quality of the U.S. teaching force?

°Are the directives aimed at failing schools having the intended impact? What is the right role
for the Federal Government in f~xing bad schools?

In addition to these policy questions, there’s the matter of money. The states have complained
bitterly that NCLB imposes its many mandates without the federal funds originally promised
to implement them. Providing more money for NCLB is a key goal for the Democrats, who
control Confess, and is almost certainly part of their price for reauthorizing the law. A look
at some of the more challenging issues:

HOW SHOULD WE MEASURE LEARNING?

The heart and soul of No Child Left Behind are its reql~ements for armual testing and proof
that students of every stripe are making adequate yearly progress. AYP is as basic to U.S.
education as ABC, but most thoughtfifl educators oloj ect to the way it’s measured. One of the
biggest problems: there are too many ways to fail, even when a school is moving in the right
direction.

Consider the case of Bud Carson Middle School in Hawthorne, Calif. In 2005 the school,
which is 92% Lafino and black, pulled out the stops to reverse its failing record and hit 20 out
of its 21 AYP goals, lifting scores for blacks, Hispanics and special-ed students; c!osing
achievement ~o-aps; and raising attendance. Nonetheless, the school remained on the "needs
improvement" list that year because it nmxowly missed the reading-score goal for its En~ish-
language learners. (Happily, it made AYP ayear later.)

Jack O’Colmell, California’s superintendent ofpubhc instruction, is one of many

administrators around the country who findthe AYP system too infl~.ible, too arbitrary and
too punitive. Some Cahfornia schools, he says, have made huge progress, but because they
did not make AYP they are reqtfired to help students transfer to another school. "So," he

06/05/2008
 Page 944 Page 4 of 8

laments, "we have to take away resources that we can document are improving achievement
and put them into transportation to bus kids to other schools."

In addition, the do-or-die AYP system crea~s perverse incentives. It re,yards schools that
focus on kids on the edge of achieving grade-level proficiency--like those 11 students in
Blaine’s math-review class. There’s no incentive for schools to do much of anything for the
kids who are on grade level or above, which is one reason the law is unpopular in wealthier,
high-achieving communities. And sadly, says O’Connell, "NCLB provides no incentive to
work on the kids far below the bar."

Sterling Garris, prindpal at Bla~e, has plenty of such low achievers at his school. As he
walked down the hallway on a recent spring day, an elated reading teacher came rushing up
to him with a third-grader who, she exclaimed, had jumped four reading levels. Garfis
offered the boy his hearty congratulations, but later he ruefully noted that the achievement
won’t be recognized under the terms set by NCLB. "This child has had tremendous growth,
but he’ll still bomb the PSSA test because he isn’t on grade leve!," says Garris. Whafs worse,
a child who has worked so hard will be stuck with a sense of failure. At test time, says Garris,
"some kids get so frustrated they cry."

What’s the alternative to AYP? Most educators, Garris included, prefer a more fle~ble
measure of student improvement known as the ~owth model. In this approach, schools Wack
the pro~ess of each student year to year. Success is defined by a certain amount of growth,
even if the student isn’t on grade level. So a child like that Blaine third-grader would be
judged a success--and his teachers and school would get credit for his achievement. "The
~owth model," says O’Cormell, "is amuchmore accurate portrayal of a school’s
perform ante."

Spellings says she appreciates the need for "a more nuanced accountability system," and her
department is testing the growth model in North Carolina, Termessee, Florida, Arkansas and
Delaware. The main sticking point, she says, is having a data-management system that can
accurately track the performance of individual students statewide. Another sticking poing she
says, is ensuring that growth doesn’t replace the goal of moving kids up to grade level.
"Growth models have to be within what I call the bright-line principles ofthe law, which is
grade-level proficiency by 2014. Moving the goalposts is not what we are talking about."

CAN WE TRUST THE STATES TO SET STANDA~S?

But moving the goalposts may be inevitable. Decreeing that all kids (except 1% with serious
disabilities and an additional 2% with other issues) must be proficient by 2014 is a little like
declaring that all the children are above average in the mythical town of Lake Wobegon.
California has some of the toughest K-12 curriculum standards in the nation, and O’Cormell
despairs ofhit~g the 201~1 goal. "Today we don’t have any of our schools with 100% student
proficiency, and I will predict that we won’t by 2014," he says. "Right now about one-quarter
of our kids have to be proficient [to make AYP], but soon it’s going to be increased 12% a
year until 2014. You have to question the accountability system when !00% of your schools
are going to be failing, by deflation."

There are, however, two surefire ways to hit the 2014 target. One is for schools to cheat on
the tests--a frighteningly commonplace solution, according to David I3erliner, a respected
education scholar at Arizona State University and a co-author of a new book, Collateral
Damage, that documents the cheating trend. The other solution is to make the state tests

06/05/2008
 Page 945 Page 5 of 8

easier, a phenomenon known among educators as "the race to the bottom." Philadelphia’s
Vallas likes to joke that there are two paths to success for his city’s schools: improve
instruction for students "or give them the Illinois tests."

Or better yet, Mississippi’s. In 2005, 89% of fourth-graders in Mississippi xvere rated

profident in reading--the highest percentage in the nation. But when Mississippi youngsters
sat for the rigorous NAEP--the closest thing to a national gold standard--they landed at the
bottom: just 18% of fourth-graders made the grade in reading. States that have a tough
curriculum and correspondingly tough exams--such as California and Massachusetts--are
delivering a more rigorous education, but they’re setting themselves up to fail in NCLB’s
terms.

No wonder so many states have watered down their expectations. An analysis by researchers
at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washin~on-based nonprofit, found that the quality
of educational standards--which are detailed, grade-by-grade, subject-by-subj ect learning
goals--declined in 30 states from 2000 to 2006. That includes the four states--Delaware,
Kansas, North Carolina and Oklahoma--said to be on track for 2014. Overall, only three
states earned an A from Fordham on curriculum standards--which are also the basis for state
tests; 37 rated C-- or belo~v.

In European countries, for example, such weak and uneven expectations aren’t a problem
because most have a uniform national curriculum and national tests. But that approach has
been politically unacceptable in the U.S., where schools are largely funded and controlled at
the state and local levels. Besides, says Spellings, "do you really want me sitting in
Washington ~vorking on how we teach evolution or ereationism? I don’t want to!"

Her deparlxnent has instead proposed a new requirement that every school, in addition to
publishing its results on state tests, provide parents with the statewide scores on NAEP. The
idea is that parents would complain if the state falls too far behind the national standard. Ifs a
sensible start, but few experts think it will be enough to ensure hi~tt standards in all the
nation’s schools.

TOO MUCH READING AND MATH?

Sinking state standards are not the only unintended consequence of NCLB. Because the law
holds schools accountable only in reading and math, there’s growing evidence that schools
are ~ving short shrift to other subjects. In a survey of 300 school disNcts conducted by the
Center on Education Policy, 71% of!ocal administrators admitted that this was the case in
their elementary schools. Martin West of Brown University found that, on average, from
1999 to 2004, reading instruction gained 40 rain. a week, while social studies and science lost
about 17 rain. and 23 min, respectively.

But the decline of science and social studies is often much steeper in schools struggling to
end a record of failure. At Arizona Desert Elementary in San Luis, Ariz., students spend three
hours of their 6 1/2-hr. day on literacy and 90 min. on arithmetic. Science is no longer taught
as a stand-alone subject. "We had to find ways to embed it within the content of reading,
writing and math," says principal Rafael Sanchez, with some regret. Social studies is handled
the sane way. The payofffor this laser-like attention to reading and math: the school ~vent
from failing in 2004 to making AYP and earning a high-flying "performing plus" designation
by the Arizona department of education last year.

06/05/2008
 Page 946 Page 6 of 8

But reading about science isn’t the same as incubating chick eggs and watching them hatch.
And cutting out field trips to Civil War sites and museums to drill social studies vocabulary
~vords is not the way to build a !ove of history. Hands-on activities are, for many kids, the
best part of school, the part that keeps them engaged. The scope of education isn’t supposed
to be based on whWs tested; it’s the other way around, says P. David Pearson, dean of the
University of California, Berkeley, graduate school of education. "Never send a test out to do
a curriculum’s job," he says.

FIXING FAILING S CHOOLS

As evidence that NCLB is working, fans of the law love to point to schools that have
reversed a long record of failure. Not far from Blaine, in a crime-infested part ofto~vn, sits
M. Hall Stanton Elementary, everybody’s favorite Philadelphia story. In 2002, only 12% of
Stanton’s fifth-graders were reading at grade level, and the third- and fourth-graders were
engaged in what teachers called "gang wars." By 2006, 70% of fifth-graders were proficient
readers, and the school was a model ofdeconm~ and lemzting, hitting its AYP goals three
years in a ro~v ~vithout sacrificing art, music or social studies--an achievement that has earned
it national coverage and a visit from Spellings. Today the place pulses with purpose:
hallways are bursting with murals, math games and word challenges, as if every square inch
of the school were devoted to instruction.

But it’s hard to say how much of the transformation can be attributed to NCLB. Much is due
to changes made to the curriculum in Philadelphia and even more to Stanton’s dynamo
principal, Barbara Adderley. Certainly, she is a big fan of testing and accountability. She
holds grade-level meetings with teachers in a room with two long assessment walls, which
display the latest test results for every student The walls show, at a ~ance, who’s making
progress and who isn’t, and if it’s the latter, Adderley and her team have a million creative
ideas on what to do about it.

No one likes to talk much about the fate of failing schools that continue to founder. Under
NCLB, such schools face escalating interventions. If they miss AYP two years in a row, they
must offer students a chance to transfer out. After three years, they must provide tutoring
services. After five years of failure, the law says the school must be restructured, which
means repladng the staff, converting to a charter school, having the state or a private
company take the reins or some other intervention_

None of these remedies are worldng very well. In the 2003-04 school year, only 17% of the
1.4 million studenls who ~vere eli~ble for tutoring got assistance. Of the 3.9 million eligible
to transfer out of failing schools in 2004-05, only about 1% did so. Inmany ciries there just
aren’t enough good schools to go around. In the Baltimore school sysl~m, for exanaple, says
Kate Waist, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, "the vast majority aren’t
schools where anyone who has a choice would want to send their kid."

And no one knows what to do about the 2,000 U.S. schools that have fa~ed to make AYP
five years in a row. "Research sho~vs that the path most often chosen is ’other,’" which often
means minor tinkering, says Kati Haycock, director of the nonprofit Education Trust. But
school districts say the more radical federal options aren’t al~vays feasible or affordable. Nor
is it clear that turning a school over to the state or making it a charter will raise its
performance. "None of these remedies have any basis in reality or research," says Diane
Ravitch, research professor of education at New York University.

06/05/2008
 Page 947 Page 7 of 8

REVISING NCLB

There is no shortage of ideas for improving No Child Left Behind. Senator Edward Kennedy,
who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and Congressman
George Miller, Kennedy’s counterpart in the House, are sorting throu~ a mind-numbing
number of proposals to address AYP’s shortcomings, lackluster state standards, curriculum
narrowing and remedies for failing schools as well as issues concerning the lady’s requ~ement
for a "qualified teacher" in every classroom and other concerns.

Miller and Kennedy hope to pass a new and improved vernon of the law by year’s end. If that
doesn’t happen, the current law--~vith all its flaws--will remain in force, probably until a new
Administration tackles the matter.

No one has all the answers to America’s challenges in education, but in revising the law,
Congress would do well to focus on the things the Federal Govermnent can handle
successfully and steer clear of long-distance micromanagement. A few suggestions:

More daylight Maintain the reporting requirements of NCLB but encourage states to provide
a fi~er picture of school quality than the bare bones of AYP. Congress should offer
incentives--carrots, not sticks--for school districts to provide more information to their
communities, including high school graduation rates, measures of student growth,
participation in gifted and talented programs and achievement in the arts.

One nation, one test Create strong incentives for the states to move away from 50 different
standards and 50 different tests and instead converge on NAEP or some other gold standard--
perhaps Massachusetts’ high-quality exams--as the national assessment. This woNd stop the
states from watering down their standards--one of the most dama~ng side effect of NCLB
and one the nation can’t afford in a globally competitive economy. The estimated $600
million a year now spent on state testing programs could be used to improve instruction.

Local solutions Back off from the business of slapping failure labels on schools and imposing
remedies. Leave schoo! turnaround to the people who are closer to the students, but fund
research into what works.

Better teachers for bad schools Improve federal-funding formulas so that schools in poor
nei~borhoods have the resources to adctress their ~veaknesses and, most especially, could
afford to hire experienced teachers. This is the best way to address the achievement gap
between rich and poor.

Most important, federal policymakers need to listen hard to the people who are workfig in
the nation’s schools every day. It’s the only way to ensure that policies that sound great in
Washington aren’t leaving educational reality behind. [This article contains a complex
diagram. Please see hardcopy of magazine.] Early Report Card. The law demands that
schools get better, but progress may be in the eye of the beholder

Under the No Child Left Behind Act, schools must show improvement. The goal: to have all
students proficient in reading and math by 2014. Math scores are creeping up, but reading
scores are flat.

1. SLOW GROWTH OVERALL

06/05/2008
 Page 948 Page 8 of 8

Average national test scores, all students ’92--’04

4th grade Math Reading

8th ~ade Math Reading

2. LESS SCIENCE AND HISTORY

Because state assessment tests focus on reading and math, other subjects get squeezed out. A
recent study looked at how elementary-school teachers apportion their ~e each week:
Weekly hours ofinstmctiona! time, Crrades ! through 6

Reading [Up] 40 rain. ’99--’04

Math [Down] 17 rain. ’99--’04

Science [Down] 23 min. ’99--’04

History [Down] 17 min_ ’99--’04

3. LOWER STATE STANDARDS

Federal law requ~es that students be tested annually to determine their reading and math
skills but leaves it to each state to devise the exam. The result, critics say, is that some states
make thdr tests easier so it appears that their students are doing wel!. The evidence: huge
gaps between state results and scores on nalional standardized tests. State test results
Percentage of fourth-graders scoring as proficient or better in reading Federal test results
Percentage of fourth-graders scoring as proficient or better in reading

By its own count, Mississippi is tied for the best score in the count,y. But on the U.S. test, the
state drops to 50th place--a whopping 71 points lower

On average, 30% ofU.S, fourth~raders score as proficient or better on the U.S. exam, called
the National Assessment of Educational Pro~ess

The average gap between state and national fourth-grade reading scores is 40 points

Massachusetts students score best on the federal test

Missouri has the smallest scoring gap: 2 points MORE SCORES To see how your state
scored in math, visit our interactive map at lime.com/nochild Note: State-by-state scores for
both tests are for 2005, the latest complete 3rear available. The Washington, D.C., reading
score is for fiPth-graders. Sources: National Center for Education Statistics; the Edncation
Trust; Testing, Learning and Teaching by Mar~ West, Brown University

06/0512008
 Page 949

Nonresponsive
............................. k~ith~rine-mclanef
May 25, 2007 12:~ u
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Ruberg, Casey; Colby, Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Dunn, David;
Dorfman, Cynthia; Evers, Bill; Kuzmich, Holly; La Force, Hudson; Landers, Angela;
MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mesecar,
Doug; Moran, Robert; Neale, Rebecca: Reich, Heidi; rob Saliterman; Yudof, Samara;
Scheessele, Marc; Halaska, Terrell; Toner, Jana; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Young, Tracy; Ditto,
Trey; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Zeff, Ken
Subject: Howto Fix No Child Let~ Behind (TIME)

Time magazine cover story?Thursday, }4ay. 24, 2007??How to Fix No Child Left Behind??By
Claudia Wallis, Son~a Steptoe??It’s coumtdo~ time in Philadelphia’s public schools. Just
21 days remain before the state reading and math tests in }{arch, and the kids and faculty
at James G. Blaine Elementary, an all-black, inner-city school that spans pre-K to eighth
grade, have been drilling for much of the dmy. At 2:45 in the afternoon, Rasheed Abdullah,
the kinetic lead math teacher, stages what could be called a prep rally with
ii third-graders. The kids, who areat neither the top nor the bottom of their class, have
been selected for intensive review--as has a contingent from other grades--because their
test scores hold the key to putting the school over the top on the pivotal Pennsylvania
System of School Assessments (PSSAS).
Last year, after a history of failure, the school, under new leadership, managed to meet
the federal goal for adequate yearly progress (AYP) on the state tests for the first time.
If it does so again, Blaine moves off the dreaded list of failing schools, no longer a
target for intensive oversight and sanctions that could include replacing the staff.??
~dullah, who has an easy rapport with students, zssues a quick reminder to sign up for
"Super Saturdmy" review classes and then begins his math-athon with a rousing recitation
of the schoo!’s declaration of education. "We believe that we can learn at high levels,"
the children chant.
"We believe we can reach our learning potentia! ... We believe that Blaine will become a
high-performing institution."??Quite a mouthful for a~ 8-year-old. And there’s more.
Abdullah starts pumping his fists as the kids finish with passionate vows.??"I’ll never
give up~" he shouts.??"I’ll never give up!" they echo.??"Even on the PSSA test!"??"Even on
the PSSA test["??"’Cause winners never !ose, and I am the best["??For the next 15 minutes,
the kids, divided into teams, compete to win points by solving math problems, with
Abdullah acting as a combination game-show host and math coach. There are giggles and
cheers and plenty of correct answers, but everyone in the room knows the fate of the
school is at stake.??To understand the impact of the 2001 Elementary and Secondary
Education Act, indelibly rebranded as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), you need to visit a
school like Blaine. The astonishingly ambitious law, the Bush Administration’s proudest
domestic achievement, was crafted with high-poverty, low-achieving schools like this one
in mind. NCLB proponents and critics alike agree that the law’s greatest accomplishment
has been shining an unforgiving spotlight on such languishing schools and demanding that
they do better. At Blaine, for instance, only 13% of fifth- and eighth-graders were
reading on grade level or above in 2004--a number that has since risen to 96%.??Under the
law’s most visible stipulation, states must test public school students in reading and
math every year from third through eighth grade, plus once in high school, and reveal the
results for each school or face a loss of federal funds. Just as critical, schools must
break out test results for certain groups: blacks, Hispanics, English-language learners,
learning-disabled students. This has embarrassed many a top suburban school where high-
flying majorities have masked the low achievement of minorities and special-ed students.
The law insists--with consequences for failure--that schools ~mke annual progress toward
c!osing the achievement gap between rich and poor, black and white, and bring al! students
to grade-level proficiency in mmth and reading by 2014, ending what the President
memorably called "the soft bigotry of !ow expectations."??Ask almost any school
administrator, education policymaker or think-tank wonk about NCLB, and you’re g~mranteed
to get at least one sunlly metaphor about how the law opened a window, raised a curtain or
otherwise illuminated the plight of the nation’s underserved kids. This is NCLB’S biggest
achievement and the best reason for Congress to reauthorize the law. "At the end of the
day, who can argue with holding schools accountable for all children?" asks Paul Vallas,
outgoing chief executive of Philadelphia’s schools and incoming head of the New Orleans
schoo! district. "Who can argue with not tolerating failing schools or with giving poor
kids the kinds of choices that wealthier kids have? It’s a civil rights issue."??There’s
 Page 950
plenty of argument, however, about how the law seeks to achieve these goals. NCLB takes
the Federal Government--which contributes only 9A¢ of every $i spent on U.S. schools--
where it’s never gone before:
telling the states how to measure schoo! success, specifying interventions for failure,
mandating qualifications for teachers and even telling the nation how to teach reading.
This year, as the five-year-old law comes t~o for debate, an u~forgiving spotlight will be
focused on its impact thus far, including its numerous unintended consequences. }4mny
teachers are enraged by the law’s reliance on high-stakes exams that lead schools like
Blaine to focus relentlessly on boosting scores rather than pursuing a broader vision of
education. More than SO,000 educators and concerned citizens have signed an online
petition calling for the repeal of the 1,100-page statute. Some offer comments like this
one from a former superintendent of schools in Ohio: "NCLB is like a Russian novel. That’s
because it’s long, it’s complicated, and in the end, everybody gets killed."??Whether NCLB
is achieving its objectives remains an open question. Fourth-grade reading scores on the
National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP) rose sharply from 1999 to 2004, but most of the gains occurred before the law took
effect. The achievement gap appears to be narrowing in some
spots--fourth- and eighth-grade math scores for minorities, for instance--but not others.
The gap between white and black eighth-graders has widened slightly in math, for example.
Gains for eighth-graders in general remain stubbornly elusive.??Secretary of Education
Margaret Spellings, who hms been advising the President on education since his days as
Texas Governor, notes that the law went into full effect only last year and that more time
is needed for it to work. Still, she and the Administration have proposed a large number
of adjustments to a law she once compared to Ivory soap, saying "It’s 99.9% pure." "We
wrote the very best bill we could five years ago," Spellings told TI~E, "but we’ve learned
from our experiences." Meanwhile, members of Congress have their o~ fix-it agendms, as do
state education officials and, of course, the teachers unions.??Much of the debate over
renewing the law is focused on five areas of controversy:??&¢AYP on reading and mmth
tests: Is it the right tool for measuring learning and raising achievement in the nation’s
schools???&¢Are the 50 states, each of which devises its own annual tests and curriculum
standards, setting the bar high enough for students, and if not, what should be done about
it???&¢Is the focus on reading and math distorting and narrowing education???&¢Do the
law’s requirements for teacher qumlifications make sense, and are they raising the quality
of the U.S. teaching force???~¢Are the directives aimed at failing schools having the
intended impact? What is the right role for the Federal Government in fixing bad
schools???In addition to these policy questions, there’s the matter of money. The states
h~ve complained bitterly that NCLB imposes its many mandates without the federal funds
originally promised to implement them. Providing more money for NCLB is a key goal for the
Democrats, who contro! Congress, and is almost certainly part of their price for
reauthorizing the law. A look at some of the more challenging issues:??HOW SHOULD WE
~EASURE LEAB_N~NG???The heart and soul of No Child Left Behind are its requirements for
ar~ual testing and proof that students of every stripe are making adequate yearly
progress. AYP is as basic to U.S. education as ABC, but most thoughtful educators object
to the way it’s measured. One of the biggest problems: there are too many ways to fail,
even when a school is moving in the right direction.??Consider the case of Bud Carson
Middle School in Hawthorne, Calif. In 2005 the schoo!, which is 92% Latino and black,
pulled out the stops to reverse its failing record and hit 20 out of its 21 AYP goals,
lifting scores for blacks, Hispanics and special-ed students; closing achievement gaps;
and raising attendance. Nonetheless, the school remained on the "needs improvement" list
that year because it narrowly missed the reading-score goal for its English-langumge
learners. (Happily, it mmde AYP a year later.)??Jack O’Connell, California’s
superintendent of public instruction, is one of many administrators around the country who
find the AYP system too inflexible, too arbitrary and too punitive.
Some California schools, he says, have made huge progress, but because they did not make
AYP they are required to help students transfer to another sohool.
"So," he laments, "we have to take away resources that we can document are improving
achievement and put them into transportation to bus kids to other schools."??In addition,
the do-or-die AYP system creates perverse i~centives. It rewards schools that focus on
kids on the edge of achieving grade-leve! proficiency--like those Ii students in Blaine’s
math-review class.
There’s no incentive for schools to do much of anything for the kids who are on grade
level or above, which is one reason the law is unpopular in wealthier, high-achieving
communities. And sadly, says O’Connell, "NCLB provides no incentive to work on the kids
far below the bar."??Sterling Garris, principal at Blaine, has plenty of such !ow
achievers at his school. As he walked do~n the hallway on a recent spring dmy, an elated
reading teacher came rushing up to him with a third-grader who, she exclaimed, had ~umped
four reading levels. Garris offered the boy his hearty congratulations, but later he
 Page 951
ruefully noted that the achievement won’t be recognized under the terms set by NCLB. "This
child has had tremendous growth, but he’ll still bomb the PSSA test because he isn’t on
grade level," says Garris. What’s worse, a child who has worked so hard wil! be stuck with
a semse of failure.
At test time, says Garris, "some kids get so frustrated they cry."??What’s the alternative
to AYP?
Most educators, Garris included, prefer a more flexible measure of student improvement
known as the growth model. In this approach, schools track the progress of each student
year to year. Success is defined by a certain amount of growth, even if the student isn’t
on grade level. So a child like that Blaine third-grader would be 9udged a success--and
his teachers and school would get credit for his achievement. "The growth model," says
O’Connell, "is a much more accurate portraya! of a school’s performance."??Spellings says
she appreciates the need for "a more nuanced accountability system," and her department is
testing the growth model in North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, Arkansas and Delaware.
The mmin sticking point, she says, is having a data-management system that can accurately
track the performance of individual students statewide. A~other sticking point, she says,
is ensuring that growth doesn’t replace the goa! of moving kids up to grade level. "Growth
models have to be within whmt I call the bright-line principles of the law, which is
grade-level proficiency by 2014. Moving the goalposts is not what we are talking about."??
CAIq WE TRUST TP~ STATES TO SET STANDARDS???But moving the goalposts may be inevitable.
Decreeing that all kids (except 1% with serious disabilities and an additiona! 2% with
other
issues) must be proficient by 2014 is a little like declaring that all the children are
above average in the mythical town of Lake Wobegon. California has some of the toughest
K-12 curriculum standards in the nation, and O’Connell despairs of hitting the 2014 goal.
"Today we don’t have any of our schools with 100% student proficiency, and I will predict
that we won’t by 2014," he says. "Right now about one-quarter of our kids have to be
proficient [to make AYP], but soon it’s going to be increased 12% a year unti! 2014.
You h~ve to question the accountability system when 100% of your schools are going to be
failing, by definition."??There are, however, two surefire ways to hit the 2014 target.
One is for schools to cheat on the tests--a frighteningly commonplace solution, according
to David Berliner, a respected education scholar at Arizona State University and a co-
author of a new book, Collateral Damage, tbmt documents the cheating trend. The other
solution is to make the state tests easier, a phenomenon know~ among educators as "the
race to the bottom." Philadelphia’s Vallas likes to ~oke that there are two paths to
success for his city’s schools: improve instruction for students "or give them the
Illinois tests."??Or better yet, Mississippi’s. In 2005, 89% of fourth-graders in
~ssissippi were rated proficient in reading--the highest percentage in the nation. But
when Hississippi youngsters sat for the rigorous NAEP--the closest thing to a national
gold standard--they landed at the
bottom: just 18% of fourth-graders made the grade in reading. States that have a tough
curriculum and correspondingly tough exams--such as California and Massachusetts--are
delivering a more rigorous education, but they’re setting themselves up to fail in NCLB’s
terms.??No wonder so many states have watered down their expectations. An amalysis by
researchers at the Thomas B. Ford_ham Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit, found that
the quality of educational standards--which are detailed, grade-by-grade, subject-by-
subject learning goals--declined in 30 states from 2000 to 2006. That includes the four
states--Delaware, Kansas, North Carolina amd Oklahoma--said to be on track for 2014.
Overall, only three states earned an A from Fordham on curriculum standards--which are
also the basis for state tests; 37 rated C-- or below.??In European countries, for
example, such weak and u~even expectations aren’t a problem because most have a uniform
n~tional curriculum and national tests. But that approach has been politically
unacceptable in the U.S., where schools are largely funded and controlled at the state and
!ocal levels. Besides, says Spellings, "do you really want me sitting in Washington
working on how we teach evolution or creationism? I don’t want to!"??Her department has
instead proposed a new requirement that every school, in addition to publishing its
results on state tests, provide parents with the statewide scores on NAEP. The idea is
that parents would complain if the state falls too far behind the nationa! standard. It’s
a sensible start, but few experts think it will be enough to ensure high standards in all
the nation’s schools.??TOO MUCH READING AND MATH???Sinking state standards are not the
only unintended consequence of NCLB. Because the law holds schools accountable only in
reading and math, there’s growing evidence that schools are giving short shrift to other
subjects. In a survey of 900 school districts conducted by the Center on Education Policy,
71% of !oca! administrators admitted that this was the case in their elementary schools.
~rtin West of Brown University found that, on average, from 1999 to 2004, reading
instruction gained 40 min. a week, while social studies and science !ost about 17 min. and
23 min, respectively.??But the decline of science and social studies is often much steeper
 Page 952
in schoolsstruggling to end a record of failure. At Arizona Desert Elementary in San
Luis, Ariz., students spend three hours of their 6 i/2-hr, day on literacy and 90 min. on
arithmetic. Science is no longer taught as a stand-alone subject. "We had to find ways to
embed it within the content of reading, writing and math," says principal Rafael Sanchez,
with some regret. Social studies is handled the same way. The payoff for this laser-like
attention to reading and math: the school went from failing in 2004 to making AYP and
earning a high-flying "performing plus" designation by the Arizona department of education
last year.??But reading about science isn’t the same as incubating chick eggs and watching
them hatch. And cutting out field trips to Civil War sites and museums to drill social
studies vocabulary words is not the way to build a love of history. Hands-on activities
are, for many kids, the best part of school, the part that keeps them engaged. The scope
of education isn’t supposed to be based on what’s tested; it’s the other way around, says
P. David Pearson, dean of the University of California, Berkeley, graduate school of
education. "Never send a test out to do a curriculum’s ~ob," he says.??FIX!N® FAILIN®
SCHOOLS??As evidence that NCLB is working, fans of the law love to point to schools that
have reversed a !ong record of failure.
Not far from Blaine, in a crime-infested part of town, sits H. Hall Stanton Elementary,
everybody’s favorite Philadelphia story. In 2002, only 12% of Stanton’s fifth-graders were
reading at grade level, and the
third- and fourth-graders were engaged in what teachers called "gang wars." By 2006, 70%
of fifth-graders were proficient readers, and the school was a model of decorum and
learning, hitting its AYP goals three years in a row without sacrificing art, music or
social studies--an achievement that has earned it national coverage and a visit from
Spellings. Today the place pulses with purpose:
ha!!m-ays are bursting with murals, math games and word challenges, as if every squmre inch
of the sohool were devoted to instruotion.??But it’s hard to say how much of the
transformation can be attributed to NCLB. Much is due to chmnges made to the curricultnm in
Philadelphia and even more to Stanton’s dynamo principal, Barbara Adderley. Certainly, she
is a big fan of testing and accountability. She holds grade-level meetings with teachers
in a room with two long assessment walls, which display the latest test results for every
student. The walls show, at a glance, who’s mmking progress and who isn’t, and if it’s the
latter, Adderley and her team have a million creative ideas on what to do about it.??No
one likes to talk much about the fate of failing schools thmt continue to founder. Under
NCLB, such schools face escalating interventions. If they miss AYP two years in a row,
they must offer students a chance to transfer out. After three years, they must provide
tutoring services. After five years of failure, the law says the school must be
restructured, which means replacing the staff, converting to a charter school, having the
state or a private company take the reins or some other intervention.??None of these
remedies are working very well. In the 2003-04 school year, only 17% of the 1.4 million
students who were eligible for tutoring got assistance. Of the 3.9 million eligible to
transfer out of failing schools in 2004-05, only about 1% did so. In many cities there
9ust aren’t enough good schools to go around. In the Baltimore school system, for example,
says Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, "the vast majority
aren’t schools where anyone who has a choice would want to send their kid."??And no one
knows what to do about the 2,000 U.S. schools that have failed to make AYP five years in a
row. "Research shows that the path most often chosen is ’other,’"
which often means minor tinkering, says Hati Haycock, director of the nonprofit Education
Trust. But school districts say the more radical federal options aren’t always feasible or
affordable. Nor is it clear that turning a school over to the state or making it a charter
will raise its performance. "None of these remedies have any basis in reality or
research," says Diane Ravitch, research professor of education at New York University.??
REVISING NCLB??There is no shortage of ideas for improving No Child Left Behind. Senator
Edward Kennedy, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and
Congressman George Miller, Kennedy’s counterpart in the House, are sorting through a mind-
numbing number of proposals to address AYP’s shortcomings, lackluster state standards,
curriculum narrowing and remedies for failing schools as well as issues concerning the
law’s requirement for a "qumlified teacher" in every classroom and other concerns.??Miller
and Kennedy hope to pass a new and improved version of the law by year’s end. If that
doesn’t happen, the current law--with all its flaws--will remain in force, probably until
a new Administration tackles the matter.??No one has all the answers to ~erica’s
challenges in education, but in revising the law, Congress would do well to focus on the
things the Federal Government can handle successfully and steer clear of long-distance
micromanagement. A few suggestions:??More daylight Maintain the reporting requirements of
NCLB but encourage states to provide a fuller picture of school quality than the bare
bones of AYP. Congress should offer incentives--carrots, not sticks--for school districts
to provide more information to their communities, including high school graduation rates,
measures of student growth, participation in gifted and talented programs and achievement
4
 Page 953
in the arts.??One nmtion, one test Create strong incentives for the states to move away
from 50 different standards and 50 different tests and instead converge on NAEP or some
other gold standard--perhaps Massachusetts’ high-quality exams--as the nationa!
assessment. This would stop the states from watering down their standards--one of the most
damaging side effect of NCLB and one the nation can’t afford in a globally competitive
economy. The estimated $600 million a year now spent on state testing programs could be
used to improve instruction.??Loca! solutions Back off from the business of slapping
failure labels on schools and imposing remedies. Leave school turnaround to the people who
are closer to the students, but fund research into what works.??Better teachers for bad
schools Improve federal-funding formulas so that schools in poor neighborhoods have the
resources to address their weaknesses and, most especially, could afford to hire
experienced teachers.
This is the best way to address the achievement gap between rich and poor.??Most
important, federal policymakers need to listen hard to the people who are working in the
nation’s schools every day. It’s the only ~y to ensure that policies that sound great in
Washington aren’t leaving educational reality behind.
[This article contains a complex diagram. Please see hardcopy of magazine.] Early Report
Card. The law demands that schools get better, but progress may be in the eye of the
beholder??Under the No Child Left Behind Act, schools must show improvement. The goal:
to have all students proficient in reading and math by 2014. ~%~th scores are creeping up,
but reading scores are flat.??l. SLOW GROWTH OVERALL??Average nmtional test scores, all
students ’92--’04??4th grade Math Reading??Sth grade Math Reading??2. LESS SCIENCE AND
HlSTORY??Because state assessment tests focus on reading and m~th, other subjects get
squeezed out. A recent study looked at how elementary-school teachers apportion their time
each week: Weekly hours of instructional time, Grades 1 through 6??Reading [Up] 40 min.
’99--’04??I~ath [Down] 17 rain.
’99--’04??Science [Down] 23 rain. ’99--’04??History [Down] 17 rain. ’99--’04??3. LOWER STATE
STANDARDS??Federal law requires that students be tested annually to determine their
reading and mmth skills but leaves it to each state to devise the exam.
The result, critics say, is that some states make their tests easier so it appears that
their students are doing well. The evidence: huge gaps between state results and scores on
national standardized tests.
State test results Percentage of fourth-graders scoring as proficient or better in reading
Federal test results Percentage of fourth-graders scoring as proficient or better in
reading??By its own cot~nt, Mississippi is tied for the best score in the country.
But on the U.S. test, the state drops to 5Oth place&"a whopping 71 points lower??On
average, 30% of U.S. fourth-graders score as proficient or better on the U.S. exam, called
the National Assessment of Educational Progress??The average gap between state and
nmtional fourth-grade reading scores is 40 points??Massachusetts students score best on
the federal test??Missouri has the smallest scoring gap: 2 points MORE SCORES To see how
your state scored in math, visit our interactive map at <http://time.com/nochild>
time.com/nochild Note:
State-by-state scores for both tests are for 2005, the latest complete year available. The
Washington, D.C., reading score is for fifth-graders. Sources: National Center for
Education Statistics; the Education Trust; Testing, Learning and Teaching by Martin West,
Bro~nUniversity??
<http://www. time.com/time/magazine/article!0,9171, 1625192, O0.html>
http://~.time, com/time/magazine/article/O, 9171,1625192,00.html???

Luggag
e? ®PS? Comic books?
Check out fitting gifts for grads at Yahoo~ Search
http://search, yahoo.com/search?fr=oni on mail&p=graduation+gifts&cs=bz
 Page 954

~Nonresponsiv
From: Reich, Heidi
Sent" May 23, 2007 9:13 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Bryant, Jessica; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angeta; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Maguire, Tory;
McGrath, John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Moran, Robert;
Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey;
Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tucker, Sara
Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Young, Tracy D. ; Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken;
Landers, Angela; Evers, Bill; Colby, Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Dorfman, Cynthia; Mesecar,
Doug; Dunckel, Denise; Pitts, Elizabeth; McGrath, John;Talbert, Kent; Briggs, Kerd; Toomey,
Liam; Scheessele, Marc; Private- Spellings, Margaret; Beaton, Meredith; Tucker, Sara
Martinez; Halaska, Terrell
Subject: Test Gains Reigniting Old Debate (EDWEEK)

Test Gains Reigniting Old Debate (EDWEEK)

By Sean Cavanagh
Education Week, May 23, 2007
Did NCLB law play a role in history, civics scores?
Elementary school students have a stronger grasp of U.S. history, and what it means to be a knowledgeable citizen, than
they did a few years ago, new test results suggest. And part of the reason they’re better informed about history and dtizenship,
some argue, is that they’re better readers.
That was the view put forward by U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, among others, who saw the hand of the
No Child Lett Behind Act’s reading requirements in the latest results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress,
released last week.
Debating what role, if any, those mandates are playing in improving student progress has become almost a ritual
accompanying the release of test scores for the heavily scrutinized NAEP, otten referred to as ’the nation’s report card."
That ritual played out again with the latest results as some advocates for history and civics education questioned the
connection between federal reading efforts and the gains in 4th grade on NAEP.
The federal law requires students in the early grades to be tested annually in reading, as well as math. Its backers,
including the secretary, say that schools’ work in reading is paying dividends in other subjects, as shown by the 4th grade history
and civics results. Scores for 8th and 12th grade students, meanwhile, rose in history but remained fiat in civics.
Ms. Spellings drew a similar connection between reading skills and NAEP gains in 4th grade science last year. Last week,
she also rejected the notion that the No Child Left: Behind law has forced teachers to cut back on subjects other than reading and
math, as the laws detractors have claimed.
’These results are a testament to what works," Ms. Spellings said in a statement issued May 16, the same day as the test
results. "While critics may argue that NCLB leads educators to narrow their curriculum focus, the fact is, when students know
how to read and comprehend, they apply these skills to other subjects like history and civics. The result is greater academic
gains."
The secretary further suggested that the laws Reading First program is helping students in other academic areas.
Building Skills
Reading First awards grants to schools and districts that try to improve the skills of struggling readers in the early grades by
using a variety of approved skills, including phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary-building, and reading comprehension.
Federal officials did not have an estimate of what percentage of schools participating in NAEP civics and history also
receive Reading First money. The vast majority of Reading First schools receive Title I funding; federal officials estimate that
about 70 percent of the roughly 7,000 4th graders on both tests were in Title I schools, though the percentages were lower in the
upper grades.
Peggy Altoff, the president of the National Council for the Social Studies, in Silver Spring, Md., did not dispute the idea that
stronger reading skills result in higher 4th grade history and civics scores-especially because the NAEP questions at that level
are very basic.
’With a lot of them, if you can read, you’re going to do well," she said.
 Page 955

But Ms. Altoff also said elementary teachers have been forced to reduce time devoted to social studies topics as a result of
the NCLB law.
Data from a federal survey from the 2003-04 school year, released last year, showed that instructional time in history in
grades 1-4 dropped by about 30 minutes per day from the early 1990s. Time for Englishtlanguage arts instruction rose by an
hour per day.
Reading scores on a NAEP test that measures long-term trends have improved for 9-year-olds by a significant margin over
the past five years, though some of those gains occurred before the law took effect. But on what’s called the "national" NAEP,
reading scores for 4th graders have remained flat since 2002.
Ms. Spellings, however, last week pointed to recent, state-reported data showing that reading proficiency increased among
1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders participating in the $1 billion-a-year Reading First program. ("State Data Show Gains in Reading," April
25, 2007.)
Ms. Altoff also said Reading First has led many teachers to use exercises geared overwhelmingly toward very basic
reading instruction-and not toward building coherent understanding of history and civics.
’There’s no sequence to it," Ms. Altoff said of that instruction. ’~’ou could be reading about Martin Luther King one day and
the American Revolution the next."
Jeffrey Cohen, the lead consultant for Reading First at the California education department, also was skeptical that
Reading First played a role in the NAEP 4th grade scores in history and civics. Under California’s Reading First model, the skill
likely to have helped students the most on NAEP-reading comprehension-isn’t typically taught until 3rd grade, he said.
’Teachers are complaining in our state that they don’t have enough time to teach other things" besides basic reading skills,
Mr. Cohen said.
But Janice Dole, an education professor at the University of Utah, who is also a co-evaluator of that state’s Reading First
program, believes many schools are balancing basic reading instruction with comprehension.
’There’s no doubt in my mind it’s having an impact on NAEP scores," Ms. Dole said of Reading First. "Kids are being taught
how to read a text, and it’s translating to other texts."
Richard M. Long, the direcl~or of government relations for the International Reading Association, based in Newark, Del.,
said the No Child Left Behind law is "clearly having an effect" on students’ ability to read across different subjects. While it is
debatable whether Reading First improves student performance in other subjects, the program was created with a different goal
in mind, he noted.
’That’s not its primary mission," Mr. Long said. Reading First schools, he said, are those ’~vhere you’re trying to make a
very specific investment."
His organization is working with the National Council for the Social Studies and other subject-area groups on a project to
give teachers guidance on how to blend other subject lessons into reading instruction.
Older Students Falter
The NAEP history and civics tests were given to a nationally representative sample of students from both public and private
schools. The history exam gauges students’ knowledge of specific historical facts, as well as their ability to evaluate evidence
and trends over time. The civics test covers students’ understanding of American politics, government, and ’the responsibilities of
citizenship" in a democracy.
The average 4th grade score in civics climbed from 150 to 154, on a 300-point scale, from 1998 to 2006, when the latest
test was administered. In history, students in that grade saw their average score rise from 208 to 211, on a 500-point scale,
between 2001 and 2006. Both increases were statistically significant. Students at the lowest-performing level, rather than high
achievers, accomplished the bulk of the gains.
At the 8th and 12th grade levels, however, the results were mixed. Middle and high school students’ scores increased in
history by statistically relevant margins. Eighth graders’ scores rose from 260 to 263, on a 500-point scale, and seniors’ average
scores increased from 287 to 290, also with a maximum of 500 points.
But on the civics test, 8th and 12th grade scores remained stagnant from 1998 to 2006.
White students continued to outperform other students at all grade levels. Gaps between black and Hispanic students and
their ,white counterparts narrowed in history and civics in 4th grade, but remained roughly the same in the upper grades.
Students at all grade levels showed a strong knowledge of some basic facts of history and civics and only a feeble grasp of
others. At the 12th grade level, for instance, only 14 percent of students on the history test could explain why the United States
had been involved in the Korean War. Just one-third of 8th graders could identify U.S. foreign-policy positions in Latin America.
In civics, 75 percent of 4th graders knew that only citizens can vote in the United States, but only 14 percent knew that
defendants have the right to a lawyer. In 8th grade, 80 percent successfully identified a notice for jury duty, but only 28 percent
could explain the historical purpose of the Declaration of Independence.
 Page 956

Cathy Gorn, the executive director of National History Day, an organization based at the University of Maryland College
Park, attributed older students’ weak showing in civics partly to shortcomings in the way that subject, and history, are taught.
Too many teachers encourage memorization of facts and dates, rather than the kind of in-depth analysis of political events
and trends that students need when they encounter more difficult material, she said. Her organization, which tries to increase
students’ interest in history, encourages teachers to use primary sources and have students conduct independent research
beyond the textbook.
’When they’re engaged, they really start to think critically about topics," Ms. Gom said. "What is the legacy of this [event]?
How do we understand it through time?"
Vol. 26, Issue 38, Pages 1,16
 Page 957

Nonresponsive
From: Ditto, Trey
Sent: May23, 2007 9:09 AM
To: Reich, Heidi; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Bryant, Jessica; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bil!; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angeta; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Maguire, Tory;
McGrath, John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Mesecar, Doug; Moran, Robert;
Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele,
Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tucker, Sara Martinez;
Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; ’Young, Tracy D. ’; Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken; Landers,
Angela; Evers, Bill; Colby, Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Don’man, Cynthia; Mesecar, Doug;
Dunckel, Denise; Pitts, Elizabeth; McGrath, John; Talbert, Kent; Briggs, Kerd; Toomey, Liam;
Scheessele, Marc; Private- Spellings, Margaret; Beaton, Meredith; Tucker, Sara Martinez;
Halaska, Terrell
Subject: RE: Secretary Spellings on The Daily Show (Politico)

If you missed it, you can click on the a link on the Daily Show website:
http:llwww.comedycentral.comlshowslthe_daily_showlindex.jhtm I.

---Orighal Message---
Frer~: Reich, Heidi
Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2007 8:55 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Bryant, ]essica; Carielb, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditl~, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers,
Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren;
Maguire, Tory; McGrath, John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L .; Mesecar, Doug; Moran, Robert; Morffi, Jessica; Neale,
Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfell:, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Schees~ele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Taberl:, Ken~ Terrell,
Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tucker, Sara Marthez; Williams, Cynl~ia; Young, Tracy; Young, Tracy D. ; Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken;
Angela Landers; B~ll Evers; Chad Coby; Cindy Williams; Dorfman, Cynbhia; Doug Mesecar; Dunckel, Denise; Elizabeth Pitts;
John McGrath; Kent Talbert; Kerri Briggs; Liam Toomey; Marc Scheessele; Margaret Privat~ - Spellings (E-mail); Meredith
BeN:on; Sara Martinez Tucker; Terrell Halaska
Subject: Secretary Spellings on The Daily Show (PolilJco)

Politico Playbook: Peeling the onion

By. Mike Allen
May 23, 2007 07:09 AM EST

3) HIGH-WIRE ACT: Publicity coups are in short supply for the Bush administration these days, but
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings nailed an appearance last night on ’Fhe Daily Show".Jon Stewart
said: "You are the only active member of our government, in terms of the executive branch, who is not
allergic to me." Laughter. Spellings: "’So far, so good." Applause." Stewart: "So I’m delighted to have you."
The host gave her an apple, which they playfully pushed back and forth throughout the interview. He
showed off No. 2 pencils and brandished a Lunchables, sipping from the CapriSun °’juice beverage."
Spellings wedged in a serious, detailed plug for the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act:
have to expect more from our kids, and we have lowered the bar and !owered the bar .... What we’ve done
with this law is peel the onion and bring to bear infoimation about how wel! are ~ve serving every single kid.
And the answer is not well enough, by far these days. What we’re causing is anxiety with gownups, on
behalf of kids .... We have to pay more attention to our high schools - No Child Left Behind is about our
elementary and middle schools." As a parting shot, Stewart asked the secretary: "°Alberto Gonzales is to °I
don’t recall’ as trees are to sunshine, oxygen or °I don’t recall.’?" With a broad wink and nod, Spellings
replied to whoops and applause: °’I don’t recall." Stewart was clearly taken by her Texas sassiness, and
apparently it was mutual. ARer the taping, Spellings was heard to say: "’I’m smitten. He’s adorable."
 Page 958

Bashford, Ter~
From: Reich, Heidi
Sent: May 23, 2007 8:58 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerd; Bryant, Jessica; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angeta; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Maguire, Tory;
McGrath, John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Mesecar, Doug; Moran, Robert;
Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey;
Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tucker, Sara
Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Young, Tracy D. ; Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken;
Landers, Angela; Evers, Bill; Colby, Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Dorfman, Cynthia; Mesecar,
Doug; Dunckel, Denise; Pitts, Elizabeth; McGrath, John; Talbert, Kent; Briggs, Kerd; Toomey,
Liam; Scheessele, Marc; Private- Spellings, Margaret; Beaton, Meredith; Tucker, Sara
Martinez; Halaska, Terrell
Subject: Comedy Escapes Jon Stewart In Spellings’s Appearance On ’Daily Show’ (CHRONED)

Comedy Escapes Jon Stewart In Spellings’s Appearance On ’Daily Show’ (CHRONED)

By Paul Basken
The Chronicle of Hi,qher Education, May 23, 2007
rvlargaret Spellings is the secretary of education, not the secretary of defense, but she may nevertheless be the bravest
member of President Bush’s cabinet.
Ms. Spellings, capping a visit on Tuesday to New York City, sat down as the evening’s guest on The Daily ShowWith Jon
Stewart, a comedy program on cable television known for its caustic - and decidedly left-of-center - treatment of current events.
Mr. Stewart began by handing his guest a traditional gift for teachers, a polished apple. He also pulled out a No. 2 pencil
and a children’s lunch snack. He then praised Ms. Spellings’s willingness to submit to his questions, calling her the only top
administration official ’k~ho is not allergic to me."
Their eight-minute encounter at the end of Mr. Stewart’s half-hour program went without any of the more pointed jabs that
the comedian routinely levels at Mr. Bush and his administration.
He asked several questions about the No Child Left Behind law, the federal statute that requires states to test grade-school
students in subjects that include mathematics and reading. Ms. Spellings responded with some well-worn talking points about the
need to fix a system in which half of all minodty children don’t finish high school on time.
Mr. Stewart expressed exasperation when his guest repeated the president’s trademark warning against schools’ practicing
"the soft bigotry of low expectations." He got his most animated response - an exaggerated impish gdn from the secretary - when
he suggested that she might "smite the teachers’ unions" if given one moment of omnipotent authority over education policy.
Before finishing with the secretary, Mr. Stewart raised the subject of the scandal in the student-loan industry, a controversy
that has prompted both colleges and lenders to change practices, pay legal settlements, and fire some top officials.
In an apparent reference to a member of his staff watching from off-stage, Mr. Stewart said he had a "lady up here" who is
’~ery mad" about her college loans
MS. Spellings said she’s undertaking a far-reaching examination of the problem. ’q-here’s obviously issues in the way
everybody runs student loans," the secretary said. "We have to fix the system comprehensively. It’s not just one little thing."
 Page 959

~ ~onrespons
From: Reich, Heidi
Sent: May 23, 2007 8:55 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Bryant, Jessica; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Maguire, Tory;
McGrath, John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Mesecar, Doug; Moran, Robert;
Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey;
Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tucker, Sara
Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Young, Tracy D. ; Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken;
Landers, Angela; Evers, Bill; Colby, Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Dorfman, Cynthia; Mesecar,
Doug; Dunckel, Denise; Pitts, Elizabeth; McGrath, John; Talbert, Kent; Briggs, Kerri; Toomey,
Liam; Scheessele, Marc; Private- Spellings, Margaret; Beaton, Meredith; Tucker, Sara
Martinez; Halaska, Terrell
Subject: Secretary Spellings on The Daily Show (Politico)

Politico Playbook: Peeling the onion

By. Mike Allen
May 23, 2007 07:09 AM EST
3) HIGH-WIRE ACT: Publidty coups are in short supply for the Bush administration these days, but Education
Secretary Margaret Spellings nailed an appearance last night on "el’he Daily Show".Jon Stewart said: "You are
the only active member of our govemment~ in terms of the executive branch, who is not allergic to me."
Laughter. Spellings: "So far, so good." Applause." Stewart: "So I’m delighted to have you." The host gave her
an apple, which they playfi~ypushed back and forth throughout the interview. He showed off‘No. 2 pencils and
brandished a Lunchables, sipping from the CapriSun "juice beverage." Spellings wedged in a serious, detailed
plug for the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act: "’We have to expect more from our kids, and we
have lowered the bar and lowered the bar .... What we’ve done with this law is peel the onion and bring to bear
information about how wd! are we serving every single kid. And the ans~ver is not well enough, by far these
days. What we’re causing is anxiety with grownups, on behalf of kids .... We have to pay more attention to our
high schools - No Child Left Beb~d is about our elementary and middle schools." As a parting shot, Stewart
asked the secretary: "’Alberto Gonzales is to ’I don’t recall’ as trees are to sunshine, oxygen or °I don’t recall.’?’"
With a broad wink and nod, Spellings replied to whoops and applause: °I don’t recall." Stewart was dearly
taken by her Texas sassiness, and apparently it ~vas mutual. After the taping, Spellings was heard to say: "I’m
smitten. He’s adorable."
 Page 960

Nonresponsiv
(b)(@)or.: .............................
J .................
Sent: May 22, 2007 5:43 AM
To: Oldham, Cheryl; Conklin, Kristin; Schray, Vickie; Duncke!, Denise; Sampson, Vincent;
Quarles, Karen; Bannerman, Kristin; Moran, Robert; scckt m. stanzel@who.eop.gov;
jeanie_s._mamo@who.eop.gov; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Ruberg, Casey; Colby,
Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Dorfman, Cynthia; Evers, Bill; Kuzmich, Holly; La
Force, Hudson; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private - Spellings,
Margaret; McGrath, John; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Reich, Heidi; rob Saliterman;
Yudof, Samara; Scheessele, Marc; Halaska, Terrell; Toner, Jana; Mcnitt, Townsend L.;
Young, Tracy; Ditto, Trey;, Tucker, Sara Martinez; Zeff, Ken
Subject: Education put to the humor test (USAT)

Education put to the humor test

By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
With twin scandals nipping at her heels, Education Secretary ~rgaret Spellings tonight
appeals directly to America’s youth: She appears on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.
"She actually is a guest thmt we’ve been trying to book for a long time," says executive
producer David Javerbaum, who jokes that Spellings’ appearance is "the ultimate admission
of defeat for education."

Producers first asked Spellings last fall about appearing on the show on cable’s Comedy
Central. Her spokeswoman, Katherine McLane, says the timing worked out for tonight’s
taping because Spellings appears today at a conference in Mew York.

She Im~de history last fall as the first sitting Cabinet secretary to appear on Jeopardy!.
She’ll make history again tonight as the first to appear on Stewart’s show.
"For some reason, they seem to feel that we hmve some kind of problem with some of the
things the Bush administration has done," Javerbaum says.

Spellings, a self-proclaimed American Idol fan who recently attended a taping of the hit
show, commented Monday, "I’m completing my trifecta of U.S. popular
culture: Jeopardy!, America~ Idol and now The Daily Show."

Daughters ~ry, 20, and Grace, 15, urged her to do the show.

Congress is investigating conflict-of-interest complaints involving the federal student

loan program and the Bush ackainistration’s Reading First program.
Stewart, a regular critic of the Bush administration, will be free to ask about beth,
McLane says.
The tactic is common enough in Washington, says former assistant education secretary
Chester Firn~ Jr.:
"Whenever the hot water rises in Washington, those in peri! of poached hips seem to
discover that they have a sense of humor after all -- especially if they think it will
encourage people to laugh rather than grimace at them."

Andrew Rotherham of the think tank Education Sector says the administration realizes it
has "a pretty substantial public relations problem and that they need to get out there and
try to turn it around."

Public relations executive Patrick Riccards, who writes the blog eduflack, com, calls the
appearance Spellings’ bid to change the subject: "She’s going to let (Stewart) make fun of
her, she’s going to let him make fun of the scandals, and then she’s going to say, ’It’s
al! behind us.’ "

Lookin
g for a deal? Find great prices on flights and hotels with Yahoo[ FareChase.
 Page 961
http://farecb~se.yahoo.com/
 Page 962

l?~onresponsi
From: Reich, Heidi
Sent: May22, 2007 9:02 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerd; Bryant, Jessica; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angeta; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Maguire, Tory;
McGrath, John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Moran, Robert;
Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey;
Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tucker, Sara
Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Young, Tracy D. ; Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken;
Landers, Angela; Evers, Bill; Colby, Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Dorfman, Cynthia; Mesecar,
Doug; Dunckel, Denise; Pitts, Elizabeth; McGrath, John;Talbert, Kent; Briggs, Kerri; Toomey,
Liam; Scheessele, Marc; Private- Spellings, Margaret; Beaton, Meredith; Tucker, Sara
Martinez; Halaska, Terrell
Subject: Spellings and McKeon promote Promise Scholarships (Education Daily)

Spellings and McKeon promote Promise Scholarships (Education Daily)

By Stephen Sawchuk
Education Daily, May 22, 2007
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and House Education and Labor Committee ranking member Rep. Howard "Buck"
McKeon, R-Calif., are highlighting positive results from a new study of Washington, D.C.’s school choice initiative to promote
national versions of the program.
Released by Georgetown University, the study showed widespread parental satisfaction with the D.C. Opportunity
Scholarship Program, which begin in 2004.
According to the report, 90 percent of parents indicated they wanted their children to remain in the program for another
year. Parents also said that several logistical issues in the early days of the program’s implementation had been resolved to their
satisfaction.
Earlier this year, President Bush proposed tying national versions of the D.C. program, dubbed Promise and Opportunity
Scholarships, to the school intervention components of NCLB.
Under the Promise Scholarships, schools that fail to meet state NCLB testing benchmarks for five consecutive years must
offer $4,000 vouchers to students in those schools. The funds could be used to cover the cost of a student’s tuition, fees, and
transportation to a private or public school of their choice. Parents could alternatively opt to choose $3,000 scholarships for
intensive tutoring.
The Opportunity Scholarships program, meanwhile, would fund district-designed school choice programs based on the
D.C. program model.
Bush’s FY 2008 budget request proposed $300 million in funding for the two programs.
With the D.C. study results in, both Spellings and McKeon said they supported Bush’s proposed national expansions.
’lt comes as no surprise that parents know what’s best for their children," Spellings said in a statement, q-he promising
results and positive feedback in this report underscore the importance of giving families options.°
McKeon said the D.C. program was "making a difference for students in our nation’s capital, and their parents are taking
note. Hopefully opponents of parental choice will as well."
Earlier in the year, McKeon introduced H.R. 1486, the Empowering Parents Through Choice Act, which would officially
authorize the Promise and Opportunity Scholarships.
So far, however, Hill Democrats have given the proposals a chilly reception.
 Page 963

_NonresponsivI
From: McLane, Katherine
Sent: May 18, 2007 3:59 PM
To: Pdvate- Spellings, Margaret; Landers, Angela; Evers, Bill; Colby, Chad; Williams, Cynthia;
Dorfman, Cynthia; Mesecar, Doug; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Pitts, Elizabeth; Flowers,
Sarah; McGrath, John; Talbert, Kent; Briggs, Kerri; Kuzmich, Holly; Toomey, Liam; Maddox,
Lauren; Scheessele, Marc; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Beaton, Meredith; Moran, Robert; Tucker,
Sara Martinez; Tada, Wendy; Halaska, Terrell; Tracy WH; Young, Tracy; Zeff, Ken
Cc: Ditto, Trey; Neale, Rebecca; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Terrell, Julie; Yudof, Samara
Subject: SMS in TIME’s Verbatim section

’"Not only are we not asleep at the switch but very much at the helm and managing our business.’ Margaret Spellings,
Secretary of Education, referring to a comment by NY AG Andrew Cuomo who said the department had been ’~sleep at
the switch" when it came to overseeing the student-loan industry."
 Page 964

L
N,~onresponsi
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: May 17, 2007 9:16 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toom ey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-m all); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken
Subject: SMS on NAEP reports

Students Show Scant Gains In History, Civics Knowledge (WSJ)

Students Gain Only Marginally On Test Of U.S. History (NYT)
U.S. Test Scores Rise In History, Level In Civics (WT)

Students Show Scant Gains In History, Civics Knowledge (WSJ)

By Robert Tomsho
The Wall Street Journal, May 17, 2007
More students have a basic understanding of U.S. history and civics, but the number who are proficient in the subjects has
changed little in recent years, according to a key national test.
The mixed results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress are unlikely to quell complaints by some
educators that the federal No Child Lett Behind laws heavy focus on reading and math has shortchanged social studies and
other subjects. The statute is in the midst of a reauthorization debate.
The Bush administration called the results a sign the law’s emphasis on boosting literacy, particularly in the early grades,
has begun to pay dividends across the curriculum. "As students’ skills in reading fluency and comprehension strengthen,
so does their ability to do well in other subject areas," Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in a prepared
statement.
O~hers saw no cause for celebration. "To say that anyone would be satisfied with these results at any level is kind of
amazing," said Peggy Altoff, president of the National Council for the Social Studies, an educators’ association. "They are telling
us that very little progress has been made and that most of our students are not prepared to assume the responsibilities of
citizens."
The NAEP is the chief federally sponsored test measuring academic achievement. The latest results were for history and
civics tests given in 2006 to a nationwide sampling of fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders.
On a scale of zero to 500 points, history scores for students in all three grades increased by three points over results in
2001, the previous time the same test was given. Lower-performing students posted the biggest gains. The average score for
fourth-graders was 211, while the average scores for eighth- and 12th-graders were 263 and 290, respectively.
All three grade levels had gains in the proportion of students scoring at or above the basic level, with 70% of fourth-graders
falling in that range, up from 66%in 2001. About 18% of fourth-graders scored at or above the proficient range, unchanged from
2001. Even with gains, more than half of high-school seniors had below-basic scores in history.
In civics, the only significant improvement was among fourth-graders, whose average score was 154 on a scale of zero to
300 points, up from 150 in t998, the last time the civics test was given.
Some critics said the NAEP results were most remarkable for what students didnt know. Only 14% of seniors taking the
history test could explain a reason for U.S. involvement in the Korean War. In civics, 28% of eighth-graders could explain the
historical purpose of the Declaration of Independence and about 14% of fourth-graders knew a defendant has a right to a lawyer.
Write to Robert Tomsho at rob.tomsho@wsj.coml

Students Gain Only Marginally On Test Of U.S. History (NYT)

 Page 965

By Sam Dillon
The NewYork Times,, May 17, 2007
Federal officials reported yesterday that students in 4th, 8th and 12th grades had scored modestly higher on an American
history test than five years eadier, although more than half of high school seniors still showed poor command of basic facts like
the effect of the cotton gin on the slave economy or the causes of the Korean War.
Federal officials said they considered the results encouraging because at each level tested, student performance had
improved since the last time the exam was administered, in 2001.
’In U.S. history there were higher scores in 2006 for all three grades," said Mark Schneider, commissioner of the National
Center for Education Statistics, which administers the test, at a Boston news conference that the Education Department carried
by Webcast.
The results were less encouraging on a national civics test, on which only fourth graders made any progress.
The best results in the history test were also in fourth grade, where 70 percent of students attained the basic level of
achievement or better.
The test results in the two subjects are likely to be closely studied, because Congress is considering the renewal of
President Bush’s signature education law, the No Child Left Behind Act.
A number of studies have shown that because No Child Left Behind requires states to administer annual tests in math and
reading, and punishes schools where scores in those subjects fail to rise, many schools have reduced time spent on other
subjects, including history. In a recent study, Martin West, an education professor at Brown, used federal data to show that
during 2003-4, first- and sixth-grade teachers spent 23 fewer minutes a week on history than during 1999-2000.
Given such circumstances, lawmakers and educators are likely to puzzle over why achievement in history has increased.
Some suggested that the fourth-grade results were tied to be~er reading skills.
The tests, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, divide achievement levels into basic, proficient and
advanced. The 2006 history assessment had the highest percentage of 12th-grade students scoring below basic of any subject
tested in 2005 and 2006. And only 1 percent of students at any grade level scored at the advanced level.
The history test was given to a national sample of 29,200 4th-, 8th- and 12th-grade students. Among the results were
these:
¶Some 47 percent of the l:2th graders performed at the basic level or above. In 2001, 43 percent were at or above basic.
11Sixty-five percent of eighth graders achieved the basic level or better, up from 62 percent six years ago.
¶Seventy percent of fourth graders attained or exceeded the basic level, compared with 66 percent in 2001. Even this
result, however, left 30 percent who, for instance, lacked an ability to identify even the most familiar historic figures or explain the
reasons for celebrating national holidays.
’It’s heartwarming that the test organizers have found positive things to say, but this report is not anything to break out the
Champagne over," said Theodore K. Rabb, a professor of history at Princeton who advocates devoting more classroom time to
the subject.
The civics exam was given to a national sample of 25,300 4th, 8th and 12th grader~ Seventy-three percent of fourth-grade
pupils performed at the basic level or better, up from 69 percent in 1998, the last time the civics exam was administered. The
scores of 8th and 12th graders showed no change.
’What is most discouraging is that as students grow older and progress through the grades towards adulthood and eligibility
to vote, their civic knowledge and dispositions seems to growweaker," said David W. Gordon, superintendent of the Sacramento
County School District in California, who is a member of the board that sets policies for the test.
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings seized on yesterday’s results to rebut critics who argue that the federal
law has narrowed the curriculum.
"When students know howto read and comprehend," Ms. Spellings said, "they apply these skills to other subjects
like history and civics."
But Kim KozbiaI-Hess, a fourth-grade teacher from Toledo, Ohio, who is a member of the assessment board, argued that
the test results were not promising enough to justify the federal law,s focus on reading and math alone.
’tAre we doing well enough in U.S. history that it should continue to be left out of the No Child Left Behind legislation?" she
asked at the Boston news conference.
In Washington, Senators Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Lamar Alexander, Republican of
Tennessee, reintroduced a bill on Wednesday based on the premise that the National Assessment gave history sho~ shrift,
testing it every five to seven years instead of every other year as with reading and math. Their legislation would require national
history tests every four years, with more students tested.
David McCullough, John Hope Franklin, Douglas Brinkley and dozens of other prominent historians have sent Congress a
 Page 966
petition urging the bill’s passage.

U.S. Test Scores Rise In History, Level In Civics (WT)

By Amy Fagan, The Washington Times
The Washinqton Times, May 17, 2007
Fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders are showing improved knowledge of U.S. history, national test results show, but only
fourth-graders improved in civics and students across the board still struggle to reach higher achievement levels in both subjects.
Officials issued a mixed report card on results of the 2006 national civics and history tests -- part of the National
Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) that is given to a sampling of public and private school students nationwide.
Results, released yesterday, are "both encouraging and discouraging," said David Gordon, a member of the National
Assessment Governing Board.
All three grades improved their average history scores from 2001, the last time the test was administered. In civics, low-
performing fourth-graders improved their scores the most since 1998, the last time that test was given, while scores for the two
higher grades stayed essentially the same.
Little or no increase was seen in either subject in the percentage of students reaching proficient level or higher.
Officials and researchers praised the history gains but lamented the civics results. Mr. Gordon said he is concerned that
civics knowledge seems to weaken as students get closer to becoming adult participants in society.
’qhe results released today are encouraging, but it must be noted that while these scores are headed in the right direction,
they still remain alarmingly low," said Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education.
Some critics of the 2002 No Child Lett Behind Act have said the education law forces schools to focus on math and reading
scores at the cost of subjects such as social studies. But Education Secretary Margaret Spellings yesterday said the focus
on reading is the reason for the gains in civics and history.
"[’r]he fact is, when students know how to read and comprehend, they apply these skills to other subjects like
history and civics," she said. "The result is greater academic gains."
The tests were administered to nationally representative samples of students -- 25,000 for civics, 29,000 for history -- in the
fourth, eighth and 12th grades.
In history, the average score improved three points in each grade. Seventy percent of fourth-graders reached the basic
level or better in history, an improvement from 66 percent in 2001. The percentage of eighth-graders reaching basic or better in
history increased from 62 percent to 65 percent. The percentage of 12th-graders reaching basic or better also increased, but is
still only 47 percent.
No significant improvement was found from 2001 in the percentage of students reaching the proficient level or better in
history.
On Capitol Hill yesterday, Sons. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, and Lamar Alexander, Tennessee
Republican, introduced a bill that would provide $14 million for 10 states to test students in American history and civics under
NAEP and deliver comparable state-by-state results.
 Page 967

~Nonresponsiv
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: May 17, 2007 9:09 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Herr, John;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angeia; Maddox, Lauren; Private - Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toom ey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-m ail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara; Zeff, Ken
Subject: Reading Recovery (BSUN)

Reading Recovery (BSUN)

The Baltimore Sun, May 17, 2007
A report released last week has reinforced that the reading improvement program that has been part of the federal No
Child Left Behind law has been awash in cronyism and conflicts of interest. The report, prepared by staff members for Sen.
Edward M. Kennedy, chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, attests to the level of congressional
interest in the problems with the program - and underscores the need for changes in the law as soon as possible. In addition, the
Department of Education needs to be able to show Congress and the public that its procedures are transparent and above
board.
The program, Reading First, tries to improve the reading skills of first-, second- and third-graders through instruction
methods that are supposed to be scientifically based with a record of effectiveness. But a report last year by DOE’s inspector
general confirmed complaints from some reading specialists that the process of awarding almost $5 billion in grants to nearly
5,000 schools has been corrupted by conflicts of interest and a propensity by some DOE officials to push for teaching methods
that they happened to like, regardless of any scientific underpinnings.
rv’r. Kennedy’s report goes even further in demonstrating how a group of DOE subcontractors, who offered guidance to
school districts on specific reading programs that could be purchased with Reading First grants, also had substantial financial ties
to the handful of publishers who produced books and other materials associated with the recommended programs.
These cozy and lucrative relationships resulted in some effective programs being downplayed or shut out entirely. One
such program, Success for All, was developed by Robert Slavin, a professor of education and school reform expert at the Johns
Hopkins University. They also probably cheated some poor-performing students of the best methods to improve their reading
abilities and perhaps their chances for overall academic success.
IV’r. Kennedy, with some bipartisan support, would impose broader financial disclosure requirements on contractors and
subcontractors and fi.=rther restrict their ability to influence local curriculum decisions. Beyond legislation, Secretary of Education
Margaret Spellings, who has shaken up leadership of the Reading First program, has vowed to continue working with her
inspector general’s office to correct problems. Better legislative and administrative controls will be needed to get this program
back in focus.
 Page 968

~leonresponsi
From: McLane, Katherine
Sent: May 14, 2007 10:36 AM
To: Private- Spellings, Margaret; Landers, Angela; Evers, Bill; Colby, Chad; Williams, Cynthia;
Dorfman, Cynthia; Mesecar, Doug; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Pitts, Elizabeth; Flowers,
Sarah; McGrath, John; Talbert, Kent; Briggs, Kerri; Kuzmich, Holly; Toomey, Liam; Maddox,
Lauren; Scheessele, Marc; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Beaton, Meredith; Moran, Robert; Tucker,
Sara Martinez; Tada, Wendy; Halaska, Terrell; Tracy WH; Young, Tracy; Zeff, Ken; Quarles,
Karen; Bannerman, Kristin; Watkins, Tiffany; Sampson, Vincent; Conklin, Kristin; Oldham,
Cheryl; Schray, Vickie
Cc: Ditto, Trey; Neale, Rebecca; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Terrell, Julie; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Educating the Education Secretary (NYT)

May 14, 2007

Editorial

Educating the Education Secretary

"It’s not our fault." That’s what Education Secretary Margaret Spe!lings seemed to say while testifying before
Congress last week about her department’s failure to halt the payoffs, kickbacks and general looting of the
public treasury by a lending company that collected nearly $300 million in undeserved subsidies. But that
doesn’t track with the federal Higher Education Act, which clearly authorizes the secretary to disqualify from
federal programs lenders who employ payoffs, kickbacks and unethical practices like those that have been found
to be commonplace in the college lending business.
Angry at the department’s failure to control corruption in the loan program, Congress has taken the unusual step
of reiterating the secretary’s powers in the Student Loan Sunshine Act, which passed the House last week. The
bill, which deserves to pass the Senate, too, makes it a crime for lenders to offer colleges anything of value in
exchange for the right to do business at a given school. It authorizes the secretary of education to fine, suspend
or even terminate lenders who violate the new guidelines.
The new bill requires colleges to explain publicly whythey placed a given lender on the schoo!’s "preferred
lender" list. It expressly bans kickbacks, payoffs and so-called revenue sharing arrangements. If this bill
becomes law, students applying for lom~ will be entitled to all kinds of reformation that they had trouble getting
in the past. For example, before offering pricey private loans, lenders would have to inform students that they
might be eligible for less expensive federal !oans.
The proposed la~v makes for a marked improvement over the current situatiorL But it won’t make up for what
has developed in the current Deparh-nent of Education, where officials have seemed more interested in
kowtowing to the lenders than anything else. Cortgress should think of some way to insulate the oversight office
from partisan tampering. It could be moved into the department’s inspector general’s office -- or it could be
moved out of the department altogether.
 Page 969

lNonresponsive
............................. ..........................
May 14, 2007 6:09 AM
To: Oldham, Cheryl; Conklin, KrislJn; Schray, Vickie; Dunckel, Denise; Shaw, Terri; Sampson,
Vincent; Quarles, Karen; Bannerman, Kristin; scott m. stanzel@who.eop.gov; jeanie_s.
_mamo@who.eop.gov; Manning, James; Moran, Robert; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri;
Ruberg, Casey; Colby, Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Dorfman, Cynthia; Evers, Bill;
Kuzmich, Holly; La Force, Hudson; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren;
Pdvate- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Reich, Heidi;
rob Saliterman; Yudof, Samara; Scheessele, Marc; Halaska, Terrell; Toner, Jana; Mcnitt,
Townsend L; Young, Tracy; Ditto, Trey; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Zeff, Ken
Subject: Urban dropout epidemic (WT)

Urban dropout epidemic

By Donald Lambro
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published May 14, 2007
Advert is ement

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings called last week for combating ~merica’s "silent
epidemic," a high-school dropout rate of crisis proportions.
We have long kno~Tn about the problem, but the numbers are still just as shocking as
ever -- more so now because of new data showing the real dropout rates have been masked by
varying definitions of what constitutes a dropout.
In 1963, President Kennedy addressed the problem when 4 in i0 fifth-graders did not
finish high school.

"Forty-four years later, the dropout rate for African-American, Hispanic and Native
American students approaches 50 percent. We are wasting not just lives but time," Mrs.
Spellings said in an address to the National Summit on America’s Silent Epidemic, where
she and first lady Laura Bush, a former teacher and educators from around the country met
to discuss ways to cure a critical illness at the core of America’s schoo! system.
"Despite our best efforts, there are still vast inequities within our education
system," Mrs.
Spellings said. "In too many of our cities, the reality faced by minority and low-income
kids is shocking .... 15 percent of our high schools produce more than half of our
dropouts."
Nationally, more kids are graduating then ever, but the story is very different in
urban, inner-city school districts where public schools sorely lack educationa!
leadership, resources and the politica! wil! to overcome a very solvable problem.
In these schools, which Mrs. Spellings says are more appropriately called "dropout
factories," a majority of the students are minorities, and their high-school e~perience
looks vastly different from what most kids encounter.
"They go to schools where trash litters the f!oors, where graffiti decorates the
walls.., where most freshmen enter unable to read or do math at an eighth-grade level and
where graduation is a 50/50 shot, or worse," she said. As a result, each year nearly 1
million high-school students do not graduate and thus become virtually unemployable in a
knowledge-based economy where even many factory jobs require skills in science, math and
technology.
This social epidemic’s deepening dimensions have festered in the shadows for so long
because, in many schoo! districts, such dropouts are counted "only if he or she registered
as one." In other districts, dropouts are listed under "graduate" status if they promise
to get a diplomm at a future time.
But now a new online database showing graduation rates in school districts across the
country will give parents the tools to find out how their own communities measure up.
Notably, the data produced by the trade journal Education Week show graduation rates lower
than previously reported in most states.
How can we turn this tragic situation around?
®iving parents data about their schools may help in some areas, but minorities in the
poorest schoo! districts may lack access to such data and, in most cases, may not need it
to tell them about a dropout rate they may be all too familiar with.
 Page 970
Mrs. Spellings proposes Title I spending in President Bush’s No Child Left Behind
reauthorization be increased another $i billion "to improve and strengthen our public high
schools serving low-income students."
There are legitimate reasons to doubt whether more federa! funding will reverse the
dropout rate. We’ve been increasing federal aid-to-education budgets for decades now by
huge amounts, with little improvement in our SAT scores. This problem ultimately will be
solved within the states, communities and the four walls of our classrooms, by outside-
the-box thinking about how schools are run, and teachers are hired and how to provide
incentives for students to stay in school.
We need to end the prohibition against hiring non-education-degree alternative
teachers. Mrs.
Spellings called for creating an Adjunct Teacher Corps to bring math and science
professionals into the classroom. It’s a good idea. There are great numbers among the
soon-to-retire Baby Boom generation in many academic fields who can bring a new and
challenging enthusiasm and discipline into our schools.
We need to encourage schoo!-choice programs that allow parents to move their kids out
of failing, high-dropout-rate schools into better public, private and parochial schools of
their choice. Wisconsin pioneered the school-choice movement with great success. It needs
to be copied around the country.
Rather than pour more money into failing schools, why not provide tax-subsidy
incentives for major corporations to establish technology and science high schools within
inner cities to educate and train the workers they need to remain competitive in the
global economy?
Microsoft, IBM and hundreds of other U.S.
corporations say they cannot fill thousands of job openings because of a lack of skills in
math, science and computer progranu~ing.
Such companies would bring the same innovation and excellence to education they have
brought to the marketplace. I have a feeling the first Microsoft High Schoo! of Science
and Technology in, say, the South Bronx, would have few if any dropouts. How about it,
Bill Gates?
Donald Lambro, chief political correspondent of The Washington Times, is a nationally
syndicated columnist.

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 Page 971

INonresponsiI
............................. .........................
May 11, 2007 6:20 AM I
To: Oldham, Cheryl; Conklin, Kristin; Schray, Vickie; Duncket, Denise; Shaw, Terri; Sampson,
Vincent; Quarles, Karen; Bannerman, Kristin; scott m. stanzel@who.eop.gov; jeanie_s.
_rnamo@who.eop.gov; Manning, James; Moran, Robert; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri;
Ruberg, Casey; Colby, Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Dorfman, Cynthia; Evers, Bill;
Kuzmich, Holly; La Force, Hudson; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren;
Pdvate- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Reich, Heidi;
rob Saliterman; Yudof, Samara; Scheessele, Marc; Halaska, Terrell; Toner, Jana; Mcnitt,
Townsend L.; Young, Tracy; Ditto, Trey; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Zeff, Ken
Subject: Spellings Lessons (vvr)

N O"she:too, deplores~ contractors and private companies profiting at students’ expense. Who

ve doesn’t? But she was very quick to point out the limitations in the law that prevent her
from solving the problem -- and this seemed to knock Chairman George Miller, California
Democrat, off his partisan horse somewhat."

Spellings Lessons
Published May ll, 2007

In a time of divided government, Republicans must learn to work with a Democratic

Congress. They could surely look to Education Secretary ~rgaret Spellings’
testimony yesterday before the House Committee on Education and Labor for an example. Mrs.
Spellings’
lesson is this: Get the discussion moving in the zone of proper, forward-looking
oversight, where these hearings belong -- in this case, student loan abuses.
Don’t take the partisan bait. Acknowledge problems where they exist, identify solutions
and then invite the Democratic Congress to help fix it.
Granted, this problem is tailor-made for bipartisanship. In Mrs. Spelling’s case, it
lies with the approximately 30 percent of the $85 billion college-loan industry in private
hands, where abuses of "preferred lender" lists and undue coziness with college loan
officers have resulted from gaps in existing law. The headlines recount lenders wining and
dining college loan officers, including offering colleges a cut of the profits, to secure
their place on the lists. The lists are crucial, since many hundreds of companies are
competing in a market where differentiation is difficult. On Wednesday the House passed
the bipartisan Student Loan Sunshine Act to crack down on conflicts of interest.
Another problem is a fault in the landmmrk No Child Left Behind law’s provisions for
the "Reading First" program, a $i billion-a-year "scientific"
reading initiative, which has allowed officials to walk through a lucrative revolving door
with textbook contractors. This, apparently, is a completely legal loophole in NCLB.
Mrs. Spellings welcomed the committee’s interest
-- and was believable when she said so. She praised the House’s loan-industry bill as "an
important first step in this process." She, too, dep!ores contractors and private
companies profiting at students’ expense.
Who doesn’t? But she was very quick to point out the limitations in the law that prevent
her from solving the problem -- and this seemed to knock Chairman George Miller,
California Democrat, off his partisan horse somewhat.
Rep. Buck McKeon, California Republican, who seemed to ask only about the Clinton
administration, was overshadowed by Rep. Ric Keller, Florida Republican, who made sure the
scope of the problem, the legal jurisdiction and the chicanery of New York State Attorney
General Andrew Cuomo were all on record. It emerged that Mr. Cuomo did not even phone Mrs.
Spellings a single time before announcing to great fanfare this spring that the education
secretary and her advisers were "asleep at the switch." He hasn’t called her since,
either. It’s also worth noting that only Mr. Keller seemed truly interested in what we
consider a much larger problem: tuition inflation. Of course, federally subsidized student
!oans are the great driver in that regard, as are university empire-building and
administrative bloat.
The lesson here is not so much "getting ahead" of the problem, as so many Washington
politicians often recommend, as it is being genuinely committed to fixing it. Hrs.
Spellings seemed that way yesterday.
 Page 972
We look forward to the bipartisan fix.

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 Page 973

~Nonresponsiv
(b) (~s)e°nT: ~’h~n~-~-°l~n~t ..........................
: ............................. May 11, 2007 6:02
To: Oldham, Cheryl; Conklin, KristJn; Schray, Vickie; Dunckel, Denise; Shaw, Terri; Sampson,
Vincent; Quarles, Karen; Bannerman, Kristin; scott m. stanzel@who.eop.gov; jeanie_s.
_mamo@who.eop.gov; Manning, James; Moran, Robert; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri;
Ruberg, Casey; Colby, Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Dorfman, Cynthia; Evers, Bill;
Kuzmich, Holly; La Force, Hudson; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren;
Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Reich, Heidi;
rob Saliterman; Yudof, Samara; Scheessele, Marc; Halaska, Terrell; Toner, Jana; Mcnitt,
Townsend L; Young, Tracy; Ditto, Trey; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Zeff, Ken
Subject: Spellings Defends Loan-Program Oversight (WSJ)

Nmy ii, 2007

Spellings Defends Loan-Program Oversight By ANNE MARIE CHAKER and JOHN HECHINGERMay ii,
2007; Page A4 WASHINGTON -- Education Secretary l~argaret Spellings defended her oversight
of the federal college-loan program, even as a top House Democrat disclosed that the
Justice Department has opened an investigation into the Education Department’s treatment
of a major student-!oan company.

At a House Education and Labor Committee hearing yesterday, Ms. Spellings said the system
she heads is "broken," but defended her stewardship of it, arguing that the problems
predate the Bush administration. She assembled a task force last month of department
officials to look into colleges referring students to "preferred" lenders and the
inducements those lenders m~ke to schools to promote their services. She said it reported
back with recommendmtions that included a bar against schools recommending only one or two
lenders as "preferred."

Committee Chairman Rep. George Miller (D., Calif.), however, contended that the department
shirked its responsibility in overseeing colleges and student-!oan companies. "Did nobody
at the department think of picking up the phone and saying, ’You’ve got to stop this’~’’

He also announced that the Justice Department is now looking into the department’s audit
of student-loan giant Nelnet Inc., but it is unclear what action, if any, the department
might take.

In a September 2006 report, the Education Department’s inspector general detailed how
Nelnet had figured out a strategy to collect about $278 million in what the report said
were excessive payments from the government from January 2003 through June 2005. The
report recommended that officials require Nelnet to return those "overpayments." Despite
the inspector general’s report, the Education Department ar~nounced in January that because
of the prospect of lengthy litigation, it would let Nelnet keep the overpayments, but
c!ose the loophole that allowed the payments.

Nelnet spokesman Ben Kiser said following the settlement, the company was advised that the
Civil Division of the Justice Department had opened a file regarding the matter, and added
that "we are cooperating with the Department of Justice."
An Education Department spokeswommn referred calls to the Justice Department. The Justice
Department had no immediate comment.

Meanwhile yesterday, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced a settlement with
Student Loan Xpress Inc., a unit of financial-services firm CIT Group Inc.
Student Loan Xpress had provided stock or other payments to six college financial-aid
officials, including those at Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University,
investigators said. The schools have recommended the company’s !oans to students. ~
Education Department financial-aid official was placed on leave last month after it was
disclosed that in
2003 he held $i00,000 of stock in the parent company of Student Loan Xpress.
 Page 974
Fir. Cuomo said that, along with paying for meals and trips, Student Loan Xpress provided
personnel at no charge to financial-aid offices and offered free printing and other
services. CIT agreed to pay $9 million to a financial-aid education fund for high-schoo!
students and their families.

Write to Anne Marie Chaker at

anne-marie.chaker@wsj.coml and John Hechinger at john. hechinger@wsj.com2

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at Yahoo! Games.
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 Page 975

Nonresponsi
(b)( 9eOn~..: ............................. 1
I~th~ii i’i ~ - ~- ~1~ii ~t .........................
May 11, 2007 5:51 AM "
To: Oldham, Cheryl; Conklin, Krislin; Schray, Vickie; Duncket, Denise; Shaw, Terri; Sampson,
Vincent; Quarles, Karen; Bannerman, Kristin; scott m. stanzel@who.eop.gov; jeanie s.
_mamo@who.eop.gov; Manning, James; Moran, Robert; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, K~rri;
Ruberg, Casey; Colby, Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Dorrman, Cynthia; Evers, Bill;
Kuzmich, Holly; La Force, Hudson; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren;
Pdvate- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Reich, Heidi;
rob Saliterman; Yudof, Samara; Scheessele, Marc; Halaska, Terrell; Toner, Jana; Mcnitt,
Townsend L; Young, Tracy; Ditto, Trey; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Zeff, Ken
Subject: Spellings Rejects Criticism on Student Loan Scandal (NYT)

May ii, 2007

Spellings Rejects Criticism on Student Loan Scandal

By SAI~[ DILLON
WASHINGTON, May i0 -- With scandal rattling the $85 billion student !oan industry,
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings argued at a House hearing on Thursday that she
lacked legal authority to clamp down on many abuses.

Ms. Spellings faced pointed questioning at the hearing from Congressional Democrats, who
accused her department of mismanagement and complacency.

In about three hours of testimony before the House education conunittee, Ms. Spellings
portrayed her department’s oversight of federal lending programs as vigorous, but said
that the world of private lending, which has become increasingly important as college
costs hmve outstripped federa! loan programs, was mostly beyond her regulatory authority.

She told the panel that the entire student loan system needed overhaul, saying, "The
system is redundant, it’s byzantine and it’s broken."

Severa! Democrats, led by Representative George Hiller, questioned her aggressively,

asserting that she had regulatory power and moral influence that she had neglected to
wield to stop loan companies from paying universities or giving gifts, trips, stock and
consulting payments to the university financial aid officers who guide students toward
loans.

Mr. Killer, the California Democrat who heads the education committee, also took up a
separate issue of questionable federal subsidy payments to lenders. He particularly
criticized Ms. Spellings’s decision to ignore a recommendation of the department’s
inspector general that she recover $278 million in federal subsidy payments improperly
obtained by Nelnet, a lender based in Nebraska. He also said the Justice Department was
now reviewing the inspector general’s September audit that found Nelnet ineligible for
those payments.
After the hearing, a Justice Department spokesmmn, Charles Hiller, did not contradict
Representative Miller’s assertions, but said, "We have no comment at this time."

Mr, I~iller openly dismissed Ms. Spellings’s portrayal of her department’s monitoring of
student lending as robust. He also criticized the department for its oversight of Reading
First, a program designed to teach poor children to read that has been besieged by reports
of conflicts of interest among Education Department consultants.

"When I look at the whole body of evidence that has been amassed about both the student
loan and Reading First programs, it is clear that -- at a minimum -- the Education
Department’s oversight failures have been monumenta!," he said.
"We monitor these programs vigorously," Ms. Spellings replied.

"Who is monitoring?" Hr. Miller shot back. "’Do they have blinders on?"
 Page 976
Ms. Spellings countered that her critics were focusing too narrowly on scattered abuses in
student lending, without offering much constructive help in changing the system, which she
said was "crying out for reform."

"’We cannot fix this broken enterprise by cherry-picking a few nmrrow issues to address,"
she said. "We must peel back the layers, increase transparency, streamline the entire
system and provide more aid to students."

Ms. Spellings said she would convene a meeting of other federal agencies that deal with
lending issues, including the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange
Commission and the Federal Reserve, to forge a coherent federal response to improper
relationships between lenders and universities.

Lenders have come under scrutiny in recent months as New York’s attorney general, Andrew
M. Cuomo, has highlighted practices of lenders to get on university preferred lender
lists, ~hich students rely on in seeking loans.

Mr. Cuomo on Thursday announced a new agreement with Student Loan Xpress, a student loan
company that engaged in some of the questionable practices, and the CIT Group, the
company’s parent. Under the terms of the new agreement, CIT wil! pay $3 million to a
nmtional fund for educating high schoo! students and their parents about financial aid.
The company also signed a code of conduct developed by Mr. Cuomo, governing relationships
between colleges and lenders.

The department has also come under scrutiny from Congress for its failure to halt millions
of dollars in subsidy payments to lenders that exploited loopholes to inflate their
eligibility for subsidies on the student loans, including those paid to Nelnet.

Mr. Hiller and other la~~kers pressed Ms. Spellings, the lone witness, to explain her
decision in January to allow Nelnet, a major contributor to Republican campaigns, to keep
the $278 million. In exchange, Nelnet agreed not to bill for nearly $900 million in
subsidies it believed it was eligible for.
Ms. Spellings said that she thought the fact that the department had been paying the
subsidies without question could have put it in legal ~eopardy and that Nelnet might have
prevailed in a lawsuit.

"The reason that I settled was that there was a risk of nearly $900 million that this
government was in danger of losing if we lost a lawsuit," Ms. Spellings said.

Representative John F. Tierney, Democrat of Massachusetts, said, "It boggles my mind -- we

al!owed somebody to get away essentially with theft."

Mr. Miller declined to answer questions after the hearing about any Justice Department
action against Nelnet.
The loan company itself hinted to investors in a filing with the Securities and Exchange
Commission earlier this year that the matter might not be closed, saying that "the company
was informed by the department that a civil attorney with the Department of Justice has
opened a file regarding this issue."
Ben Kiser, a Nelnet spokesman, said in an interview, "We are fully cooperating with the
Department of Justice and are confident that there are no grounds for any action against
Nelnet."
Jonathan D. Glarer contributed reporting.

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 Page 978

~NonresponsivI
May 11, 2007 5:46 AM
To: Oldham, Cheryl; Conklin, KrislJn; Schray, Vickie; Duncket, Denise; Shaw, Terri; Sampson,
Vincent; Quarles, Karen; Bannerman, Kristin; scott m. stanzel@who.eop.gov; jeanie_s.
_mamo@who.eop.gov; Manning, James; Moran, Robert; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri;
Ruberg, Casey; Colby, Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Dorfman, Cynthia; Evers, Bill;
Kuzmich, Holly; La Force, Hudson; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren;
Private-Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Reich, Heidi;
rob Saliterman; Yudof, Samara; Scheessele, Marc; Halaska, Terrell; Toner, Jana; Mcnitt,
Townsend L.; Young, Tracy; Ditto, Trey; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Zeff, Ken
Subject: Justice Probes Student Lender Payments (AP)

Ymy ii, 2007

Justice Probes Student Lender Payments
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:57 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AB) -- The Justice Department is reviewing an audit that found hundreds of
millions of dollars have been ~mproperly paid to a student loan company, House Education
Committee Chairman George Miller said Thursday.
Miller, D-Calif., mmde the review public during a hearing in w1~ch he pressed Education
Secretary Margaret Spellings on her decision to ignore a recommendation by her
department’s inspector general, John Higgins, to recover an estimated $278 million.
It’s the IG’s audit that Justice is reviewing.

A Justice Department spokesman declined comment Thursday.

Spellings defended her decision not to recover the improper payments to the lender,
Nebraska-based Nelnet, saying it was prudent to simply extract a promise from Nelnet that
it would halt the practice, avoiding a costly lawsuit.

Some lawmakers were skeptical.

’’Do you not have confidence in your inspector general?’’ asked Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass.
’’I’m extremely uncomfortable with this.’’

Spellings also traded barbs with Miller over allegations that the department’s oversight
of the student loan industry has been lax.
Miller said the department failed to do its job when it came to u!icovering improper
relationships between student lenders and colleges or student loan officials at those
oolleges. He pointed to a 2003 notice from Higgins’ office urging the department to curb
inducements mmde by lenders to colleges or their staffs.

Miller said the department promised it would keep an eye on such activities, a response he
called inadequate. Spellings countered that the department has done what it could under
existing law. ’’We monitor these programs vigorously,’’ she said.

’’Who is monitoring? Do they have blinders on?’’

Miller asked.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has been leading an investigation into the $85
billion-a-year student loan industry. He has found evidence thmt some colleges received a
percentage of loan proceeds from lenders given preferred status by the schools and found
college loan officers got gifts from lenders to encourage them to steer borrowers their
way.

Cuomo said Thursday he had reached a $3 million settlement with Student Loan Xpress, Inc.
and its parent company CIT Group Inc. Student Loan Xpress also agreed to cooperate with
 Page 979
the investigation into potentially improper stock transactions.

Cuomo’s investigation revealed that the former CEO of Student Loan Xpress, Fabrizio
Balestri, sold or transferred securities to financial aid officers at several colleges and
to Matteo Fontana, a senior Education Department officia! who was recently placed on leave
due to the disclosure of his stock holdings.

Cuomo previously reached similar agreements with Citibank, Sallie ~e, JP Morgan Chase,
Bank of America and Education Finance Partners.

The congressional hearing came a day after the House overwhel~Lingly passed a bipartisan
bil! that would ban gifts from lenders to schools and impose strict controls on schools
that publish approved lender lists to guide students to certain loan companies.

Spellings called the vote ’’an important first step in this process.’’

But she als0 noted that she was pushing through new regulations to protect against
conflicts of interest.
She said proposed regulations would be completed this month and would include a
requirement of at least three lenders on any school’s preferred-lender list, together with
an explanation of how and why they were chosen. The rules also wil! spell out what is
allowed and what is prohibited with regard to inducements from lenders to schools, she
said.
Spellings said her department hms oversight only for loans made through the federal
student loan programs in which the government guarantees the !oans. She said she has no
authority over the growing private student !oan industry, in which the government doesn’t
make or guarantee the !oans.

She announced at the hearing that she was convening the chairs of other federal agencies
that deal with banking and lending issues to help her examine the problems in this sector
of the student loan industry.

California Rep. Buck McKeon, the top Republican on the House Education and Labor
Committee, came to Spellings’ defense, saying she couldn’t be ’’expected to be the ethics
police for the nation’s colleges.’’

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 Page 980

NonresponsiI
( )(}s)ent:b e ............................. ..........................
May 10, 2007 10:13 PM
]
To: Oldham, Cheryl; Conklin, KdslJn; Schray, Vickie; Dunckel, Denise; Shaw, Terri; Sampson,
Vincent; Quarles, Karen; Bannerman, Kdstin; scott m. stanzel@who.eop.gov; jeanie_s.
_mamo@who.eop.gov; Manning, James; Moran, Robert; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri;
Ruberg, Casey; Colby, Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Dorfman, Cynthia; Evers, Bill;
Kuzmich, Holly; La Force, Hudson; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren;
Private-Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Reich, Heidi;
rob Saliterman; Yudof, Samara; Scheessele, Marc; Halaska, Terrell; Toner, Jana; Mcnitt,
Townsend L.; Young, Tracy; Ditto, Trey; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Zeff, Ken
Subject: Education Secretary Defends Loans Record (WP)

Education Secretary Defends Loans Record ~~ersight Is Lax, Committee Chief Asserts By ~mit
R. Paley Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, May 11, 2007; A08

Education Secretary ~rgaret Spellings, facing aggressive questions about her department’
oversight of the $85 billion-a-year student loan industry, offered a vigorous defense of
her actions yesterday and called for a multi-agency effort to prevent corruption in the
loan system.

"Federal student aid is crying out for reform,"

Spellings told the House education committee. "The system is redundant, it’s byzantine and
it’s broken.
In fact, it’s often more difficult for students to get aid thmn it is for bad actors to
game the system."
In a sometimes-tense hearing, Democratic lammmkers accused the Bush ackLlinistration of
failing to clamp down on conflicts of interest and various industry practices that have
drawn criticism from Congress and attorneys general across the nation. The House voted
this week to increase federal regulation of the loan business.

"The Education Department’s oversight failures have been monumental," said Rep. George
Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the committee. "Was this simply laziness?
Was it incompetence? Was it a deliberate decision to !ook the other way while these things
hmppened? Or was it a failing more sinister than that?"
Miller disclosed at the hearing that the Justice Department is examining a controversial
accounting loophole used by Nelnet, a Nebraska-based lending company, in an attempt to
collect more than $1 billion in government subsidies. Spellings decided this year to halt
the payments but allowed Nelnet to keep $278 million it had collected.

Ben Kiser, a Nelnet spokesman, said the company is "fully cooperating" with the Justice
Department and remains "confident that there are no grounds for any action against
Nelnet." The department is looking into potential civil fraud, according to a source who
spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

Spellings offered her fullest explanation yet of the decision to settle with Nelnet,
saying she believed there was a significant chance that the company would have won if it
had filed a lawsuit against the government to continue receiving payments.

But Hiller, in one of several verbal sparring sessions with Spellings, said the
explanation made little sense. "if it’s such an easy case for them, why did they walk away
from $1 billion?" he asked.

Spellings said the Bush administration has taken significant steps to regulate the student
loan industry. She announced that a task force named to create rules forbidding gifts from
lenders to universities had made its recommendations, which she pledged to implement.

One of the biggest areas of contention was the department’s oversight of companies that
offer private loans, a fast-growing sect$on of the market. Spellings said she had the
ability to regulate only federally guaranteed loans, but Miller insisted that she could
 Page 981
h~ve used her bully pulpit as secretary to stop controversial practices in the private
loan business.

"Who was monitoring?" Miller asked. "Did they h~ve blinders on?"

Spellings replied: "It was not a violation of the laws I’m charged with overseeing."

"That’s become a crutch," Miller said.

Spellings said responsibility for regulation of the private loan market rested with the
Federal Trade Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Deposit Insurance
Corp. and Federal Reserve.
But she promised to convene the heads of all the agencies "to coordinate a government-wide
endeavor to end student-loan abuse -- no matter where it occurs."

Several Republicans came to the secretary’s defense.

"We must be cautious not to engage in an endless, partisan fishing expedition that, after
a while, runs the risk of becoming a witch hunt instead of a serious pursuit of changes to
public policy," said Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (Calif.), the committee’s ranking
Republican.

Also yesterday, New York Attorney General Andrew M.

Cuomo announced that the parent company of lender Student Loan Xpress, which placed three
executives on leave amid a conflict-of-interest investigation, agreed to pay $3 million
and sign a code of conduct that forbids controversial business practices.

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 Page 982

~l~nresponsi1
From: McLane, Katherine
Sent: May 10, 2007 6:32 PM
To: Private-Spellings, Margaret; Shaw, Terri; Manning, James; Landers, Angela; Evers, Bill;
Colby, Chad; VVilliams, C:ynthia; Dorfman, Cynthia; Mesecar, Doug; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn,
David; Pitts, Elizabeth; Flowers, Sarah; McGrath, John; Talbert, Kent; Briggs, Kerri; Kuzmich,
Holly; Toomey, Liam; Maddox, Lauren; Scheessele, Marc; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Beaton,
Meredith; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Tada, Wendy; Halaska, Terrell; Tracy WH; Young, Tracy;
Zeff, Ken; Quarles, Karen; Bannerman, Kristin; Watkins, Tiffany; Sampson, Vincent; Conklin,
Kristin; Oldham, Cheryl; Schray, Vickie
Cc: Ditto, Trey; Neale, Rebecca; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Terrell, Julie; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Justice Dept. investigating overpayments to student loan company (AP)

Justice Dept. investigating overpayments to student loan company

By NANCY ZUCKERBROD
AP Education Writer

May !0, 2007, 6:06 PM EDT

WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department is reviewing an audit that found hundreds of millions of dollars
have been improperly paid to a student loan company, House Education Committee Chairman George lViiller
said Thursday.
Miller, D-Calif, made the review public during a hearing in which he pressed Education Secretary Margaret
Spellings on her decision to ignore a recommendation by her deparlment’s inspector general, John Higgins, to
recover an estimated $278 million. It’s the IG’s audit that Justice is reviewing.

A Justice Department spokesman declined comment Thursday.

Spellings defended her decision not to recover the improper payments to the lender, Nebraska-based Ndnet,
saying it was prudent to simply extract a promise from Nelnet that it would halt the practice, avoiding a costly
lawsuit.

Some lawmakers were skeptical.

"Do you not have confidence in your inspector general?" asked Rep. John Tiemey, D-Mass. "I’m extremely
uncomfortable with this."
Spellings also traded barbs with lVliller over allegations that the department’s oversight of the student loan
industry has been lax.

Miller said the department failed to do its job when it came to uncovering improper relationships between
student lenders and colleges or student loan officials at those colleges. He pointed to a 2003 notice from
Higgins’ office urging the department to curb inducements made by lenders to colleges or their staffs.

Miller said the department promised it would keep an eye on such activities, a response he called inadequate.
Spellings countered that the department has done what it could under existing law. "We monitor these programs
vigorously," she said.
 Page 983

"Who is monitoring? Do they have blinders on?" Ivliller asked.

New York Attomey General Andrew Cuomo has been leading an investigation into the $85 billion-a-year
student loan industry. He has found evidence that some colleges received a percentage of loan proceeds from
lenders given preferred status by the schools and found college loan officers got gifts from lenders to encourage
them to steer borrowers their way.

Cuomo said Thursday he had reached a $3 million settlement with Student Loan Xpress, Inc. and its parent
company C1T Group Inc. Student Loan Xpress also agreed to cooperate with the investigation into potentially
improper stock transactions.

Cuomo’s investigation revealed that the former CEO of Student Loan Xpress, Fabrizio Balestri, sold or
transferred securities to flnandal aid officers at several colleges and to Matteo Fontana, a senior Education
Department official who was recently placed on leave due to the disclosure of his stock holdings.

Cuomo previously reached similar agreements with Citibank, Sallie Mae, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America
and Education Finance Partners.

The congressional hearing came a day after the House overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan bill that would ban
gifts from lenders to schools and impose strict controls on schools that publish approved lender lists to guide
students to certain loan companies.
Spellings called the vote "an important first step in Lhis process."

But she also noted that she was pushing through new regulations to protect against conflicts of interest. She said
proposed reg~ations would be completed this month and would include a requirement of at least three lenders
on any school’s preferred-lender list, together with an explanation of how and why they ~vere chosen. The roles
also will spell out what is allowed and what is prohibited with regard to inducements from lenders to schools,
she said.
Spellings said her department has oversight only for loans made through the federal student loan programs in
which the government guarantees the loans. She said she has no authority over the growing private student loan
industry, in which the government doesn’t make or guarantee the loans.

She announced at the hearing that she was convening the chairs of other federal agencies that deal with banking
and lending issues to help her examine the problems in this sector of the student loan industry.
California Rep. Buck McKeon, the top Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee, came to
Spellings’ defense, saying she couldn’t be "expected to be the ethics police for the nation’s colleges."
 Page 984

lNonresponsivI
From: McLane, Katherine
Sent: May 10, 2007 3:25 PM
To: Private- Spellings, Margaret; Landers, Angela; Evers, Bill; Colby, Chad; Williams, Cynthia;
Dorfman, Cynthia; Mesecar, Doug; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Pitts, Elizabeth; Flowers,
Sarah; McGrath, John; Talbert, Kent; Briggs, Kerri; Kuzmich, Holly; Toomey, Liam; Maddox,
Lauren; Scheessele, Marc; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Beaton, Meredith; Tucker, Sara Martinez;
Tada, Wendy; Halaska, Terrell; Tracy WH; Young, Tracy; Zeff, Ken; Quarles, Karen;
Bannerman, Kristin; Watkins, Tiffany; Sampson, Vincent; Conklin, Kdstin; Oldham, Cheryl;
Schray, Vickie
Cc: Ditto, Trey; Neale, Rebecca; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Terrell, Julie; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Student aid system broken - U.S. education secretary (Reuters)

Attachments: Picture (Metafile)

Student aid system broken education

secretary
By Kevin Drawbaugh ] May 10, 2007
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. college student financial aid system is broken and needs changes,
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings told a congressional hearing Thursday amid a widening scandal in
the $85 billion student loan business that her agency oversees.
"Federal student aid is crying out for reform. The system is redundant, it’s Byzantine, and it’s broken," Spellings
told the House Education and Labor Committee.
With federal and state investigators probing alleged conflicts of interest among loan companies and universities,
committee Chairman George Miller grilled Spellings about what he said was chronic inaction by the depar~ent
on the matter.
"The U.S. Department of Education has been conspicuously missing in action," said the California Democrat.
"What makes all of this evenmore troubling is that many Education Department officials who have worked
directly on the student loan programs appear, according to press accounts, to have their own conflicts of
interest," he said.
Some Congressional Democrats have said student loan companies that handle the federally guaranteed student
loan program exert too much influence in the department. Spellings became education secretary two years ago
after working as a domestic policy adviser to President Bush_
Spellings said any suggestion that her department has shown favoritism to the federally guaranteed student loan
program "is totally without merit and has no basis in fact."
The department faces high hurdles before it can bring enforcement actions over possible misconduct in student
loan programs, she said. Some questionable practices alleged by investigators now fall under the jurisdiction of
other federal agencies, Spellings added.
"We have conducted thousands and thousands of audits of programs," she said. "We monitor these programs
vigilantly."
The scandal shaking the loan industry has swept up the department, numerous universities and student aid
 Page 985
officers, as well as major lenders including Sallie Mae, Citigoup, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America.
Investigators allege t~t banks have given college financial aid oNcers pay and perks -- such as stock and gifts
-- to win inclusion on so-called "preferred lender" lists that are shown to students seeking loans.
The House voted 414-3 on Wednesday to approve a bill that would crack down on such lists, ban lender gifts to
college aid officers and protect students from ag~essive marketing practices.
The Senate is considering a similar measure.
Spellings announced Tuesday the resignation of a key subordinate at the Education Department. Tern Shaw,
chief operating officer for federal student aid, roll quit June 1.
Facedwith fast-rising college tuition fees, already the world’s highest, U.S. student debt is rising sharply.
Most students who take out loans get them from banks or from Sallie Mae, either with a federal guarantee
backing them or, increasingly, without one. Loans are also available directly from the government and from
other sources.
Congressional Democrats -- including Miller and Senate Education Committee Chairman Edward Kennedy of
Massachusetts -- support far-reaching reforms for student loans that directly threaten the business models of
Sallie Mae and the banks.
Critics of the loan indusWy charge it makes unfair profits at the expense of students, while lenders say their
loans are cost-efficient and that they provide valuable financial services to both students and the universities
they attend.
 Page 986 Page 1 of 2

[Nonresponsiv J
From: katherine mclane~(h~t(R~t
Sent: April 27, 2007 7:32 AM
To: scott m. stanzel@who.eop.gov; Oldham, Cheryl; Sampson, Vincent; Bannerman,
Kristin; Quarles, Karen; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Ruberg, Casey; Colby, Chad;
Williams, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Doffman, Cynthia; Evers, Bill; Kuzmich, Holly; La
Force, Hudson; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private-
Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Reich, Heidi; rob
Saliterman; Yudof, Samara; Scheessele, Marc; Halaska, Ten-ell; Toner, Jana; Mcnitt,
Townsend L.; Young, Tracy; Ditto, Trey; Tucker, Sara Martinez; 7"eft, Ken
Subject: Congressional probe of student loans widens (Reuters)

Congressional probe of student loans widens

By Kevin Drawbaugh
Reuters
Thursday, April 26, 2007; 7:41 PM
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Congressional investigators probing the $85 billion student loan
market pushed into new areas on Thursday by raising concerns about collection tactics and
seeking an inqttiry into possible conflicts of interest inNde the U.S. Education Department.
Edward Kenned¥, chairman of the Senate education committee, wrote to the heads of two
major student loan firms expressing concerns about allegedly abusive !oan collection tactics.
"I am concerned that several private lenders may be engaging in harsh and inappropriate
tactics with regard to borrowers whose payments are overdue ... tactics that are prohibited by
federal law and regulations," Kennedy wrote in a letter to Tim Fitzpatrick, chief executive
officer of Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest student lender.
Senate investigators have obtained information indicating lenders may have told a borrowers
spouse that the borrower wottld go to jail if he did not pay, which is "a blatantly false
assertion," said K~medy, a Massachusetts Democrat.
Investigators are also looking into whether lenders have refused to n~otiate with borrowers
on payment deferment, called borrowers on the job after being told to stop, harassed
borrowers’ neighbors, family and co-workers and used profane language to intimidate
borrowers.
Kennedy asked Filzpalfick to provide information about Sallie Mac’s collection practices
trader the federally g~aranteed student loan system.
Sallie Mae spokesman Tom Joyce said, "It is a shame that Senator Kennedy’s staff is
continuing to investigate through press releases ... The media received this letter before we
did."
He said Satlie Mae is proud of helping coll~e graduates avoid loan defaults and keep healthy
credit ratings throngh its debt counseling efforts. He said the company will cooperate with
Kennedy’s request for information_
EDUCATION DEPARTMENT INQUIRY
Also known as SLM Corp., Sallie Mae has been swept up in an expanding inqttiry by state
and congressional officials, which has led to allegations of misconduct and conflicts of
interest across the student loan industry.
Kennedy also wrote a letter hi~hlighfing his concerns about collection practices to Michael
Dtmlap, chief executive of Nelnet Inc., another student loan group.
Separately, the chnirman of the House of Representatives education committee on Thursday
asked for an internal inquiry at the Education Department into possible conflicts of interest
among department employees, lenders and others.
California Democrat Geo~e Miller made his request in a letter to department Inspector

06/05/2008
 Page 987 Page 2 of 2

General John
Kennedy asked Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings on Wednesday to hand over to his
once the persormd files and financial disclosure reports for 27 Education Department
employees, including Chief of Staff James Manning.
Earlier tlfis month, a manager in the departrnenffs financial aid ot~ce was put on leave
pending a review of his ownel~hip of stock in Education Lending Group Inc., former parent
of Student Loan Xpress, now a unit of CIT Group Inc..
Along with Kennedy and Miller, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has been
leading a campaign to shake up the student loan business.
Testifying before Mille,’s committee on Wednesday, Cuomo said criminal charges may result
from his inquiry into ties between banks that lend money to college students and individual
tmiversity financial aid officers.
Investigators have said some college aid oNcers took payments and perks t~om lenders in
exchange for placing the companies on "preferred lender" lists sho~m to students.
As the inquiry has progressed, major lenders -- including Citigroup, Sallie Mac, JPMorgan
Chase and Bank of America -- have agreed to a code of conduct recommended by Cuomo
that bans school-lender financial ties, "preferred lender" list payments and lender ~fts to
college employees.

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06/05/2008
 Page 988

INonresponsiv
From: McLane, Katherine
Sent: May 10, 2007 2:56 PM
To: Pdvate- Spellings, Margaret; Landers, Angela; Evers, Bill; Colby, Chad; Williams, Cynthia;
Dorfman, Cynthia; Mesecar, Doug; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Pitts, Elizabeth; Flowers,
Sarah; McGrath, John; Talbert, Kent; Briggs, Kerri; Kuzmich, Holly; Toomey, Liam; Maddox,
Lauren; Scheessele, Marc; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Beaton, Meredith; Tucker, Sara Martinez;
Tada, Wendy; Halaska, Terrell; Tracy WH; Young, Tracy; Zeff, Ken; Quarles, Karen;
Bannerman, Kristin; Watkins, Tiffany; Sampson, Vincent; Conklin, Kdstin; Oldham, Cheryl;
Schray, Vickie
Cc: Ditto, Trey; Neale, Rebecca; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Terrell, Julie; Yudof, Samara
Subject: AP on headng: "Education chief: Department responding to student loan problems"

[Nonresponsive J
Education chief. Department responding to student loan problems
By NANCY ZUCKERBROD
Thursday, May 10, 2007 11:49 AM CDT
~VASHINGTON - Education Secretary Margaret Spellings sparred with the chairman of the House education
committee Thursday amid allegations that the department’s oversight of the student !oan industry has been lax.
Rep. George Miller, D-Cali£, said in a hearing that the department failed to do its job when it came to
uncovering improper relationships between student lenders and colleges or student loan officials at those
colleges.
Iviiller pointed to a 2003 notice from Education Department Inspector General John Higgins’ office urging the
department to take action to curb gift-giving by lenders to colleges or their staffs.
Miller said the department promised that it would keep an eye on such activities, a response he called
inadequate. Spellings countered that the department has done what it could under existing law. "We monitor
these programs vigorously," she said.
"Who is monitoring? Do theyhave blinders on?" Miller asked.
The hearing was focused on recent findings of an investigation by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo
into the $85 billion-a-year student loan industry. Cuomo has turned up evidence that some colleges received a
percentage of loan proceeds from lenders given preferred status by the schools _ a practice Cuomo calls
"kickbacks."
Cuomo also found that some college loan officers received gifts from lenders to encourage them to steer
borrowers their way.

On Wednesday, the House overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan bil! that would ban gifts from lenders to schools
and impose strict controls on schools that publish approved lender lists to guide students to certain loan
companies.

Spellings called the vote "an important first step in this process."

But she also noted that she also was taldng steps to push through new regulations to protect against conflicts of
interest. She said proposed rega,tlations ~vould be completed this month and would include a requirement of at
 Page 989
least three lenders on any school’s preferred-lender list, together with an explanation of how and why they were
chosen. The rules also ,~,511 spell out what is a!lowed and what is prohibited with regard to inducements from
lenders to schools, Spellings said.

She said the Education Department has oversight only for loans made through the federal student loan progams
in which the govermnent guarantees the loans. She said she has no authority over the growing private student
loan industry, in which the government doesn’t make or guarantee the loans.

Spellings announced at the hearing that she was conven~g the chairs of other federal agencies that deal with
banking and lending issues to help her examine the problems in this sector of the student loan industry.

A service of the Associated Press(AP)

 Page 990

[Nonresponsiv!
From: McLane, Katherine
Sent: May 10, 2007 2:46 PM
To: Private- Spellings, Margaret; Landers, Angela; Evers, Bill; Colby, Chad; Williams, Cynthia;
Dorfman, Cynthia; Mesecar, Doug; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Pitts, Elizabeth; Flowers,
Sarah; McGrath, John; Talbert, Kent; Briggs, Kerri; Kuzmich, Holly; Toomey, Liam; Maddox,
Lauren; Scheessele, Marc; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Beaton, Meredith; Tucker, Sara Mar[inez;
Tada, Wendy; Halaska, Terrell; Tracy WH; Young, Tracy; Zeff, Ken; Quarles, Karen;
Bannerman, Kristin; Watkins, Tiffany; Sampson, Vincent; Conklin, Kristin; Oldham, Cher:yl;
Schray, Vickie
Cc" Ditto, Trey; Neale, Rebecca; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Terrell, Julie; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Spellings vows headway on student loans (AP)

Spellings vows headway on student loans

Staff ~’~d agencies
10 May, 2007

By NANCY ZUCKERBROD, AP Education Writer 1 minute ago

WASHINGTON - Education Secretary Margaret Spellings Margaret Spellings sparred with the chairman of the
House education committee Thursday amid allegations that the department’s oversight of the student loan
industry has been lax.
Miller pointed to a 2003 notice from Education Department Inspector General John Higgins’ office urging the
department to take action to curb gift-giving by lenders to colleges or their staffs.
"Who is monitoring? Do they have blinders on?" Miller asked.
Cuomo also found that some college loan officers received gifts from lenders to encourage them to steer
borrowers their way.
Spellings called the vote "an important first step in this process."

She said the Education Department has oversight only for loans made through the federal student loan programs
in which the government guarantees the loans. She said she has no authority over the growing private student
loan industry, in which the government doesn’t make or guarantee the loans.
 Page 991

[NonresponsivI
J
May 10, 2007 7:05 AM
Oldham, Cheryl; Conklin, KrislJn; Schray, Vickie; Duncket, Denise; Shaw, Terri; Sampson,
Vincent; Quarles, Karen; Bannerman, Kristin; scott m. stanzel@who.eop.gov; jeanie_s.
_mamo@who.eop.gov; Manning, James; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Ruberg, Casey;
Colby, Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Dorfman, Cynthia; Evers, Bill; Kuzmich, Holly;
La Force, Hudson; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private - Spellings,
Margaret; McGrath, John; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Reich, Heidi; rob Saliterman;
Yudof, Samara; Scheessele, Marc; Halaska, Terrell; Toner, Jana; Mcnitt, Townsend L.;
Young, Tracy; Ditto, Trey; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Zeff, Ken
Subject: Four Officials Profited From Publishers, Report Finds (WP)

Four Officials Profited From Publishers, Report Finds By ~it R. Paley Washington Post
Staff Writer Thursdmy, ~y I0, 2007; All

Four officials who helped oversee a federal reading program for young students have
pocketed significant sums of money from textbook publishers thmt profited from the $i
billion-a-year initiative, a Democratic congressionml report disclosed yesterday.

The report from the office of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy

(D-Mass.) offers fresh details on the extensive financial ties between publishers and
officials who helped implement the Reading First program. Over the past several months,
the program has faced numerous allegations of conflicts of interest and cronyism.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is expected to face questions about the program, a
key provision of the No Child Left Behind law, from a House oversight committee today.
David Dunn, her chief of staff, said the department is reviewing the report’s findings.

Congress and the Justice Department are examining the initiative, which provides grants to
improve reading for children from kindergarten through third grade.

Kennedy’s report focused on how much current or former directors of three regional Reading
First technical assistance centers have earned in recent years from
publishers: Douglas Carnine (more than $800,000), Edward Kame’enui (more than $750,000),
Joseph Torgesen (more th~_n $50,000) and Sharon Vaughn (more than $1.2 million).

All four denied wrongdoing, and two accused Kep~nedy of distorting the situation for
political benefit. "The report is inaccurate, unfair and has no basis in fact," said
Lizette D. Benedi, an attorney for Kame’enui, who works for the Education Department as
commissioner of the National Center for Special Education Research.

Carnine and Torgesen still run regional Reading First centers. "At no time did anyone from
the Department of Education or anywhere else tell me that [the earnings from publishers]
was a problem as !ong as I disclosed my contracts," Torgesen said.

The four officials were not covered by federal conflict-of-interest rules because they
worked for a contracted company, not the department, experts said.
Kennedy said the rules should be tightened.

Staff researcher Meg SmAth contributed to this report.

Do You YahooS?
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 Page 992

Nonresponsiv
~ ~t’6~i-ii-i i~ -i’h- ~1~ii ~t ...........................
(b)( 9e°n~: ............................. May 10, 2007 7:01 AM
To; Oldham, Cheryl; Conklin, KrislJn; Schray, Vickie; Duncket, Denise; Shaw, Terri; Sampson,
Vincent; Quarles, Karen; Bannerman, Kristin; scott m. stanzel@who.eop.gov; jeanie s.
_mamo@who.eop.gov; Manning, James; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Ruberg, Cagey;
Colby, Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Dorfman, C’ynthia; Evers, Bill; Kuzmich, Holly;
La Force, Hudson; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private - Spellings,
Margaret; McGrath, John; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Reich, Heidi; rob Saliterman;
Yudof, Samara; Scheessele, Marc; Halaska, Terrell; Toner, Jana; Mcnitt, Townsend L.;
Young, Tracy; Ditto, Trey;, Tucker, Sara Martinez; Zeff, Ken
Subject: Bill: Bar gifts to school officials from student lenders (USAT)

Bill: Bar gifts to school officials from student lenders By Kathy Chu, USA TODAY On the
eve of a congressiona! hearing on student !can practices, the House passed a bipartisan
bil! Wednesday that would bar lenders from giving gifts to colleges or school officials to
win business, and would require schools to disc!ose any financial ties to lenders.
The passage of the bil!, pushed by House education committee chair George Miller, D-
Calif., comes a day before Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is to testify at the
hearing. Spellings is expected to be grilled about how her agency hmndled conflicts of
interest and what it’s doing to combat questionable loan practices.

Miller and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., have criticized the department’s oversight of
student lenders and its own department officials. New York Attorney General ~tndrew Cuomo
said at a Mouse hearing last month that conflicts of interest between lenders and
universities escalated because the department had been "asleep at the switch" in
overseeing the federal loan program.

The House bill’s passage is "promising" and comes at a pivotal time, says Michael
Dannenberg of the New America Foundation, a policy institute. "Congress wants to show
action in response to the disturbing press reports we’ve seen about conflicts." Prospects
for a similar bil! in the Senate are not clear.
Cuomo and other critics charge that lenders plied college officials with cash and trips to
get on their "preferred lender" lists. Documents obtained by Miller’s office shows that
one lender, JPMorgan Chase, paid five unidentified university officials as consultants.
Chase also paid about $70,000 for a dinner cruise for about 200 college officers. Chase
says it’s halted these practices to erase "the appearance of conflicts of interest."

The Education Department itself has been accused of forging cozy ties with lenders it
regulates. A handful of agency emp!oyees formerly worked at private lenders. One senior
official, Matteo Fontana, owned stock in a lender the department oversaw; Eontana has been
put on leave. In 2006, the Education Department’s inspector genera! criticized the agency
for focusing on "partnership over compliance" in dealing with lenders.
The department has recently taken steps to ease those concerns. It’s imposed new rules on
lenders’ access to a national student !can database. At Miller’s urging, the inspector
general has begun investigating conflicts of interest at the agency. And the official in
charge of the department’s student loan program has resigned. (The Education Department
says the resigr~tion is unrelated to the loan investigations.)

The Education Department has said it takes its oversight role "very seriously." David
Dunn, Spellings’ chief of staff, says Spellings plans today to unveil suggestions by an
internal task force to revamp preferred-lender lists. Most students use those lists to
choose a lender.

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 Page 994

INonresponsive
’, ~ I \ "S~nt:¯ May 10, 2007 6:58 AM
To: Oldham, Cheryl; Conklin, KrislJn; Schray, Vickie; Duncket, Denise; Shaw, Terri; Sampson,
Vincent; Quarles, Karen; Bannerman, Kristin; scott m. stanzel@who.eop.gov; jeanie s.
_mamo@who.eop.gov; Manning, James; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Ruberg, Cagey;
Colby, Chad; Williams, C~thia; Dunn, David; Dorfman, Cynthia; Evers, Bill; Kuzmich, Holly;
La Force, Hudson; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private - Spellings,
Margaret; McGrath, John; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Reich, Heidi; rob Saliterman;
Yudof, Samara; Scheessele, Marc; Halaska, Terrell; Toner, Jana; Mcnitt, Townsend L.;
Young, Tracy; Ditto, Trey;, Tucker, Sara Martinez; Zeff, Ken
Su~t: House Passes Ban on Gifts From Student Lenders (NYT)

Mmy i0, 2007

House Passes Ban on Gifts From Student Lenders
By SAM DILLON and JONATHAN D. GLATER
WASHINGTON, ~y 9 -- The House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to ban
gifts and payments by student loan companies to universities, showing bipartisan resolve
to clean up the $85 billion industry.

The vote, 414 to 3, demonstrated how politically potent the issue of paying for college
hms become at a time when tuition is steadily rising and millions of students depend on
borrowing to finance college.

"With this vote," said Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who leads the
House education committee, "the House has taken a huge step in the right direction to put
a stop to those practices and mmke sure that the student loan programs operate on the
level, in the best interests of students and families trying to pay for college."

The bill passed a day before Education Secretary Margaret Spellings was scheduled to
testify before the House education committee about oversight of the industry.

It comes in the wake of revelations that lenders paid universities money contingent on
student loan volume, gave gifts to the financial aid administrators whom students rely on
to recommend lenders, and hired financial aid officials as paid consultants.

The m~tion’s four largest student lenders and at least

22 colleges have already signed on to a code of conduct developed by Attorney General
Andrew M. Cuomo of New York.
Mr. Miller was joined by the ranking Republican on his committee, Representative Howard P.
McKeon of California, in promoting the bill. "We’re stepping up today for a single,
fundamental reason," Mr. McKeon said before the vote, "to ensure our nation’s financial
aid system continues to serve the needs of our students.’"

But he also urged that Congress be careful "not to overreach." The bill has bipartisan
support in the Senate, said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and
chairman of the education committee.
A senior Education Department official said that the agency was prepared to move quickly
to draft regulations to enforce the bil!.

Ms. Spellings is expected to face tough questions Thursday about the department’s policing
of the industry, as well as about enforcement of its own internal policies on conflicts of
interest after reports that an officia! with oversight over the student loan database held
stock in a student loan company.

Ms. Spellings’s chief of staff, David Dunm, said in an interview that the secretary wanted
to "set the record straight" and show that the department had taken the steps it could to
regulate lenders. Ms. Spellings has convened a task force that is to make recommendations
by the end of May on how to regulate the lists of recommended lenders at university aid
 Page 995
offices.

Ms. Spellings is also expected to face questions about the oversight of Reading First, a
program designed to teach poor children to read by third grade. The department’s inspector
general, John P. Higgins, has issued reports finding conflicts of interest, cronyism and
bias in how officials and private consultants operated the program and awarded grants.

Mr. Kennedy, in a report, added new detail Wednesday on how four officials contracted by
the education agency to advise states on buying reading materials had lucrative ties with
publishers.

Edward Kame’enui, head of the department’s western technical assistance center in Oregon
from 2002 through May 2005, earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties from
Pearson!Scott Foresman from
2001 to 2006, the report said. It also said that Douglas Carnine, who replaced Dr.
Kmme’enui in 2005, also earned royalties -- $168,470 from McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin
and Pearson last year.

Joseph Torgesen, who advised Eastern states about mmterials, and Sharon Vaughn, who
advised Central states, also received thousands of dollars in royalties from educational
publishers while representing the department, the report said.
Kmtherine McLane, a department spokeswoman, said: "The department is deeply concerned
about conflicts of interest and takes the allegations contained in Senator Kennedy’s
report very seriously.

"’We are studying this report to determine if further actions are necessary and will act
aggressively if any wrongdoing is found."

Do You YahooS?
Tired of spam? Yahoo~ Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
Green Dot Hans A School In New York ~LAT) Page 1 of 9
~age 996

INonresponsiv
From: Ditto, Trey
Sent: July 14, 2007 9:43 AM
To: Neale, Rebecca; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad;
Dorfman, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska,
Ten-ell; Herr, John; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; Maddox, Lauren; Private -
Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar,
Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele,
Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail);
Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: WE EKEN D N EWS SU MMARY 07.14.07

WeeHy Standard praising Reading First stoly

The Cabinet Press (NC) on Elizabeth Edwards stumping for husband (she says NCLB was
just an excuse for vouchers)
Deseret Morning Ne~vs (UT) on Richardson (he says NCLB should be eliminated)
Wa!l Street Jottmal op-ed saying because of NCLB music instmchon is shrinking
WaPo Letter to the Editor on NCLB
Contm Costa Times on Miller haxdng townhall meeting toni~ht
Government Executive on the increase in STEM fimding in NCLB.

Weekly Standard
h ttp: / /ww w. wee kl ystan dar d. com/ Ch ec k.asp ?i dArfi d e=13 8 7 9 &r=zlcmk c
Read It and Weep.
FIGHT FOR READING FIRST
CHARLOTI?E ALLEN’s "Read It and Weep" (July t6) hit the nail on the head. For once a
journalist did her homework and described accurately and cogently Bush’s Reading First
initiative. Reid Lyon and I were tasked to develop legislation that would reflect President
Bush’s determination to change the paradigm of how reading is taught in the United States.
As Texas governor, Bush learned from Lyonthat if the findings of science were applied to
reading instruction it could make the difference beb,veen ~ccess and failure for generations
of children in our public schools. No Child Left Behind became law with bipartisan support
on January 8, 2002. Reading First was a signature part of that law and was carefully guided
throu~h the le~slafive process by Margaret Spellings, then an assistant to the president for
domestic policy and now secretary of education.

When the inspector general’s reports on Reading First were released over a period of several
months beginning in September 2006, the new Democratic leadership had a political club to
beat up the Bush administration. Although neither the inspector general nor the Justice
Department has ever issued any charges, Senate and House Education Committee chairmen
Ted Kennedy and George Miller were not deterred from using the report to gain what they
saw as a political advantage. Both of these leaders had worked closely with then-House
Education Committee chairman John Boehner and Senate education chairman Judd Gregg
during the writing of the Reading First law.

The Cabinet Press

http~//x~vw~cabinet~c~m/apps/pbcs.d~l/ar~cle?AID=/2~7~714~BEDF~RD~/7~713~7/-

06/05/2008 ,
Green Dot Plans A School In New York (LAT) Page 2 of 9
age 997

I/bedford01

200 pack in to hear Edwards

But it’s Elizabeth, not John, who speaks at Bedford gathering
Elizabeth Edwards is smack dab in the middle of the "sand~vich generation," with a college
graduate daughter, two young children, and an ailing 83-year-old mother.

Plus Edwards works for the family business -- her husband John’s presidential campaign --
and she runs the educational foundation the pair set up after their first son died at 16.

Then there’s her stage 4 cancer.

Still, even after spending the night before in North Carolina having her mother checked at a
hospital after a fall, and attending a morrdng meeting in that state, she looked little worse for
the wear in a Bedford Village Green condo with more than 200 people on Tuesday.
And she still had two more house parties to go to, in Keene and Hoptdnton.

Why does Edwards, 58, the mother of three and an attorney, do it?
"Because I believe we need John to be president." she told the packed crowd, many of whom
were fanning themselves with campaign literature as they stood elbow to elbow in the living
and dining room, kitchen, hallways and ~assed-in porch.
That so many people ~vould brave the "steam bath" speaks to the excitement about what’s
going on in the country, and about Edwards, hostess Beth Salzman said_
Richard and Rita Ivlorrissette have lived in Bedford for 47 years. The couple is retired -- he
for 14 years, she for 13 -- and are being courted by several Democratic presidential
wannabes.
When they got invited to see Edwards at the house party they came ’~o see what she’s all
about.’"

"She’s very courageous," Rita said, refening to Edwards’ ongoing battle with breast cancer.
They’d heard that the candidate himself might show, but he didn’t.
Edwards opened with her husband’s priorities. In addition to Iraq -- John Edwards believes
we should withdraw -- one of the biggest issues is global warming, his wife of 30 years said.

This is an emergency, she said, and we’re ’Netting to a tipping point"where the Earth’s
warming will be out of our control, no matter what we do.
Other hot button issues for the campaign are eradicating poverty °~_nd uplifting the middle
class 2’

"Bankruptcies are more common"in the middle class than divorce, Edwards said.

Edwards spoke briefly, then took questions, the first one was "How are you feeling?"

"Well, thank you," she said to applause.

06/05/2008
Green Dot Hans A School In New York (~,LAT) Page 3 of 9
~age 998

What is John going to do about Medicare? a senior citizen from Manchester asked.

He is committed to universal healthcare, Edwards said. Once President Bush "took the cap
offMedicare," it %reded up costing seniors more and more and became a real burden on
those with fixed incomes."

A teacher asked about the No Child Left Behind Act and Edwards explained how the original
program, ABCs, was started in North Carolina and was successful. But Bush refused "to fund
the fix," she said. His admi~stration never intended it to be a fLX for schools: "It was an
excuse to go to vouchers."

The program as currently set up doesn’t make sense, she added.

When John ~vas senator of North Carolina (t~om 1996 to 2005), he chose as legislative
assistants a nurse to advise him on healthcare and a teacher for education, noted Edwards. He
solicits others’ opinions and experts’ advice.

Also, John, 54, doesn’t take money from lobbsdsts "even if they believe in the same things,"
and looks to his conscience first when he needs to make a decision, she said.
"’We need to know this is the best president." she said, "’not the best president that money can
buy. ""

At one point she interrupted herself to chide a photographer who was taking her photo from
the floor.

"’Don’t you hate that angle, ladies?" she asked.

To a chorus of spontaneous groans when she mentioned conservative political colttmnist Ann
Coulter, one woman said that the right wing and especially Coulter seemed °’particularly
venomous" in their attacks against John and asked if Edwards knew why.

They find him andhis principles threatening, Edwards said, because "Jotm is the most
dectable candidate."

About immigration, Ed~vards said there are three options: pretend the problem doesn’t exit,
"rout out" illegal aliens, or help them find apath to dtizenship.

Her husband supports the latter option, but she said that part of becoming a citizen should be
to learn English "because that’s the language of commerce that they need to succeed.’"
Afterward, Richard Morrissette said, "I thought it,vas very good; we both did. She’s a very
smart lady.’"

But they’re not ready to pick a candidate yet, they said Tuesday before Edwards spoke: "It’s
still early."

Deseret Morning Ne~vs

http://desere~e~vs.com/dn/view/0,1249,685193551,00.hh-nl

’We have lot in common,’ Richardson tdls Utahns

06/05/2008
Green Dot Plans A School In New York (.~AT) Page 4 of 9
b’age 999

Presidential hopeful makes quick, busy visit

By ~ie Welling

As governor of a neighboring state, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson told hundreds of
Utahns Friday night that he is in a unique position to understand and bring their concerns to
the White House.

"Utah, New Mexico, we have a lot in common," the presidential candidate said at the Utah
Democratic Party’s annual Jefferson/Jackson Day dinner. "We care about preserving the
environment ... open spaces ... agriculture ... immigration."

Richardson was in Utah for only about three hours, appearing first at two private fund-raisers,
one for himself and another for the state Democrats, and then delivering the nighfs keynote
address.

Some 700 UNtms paid $65 apiece to attendthe buffet dinner at This Is the Place Heritage
Park. Others paid either $500 or $2,300 eachto attend the private receptions.

Richardson touched on all the major issues ~pected to be discussed by a presidenti!l

candidate, outlining his first five days in office. First on his agenda, he said, would be
"ending the war in an honorable way."

Outlined on his campaign Web site, Richardson’s "7-point plan for Iraq" calls for immediate
deauthorization of the war, followed by a complete troop withdra~val within six months.

"We elected this Congress to end the ~var and they’re not. And I’m not happy, and you
shouldn’t be either," he said. ,The whole soul of this country is wrapped up in this war that is
totally divided."

Second on his list is "an energy revolution," which wonld require significantly reduced
greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on foreign oil. Third is revi~zing education
through an increased focus on math and science in the classroom, a $40,000 a year
"minimum ~vage" for teachers and the elimination of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind
effort.

On his fourth day, Richardson said, he ~vould work to f~x a national economy that has "left
the middle class behind_" The governor earned a standing ovation and enthusiastic cheers
when discussing tis support of unions and promising that "a union member will be my
Secretary of Labor."

Finally, Richardson said, he would turn his focus to establishing tmiversal health care in the
United States. The plan, according to Richardson’s Web site, calls for increasing access to
affordable health care by allowing working families and small businesses to purchase
coverage through the Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan, allowing Americans over the
age of 55 to purchase coverage through Medicare and low-income Americans to obtain
coverage through expanded Medicaid and s~ate child health insurance programs.

Though his goals may sound expensive, Richardson said all could be funded with the money
being spent on the war in Iraq. A recent report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research
Service recently put the war’s cost at nearly a half-trillion dollars.

06/05/2008
Green Dot Plans A School In Ne~v York~(LAT) Page 5 of 9
~’age 1000

"We’re going to take money from that war and we’re going to invest itin our own people," he
said. "America is ready to come together to do what is best for this country."

Earlier Friday, several local Democrats endorsed Richardson’s presidential bid at an

afternoon news conference. Salt Lake County Mayor Peter Corroon, Salt Lake City Mayor
Rocky Anderson, state Sen. Ross Romero, D-Salt Lake, and Hispanic leader David Ibarra all
noted that Richardson’s broad-based career makes him qualified to lead the nation --
something Richardson himself touched on in his evening speech.

"We cannot afford another president with a need for on-the-job training," he said to the
laughter and applause of the crowd-

During his 25 years in public service, Richardson has been a member of the U.S. House, a
U.N. ambassador and a U.S. Secretary of Energy, andhe is now a Western governor.

Richardson is the second Democratic presidential candidate to visit Utah, though two more
hopefuls are expected soon.

Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd is today’s fea~ared speaker atthe Utah Democratic Party’s state
convention. A fund-raiser for Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois is scheduled for Aug. 1 in either
Salt Lake City or Park City, according to the Utah Democratic Party.

Sen. John E&wards of North Carolina also made a brief fund-raising stop here in early June,
collecting some $100,000 during his three hottrs in the Beehive State.

The three top-tier Republican presidential candidates -- former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt
Romney, Arizona Ser~ John McCain and former New York Mayor Rudy Criuliani -- have
also been to Utah lhis year to raise money.

Despite consistently falling behind high-profile Democratic candidates, Obama and Sen.
Hillary Clinton of Ne~v York in the polls, Richardson ~vas confident Friday that he could earn
his party’s nomination.

"I promise you my best effort," he said. "I promise you that I will outwork everybody."

Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj .comiarficle/S B 118436292695466235.html?mod=go~lenews wsj

"Music stopped, Symphony shuttered." In the past decade, headlines ~mouncing the demise
of a symphony were an unforttmate feature of our cultural landscape. Were. Past tense.
Because, if the upbeat mood of the 1,300 delegates to the Nashville meeting of the League of
American Orcheslras at the end of last month is to be trusted, those days are fading.

Of course, there are significant problems. In the past, organizations such as the Chicago and
Boston symphonies had generally funded themselves according to a formula of 45-45-10 --

06/05/2008
 C~een Dot Hans A School In New York (LAT) Page 6 of 9
Page 1001

45% of the annual budget from ticket sales and hall rental, 45% from annual contributions,
and 10% from recording income. But these percentages have change& Although there are
exceptions, philanthropies are increasin~y directing their gifts away from support for the arts
and to environmental and world health concerns. Similarly, state andlocal governments are
finding it difficult to support the arts as their aging populations demand more generous slices
of the tax pie for health and social services. Because the tests mandated by No Child Left
Behind have no musical content, many school districts are shrinking what little music
instruction they once offered, resulting in a growing population of young adults who, though
passionate about music, find the classical realm terra incognita. And the academy
increasingly vie~vs orchestras and the core repertory for which they were developed as
irrelevant in an age ofmulticultaralism.

Ticket and CD sales mirror this change in taste. Income from ticket sales for regular-season
classical concerts now peaks at 37%, with some ensembles’ percentage being substantially
lower. And orchestras’ income from new recordings has disappeared. In all areas of music,
CD sales fell 20% dttfing the first quarter of 2007 alone and it’s estimated that one bi!lion
pieces of music are traded illegally every month. While relatively few of these trades (or
sales) are works like Stravinsky’s "Thieni," the loss of income is genuine and unites
symphony directors with the pop managers in their belief that CDs are not income generators
but instead marketing tools for profit-making tours and T-shirt sales. When asked when the
Nashville Symphony might see a return on its critically acclaimed recording of the Ives
Second Symphony with Naxos, Alan Valentine, the symphony’s CEO, said, "Never."

But Mr. Valentine’s "never" was mischievous, and here lies the basis of the delegates’
optimism. He was sitting two blocks from one of the country’s most successful new
auditoriums in a city that in 2006 Kiplinger ranked as the country’s No. 1 "smart" destination
partly because of its Naxos-recording orchestra. Orchestras, and the music they play, are
important part of American civic pride.

When last year the Duluth Superior Symphony needed a million-dollar acoustic shall for its
performing hall, a quarter of the funds were given by a !ocal hospital. The hospital leadership
told Andrew Berryhill, the orchestra’s executive director, that the presence of a vibrant
symphony in Duluth, Mich., was necessary for the hospital to attract quality physidans to its
staff. When CVS/Caremark was !ooking for a city in which to relocate its headquarters, the
orchestra and the depth of the arts culture it exemplified played a prominent role in the
company’s decision to settle in Nashville.

But civic boosterism itself isn’t enough to sustain an orchestra. The delegates ~vere told that
the findings of a two-year study in St. Paul, Minn., and Pittsburgh suggests that orchestras’
institutional health lies in the adoption of a new business model. Music managers typically
think that their job is to present the l~ghest level of musical performances possible and pay
for them by selling seats and catching grants. It isn’t. Sell all the seats to all your
performances, market through every site on the Web and corral every foundation executive
you can, and your orchestra will still face a deficit. Music executives’ real business is
developing communities of patrons. And educating their children.

This is hardly news. From Machaut’s dinner with Charles V of Francein 1361 to Klaus
Heymann’s 1987 founding of the Naxos label, the culture ofclassicalmusic has been funded
through the generosity of informed patrons. The "new" business model simply recognizes
this ancient reality.

But the business of creating an informed patron begins in the first grade. Here the San

06/05/2008
Green Dot Plans A School In New York (LAT) Page 7 of 9
Page 1002

Francisco Symphon~v serves as the industry’s benchmark.

For 20 years it has underwritten a program that yearly takes musidans into the classrooms of
24,000 San Frandsco students in grades one through five. This year the program is being
expanded to provide middle- and high-school students with instnmaents they can boi~row. In
the "Keeping Score" TV series, the SFO’s music director, Michael Tilson Thomas and
members of the symphony discuss and perform maj or works of the Western canon. Programs
on works by Beethoven, Copland and Stravinsky (nine are projected) have already been
carried on most PBS affiliates, and the school districts in California, Arizona and Oklahoma
are integrating elements of the programs into their basic curricula. Have a 7-year-old listen to
the opening chords of the "Eroica," give him a clarinet when he’s 9, and by the time he’s 50
chances are he’s a subscriber looking for ways he can become a patron because all that music
changed his life.

Jesse Rosen, the League’s executive vice president and manae~ng director, said that there
were a lot of reasons to be optimistic about the future of America’s symphonic music. The
204 works premiered by League orchestras last season alone could h~rdly have been
presented by an institution that wasn’t robust. Let’s hope he’s right. Silenced music and
shuttered orchestras can’t change anybody’s life.

Mr. Linton is a composer and teaches at ~/~ddle Tennessee State University.

Washington Post
http://~wwv.washingtonpo st .com/wp-
dyn/content/arlicld2007/O7/13/AR2007071301957~f.html
Education: If It Ain’t Broke...
Saturday, July 14, 2007; A16

The first sentence of the July 2 editorial "No Child in the Crosshairs" was spot on: "No one in
his right mind would demolish his home because it had a leaky basement or it needed new
carpeting."

However, the editorial went on to apply that reasoning to the No Child Left Behind Act
instead of to public education. NCLB was based on the false premise that the entire public
education system was broken and therefore needed to be brought to heel. When one starts
from a false premise, one eventually reaches a false conclusion.

There are some parts of the educational system that are in need of improvement, but NCLB
guidelines require a district to be placed on a watch list if only one s~ment of its student
body falls to make adequate yearly progress. Instead ofidentif34ng those students most in
need of help, the entire district is placed under a cloud.

Legs provide the funds to fix public education’s leaky basements (apparently the District has,
literally, lots of those) and stop demolishing the nation’s public education system, which is
overwhelmingly doing a good job.

PAT HEEFNER

Waynesboro, Pa.

06/05/2008
Green Dot Plans A School In New York (LAT) Page 8 of 9
Page" 1003

The writer is a candiffate forthe Waynesboro At~a School Board.

Contra Costa Times

h ttp:/A~’ww.con tracosta tiin es.co~n/solanocounty/ci_63 67560

Rep. Miller to meet with constituents in Benicia, Marfinez

Times-Herald staffreport
Article Launched: 07/13/2007 09:02:50 AM PDT

U.S. Rep. George IVliller, D-Martinez, will hold town meetings Saturday in Benicia and
Martinez to discuss a range of issues.

Topics will include the Iraq war, energy and global warming, the No Child Left Behind Act
and a new bib on college aid.
Miller, chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, holds town meetings
annually in dries in his district, which includes Vallej o and Benicia.

http:/iwww.govexec.com/dailyfedY0707/071307tdpm 1.htm
Goverrkm ent Executive

Science, tech advocates eye increased federal resources

By Aliya S ternstein National Journal’s Tect~oto~ov Daily July 13, 2007
Six months into 2007, education in the areas of science, teclmology, engineering and
mathematics, or STEM education, is finally getting much needed attention in
Washington, education advocates and lawmakers say.

"The budget request contained the first meaningfu! increase for the Narional Science
Foundation’s education programs in many years, something the STEM ed commm~ty has
really made a hi~ priority," said James Brown, co-chairman of the STEM Education
Coalition.

Aside from the presidenfs actions, House and Senate appropriators are supporting
substantial funding increases for NSF’s STEM education programs this budget season, he
said. The funding would go partly toward a math and science professional development
program that produced measurable improvements in student proficiency at the
elementary, middle- and high-school levels over a three-year period

And Brown said it looks possible that the House and Senate will reach an agreement on
major competitiveness legislation this summer, which would bring "a badly needed shot
in the arm" to the NSF programs. Also looming over the horizon is reanthorization of the
signature 2002 education law known as the No C~ld Left Behind Act.

Despite many promising developments in Washington, students and teachers are still
struggling in the STEM fields, according to Brown. "I am hopeful that these positive
actions in Congress will soon be translated into real progress on the ground," he said.

Betty Shanahan, executive director and CEO of the Society of Women Engineers, said
she is optimistic that recent grants awarded by the Education Department will assist
under-represented members of the population in pursuing STEM careers.

06/05/2008
Green Dot Hans A School In New York2LAT) J Page 9 of 9
Page ~004

On June 29, the department awarded $22 million in grants to universities, state and local
educational agencies, and nonprofits to devise strategies for tapping higlfly qualified
individuals who do not have teaching credentials to teach core subjects, such as math,
science and spedal education in high-need school districts.

That same day, the department gave 25 predominantly minority universities $3.5 million
to better prepare ethnic minorities, especially minority women, for jobs in science and
technology.

Sen. Michael Enzi of Wyoming, the top Republican on the Health, Education, Labor and
Pensions Committee, said Tuesday that "it is critical" that Congress reauthorize a
comprehensive hipster education bill this year, as well as No Child Left Behind, to
enhance America’s technological and economic competitiveness. Enzi said the
competitiveness leNslation is expected to be "signed into law before the end of the year."

A spokeswoman for HELP Committee Chairman Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said

current federal efforts include grants, which Kennedy helped craft, that encourage
students to pursue STEM majors. Legislative proposals backed by the committee would
increase access to the g-rants, she said.

Democrats and Republicans on the House Science and Technology Committee noted that
the panel has passed severa! measures aimed at boosting the quality and quantity of
STEM teachers in the United States.

06/05/2008
 Page 1005

~lonresponsiv
(b)( .............................
July 16, 2007 6:05 AM
To: scott m. stanzel@who.eop.gov; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Ruberg, Casey; Colby,
Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Dorfman, Cynthia; Dunckel, Denise; Evers, Bill;
Gribble, Emily; Kuzmich, Holly;, La Force, Hudson; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie;
Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mesecar, Doug; Moran,
Robert; Neale, Rebecca; Oldham, Cheryl; Reich, Heidi; rob Saliterman; Yudof, Samara;
Scheessele, Marc; Halaska, Terrell; Toner, Jana; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Young, Tracy; Ditto,
Trey; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Wurman, Ze’ev
Subject: No Child law’s authors work on a revision (Boston Globe)

No Child law’s authors work on a revision Respond to complaints By Susan Milligan, Globe
Staff 1 July 16, 2007

WASHENGTON -- The landmark No Child Left Behind law, which has dragon impassioned criticism
from educators and parents tun_happy with its stringent requirements for public schools to
raise students’ test scores, is being rewritten on Capitol Hill to fix what the bill’s
authors now acknowledge are flaws.
La~makers say they will not abandon the basic tenets of the legislation, which requires
yearly testing of elementary and some secondary school students, and holds schools and
districts accountable for poor test scores.

But after five years of complaints -- followed by sit-dom-ns in recent months with
teachers, administrators, and civil rights leaders -- ConGress and the Bush administration
are ready to change the way schools and students are rate~.

They say the changes will help states and school districts identify more clearly which
students need extra help, while avoiding labeling entire schools as failing because they
have students who are harder to teach, such as those with learning disabilities or limited
English skills.

The original authors of the bill, Senator Edward M.

Kennedy and Representative George Miller, are looking at a slew of changes, inoluding
expanding the way "adequate yearly progress" is calculated, so schools that barely miss
the testing thresholds are not put in the same failing category as schools with across-
the-board learning problems.

Other proposals include giving schools more time to improve test scores before schools are
forced to take corrective action.

"Everything’s up for review," said Miller , Democrat of California and chairman of the
House Education and Labor Committee. "I’ve always said I was the proud co author of No
Child Left Behind. . Now, I’m determined to be the proud author of a No Child Left
Behind that works."

Kerznedy, who worked closely with President Bush in writing the law, has for years said the
much-reviled measure would work if the administration provided the money schools need to
develop good tests and help struggling students, especially those in poorer school
districts.

But the ~ssachusetts Democrat said in a Globe interview that he now believes the law
itself must be changed as well. Many of the presidential candidates in both parties have
called for changes in the law, and several -- including Democratic Senators Chris Dodd of
Connecticut, Hillary Clinton of New York, and Barack Obama of Illinois -- have introduced
legislation.

"We still have to have the concept of accountability,"

said Kennedy, who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
But "what we need to do is get away from labeling, get away from the punitive aspects, and
give help and assistance to the neediest schools. We’re now on a path}~ay to make some
 Page 1006
sense on this. "

Miller and Kennedy said they hope to begin work this month on ~-iting the revised version
of No Child Left Behind. The law is up for reauthorization this year, which means Congress
must vote on whether to extend it.

Miller said he was pessimistic only six weeks ago that he could rally his Democratic
colleagues to extend the controversia! law, but hms recently convinced fel!ow la}~nakers
that the law can work well if it is rewritten to address the complaints from constituents.

The law requires yearly testing in math and reading for students in grades 3 through 8;
students are also tested once in high school to gauge their academic progress. Schools can
be labeled as in need of improvement -- and eventually, as a failing schoo! -- if
students’ scores do not meet whmt the law calls "adequate yearly progress."

The law provides for additional help for students needing assistance, and parents can also
send their children to another public schoo! if a school is deemed unsuccessful. In
extreme cases, a schoo! can be closed for poor performance.

Educators have complained mightily about the law, saying the testing rules do not fully
measure whether a student is learning. School administrators say they are being wrongly
punished for lower test scores from students with learning difficulties, and some parents
are unhappy with schools’ decisions to curtai! art and music education to focus on meeting
testing thresholds in math and reading.

Funding, too, is a major complaint from both educators and congressional Democrats, who
say that No Child Left Behind has never been given all the money authorized in the law by
Congress. The Bush administration said thmt funding for elementary and secondmry schools
has increased each year since Bush took office, often by more than it did under President
Bil! Clinton -- a fact Kennedy acknowledges.
But states are still not getting the money they need to develop appropriate tests and
provide the extra help students need to make the test-score improvements demanded in the
law, Kennedy said.

Nonetheless, complaints from teachers hmve been so strong that some say it is unclear
whether the changes under consideration will appease educators, and some political
leaders, up_happy with No Child Left Behind.

While teachers say they share the goals of providing a high-quality education to all
children, regardless of race, economic background, or disability, many fear that the rules
might undermine public education and send more students fleeing into private schools.

"The Bush administration was setting up the public schools to fai!, and to undermine
public confidence"
in them, said Kevin Fleming , a teacher at Winnacunnet High Schoo! in Exeter, N.H.

At a conference late last month for the Nationa! Education Association, candidates for
president slammed the law, saying the testing requirements force educators to "teach to
the test" and stifle creativity in the classroom.

Further, the testing structure -- which holds schools accountable for the progress of an
entire class, instead of individual students -- is unrealistic, said NEA president Reg
Weaver. "Not all children learn at the same rate, at the same speed," Weaver said in an
interview.

Dodd is author of the most sweeping package on Capitol Hill to overhaul No Child Left
Behind. Dodd annoyed some of his colleagues when he introduced his proposal severa! years
ago, when the education law was still new. He is now drawing support for some of the
alterations he’s seeking. They include easing certification requirements for teachers and
giving schools more ways to show they are making students better at math and reading.

"Test scores obviously have value, but if it’s the only thing you’re doing, you’re not
making a coherent and substantial judgment of how an individual is doing or how a school
is doing," Dodd said in an interview.

Hore than 30 pieces of legislation to alter No Child Left Behind have been introduced on
 Page 1007
Capitol Hill, by the NEA’s count -- some of them from Republicans.

Senators Judd ®regg of New Hampshire and Richmrd Burr of North Carolina -- both
Republicans -- introduced legislation last week aimed at keeping the accountability and
testing concepts while giving more leeway to schools. For example, the bill would give
schools more time to achieve test standards among children ~ust learning English, and
treat schools with small populations of low-achieving students less harshly than those
with widespread problems.

The Bush administration is also ready to make some changes in the law.

The Department of Education has launched a limited program allowing several states to use
different ways of calculating a school’s progress in boosting test scores.

"We shifted our national education dialogue from how much we are spending to how much
children are learning," Education Secretary Hargaret Spellings said in a statement.
"Today, we need a new conversation about how to strengthen and improve this law."

Don’t get soaked. Take a quick peak at the forecast with the Yahoo! Search weather
shortcut.
http://tools.search, yahoo, com/shortcuts/#1oo weather
Support C~ows For Teacher Bonuses (W..P) Page ! of 2
~age 1008

Nonresponsi
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 24, 2007 8:24 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers,
Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin,
Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend
L.; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy;
Talbert, Kent; Ten-ell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez;
Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Va. Tech Clips (2)

Grant To Help Va. Tech Upgrade Counseling (WP)

By Maria Glod, Washington Post Staff Writer
The Washington Post, September 22, 2007
U.S. Funding for Model Program
The U.S. Department of Education announced yesterday that it has awarded Virginia Tech a $960,685
grant to help the university improve its efforts to identify and help troubled students and staff.
University officials sought the funding in the wake of the April 16 mass shooting on campus. Student
Seung Hut Cho, who was found to be mentally ill but never received counseling that had been ordered
by a court, fatally shot 32 people before killing himself.
A panel appointed by Gov. ]]mothy M Kaine (D) to investigate the rampage - the deadliest mass
shooting by an individual in U.S. history -- found gaps in the mental health system, confusion over
student privacy laws and breakdowns in communications.
Virginia Tech will use the federal grant to identify, treat and monitor students, faculty and staff with
mental health issues who may be a danger to themselves or others. The money also will be used to
improve coordination of mental health services.
Mark Owczarski, a university spokesman, said the school has been working since the shooting to
improve its mental health services and respond to problems identified by the governor’s panel and in
other reviews. He said the grant funding, which will be used to hire case managers and increase
training, will help refine and strengthen the system.
Owszarski said the university also will develop a model for assessing and helping troubled students and
staff that will be shared with other schools across the country.
"We will share the information with other universities so as many universities as possible can benefit
from what we learn," Owczarski said.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in a statement that the grant will help ensure that people
at the university have the "continued support they need to recover, rebuild and prevent future acts of
violence."
The shooting sparked efforts in schools nationwide to tighten security, improve mental health services
and create systemsto alert students of any danger.
According to the governor’s report, professors, police and officials at Tesh all had indications of Cho’s
mental instability, b~t the university did not "intervene effectively." In some cases there were privacy
concerns about sharing information.
Cho, a quiet loner who did not like to be touched as a toddler, was in middle school when he was found
to have a severe anxiety disorder. At Westfield High School in Chantilly, he was in a special education
program and allowances were made for his inability to communicate and lack of social skills.
At Virginia Tech, Cho grew more isolated, and frightened teachers and classmates with violent writings.
In 2005, a judge ordered Cho to receive outpatient care atter female sb.~dents complained that Cho was

06/05/2008
Support Gro~vs For Teacher Bonuses (W~)age ] 009 Page 2 of 2

stalking them, according to the governor’s report A judge ordered Cho to go to the university’s Cook
Counseling Center, but he was not treated by health-care professionals there, the report said.

Va. Tech Fund To Be Disbursed Within Weeks (WP)

By Brigid Schulte
The Washington Post, September 24, 2007
The administrator of the memorial fund created after the April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech says he
hopes to disburse the $7.5 million by the end of next month. The decision to accept the money, he
added, does not prevent the families of victims #ore pursuing legal action against the university or the
state.
"Unlike the’9/11 victim compensation fund, which was public money, this is private money," fund
administrator Kenneth R. Feinberg said of the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund. "There is no requirement
that any of these victims waive their right to sue. There is no condition at all to receive this money. It’s
essentially a gi&"
Vincent J. Bore, a spokesman for several victims’ families, said many are considering legal action and
have retained lawyers for that purpose.
"My understanding is there will be significant legal action," he said. "They feel that only through legal
action will the troth unfold and accountability fall into place."
Some victims’ families had criticized Virginia Tech for initially wanting to use half the memorial fund for
scholarships.
"The families want to make it known that they appreciate the generosity of the donors," Bore said, "and
that the intention of the donors is finally being honored."
The families of all 32 victims killed in the shootings, as well as those physically injured and those
psychologically traumatized from being on the second floor of Norris Hall that day, have applied for
money from the fund.
The fund was created after the shooting from an outpouring of 20,000 donations from across the
country, ranging from $5 to $1 million. Families and those injured, 78 people in all, had until Sept. 15 to
apply for funds.
"It is very gratifying to know that 100 percent, every single eligible claimant, whether the family of a
victim, one of the 32 killed in April, or those physically injured or suffering mental trauma, every one
filed a claim," Feinberg said.
Families of those killed will receive about $180,000 each, Feinberg said. Those injured will receive
either $45,000 or $90,000, depending on the lengths of their hospital stays, md free tuition at Virginia
Tech. Those mentally traumatized will receive $10,000 or free tuition.
Feinberg said the fund will remain open until the end of the year, with a possible supplemental
disbursement if sufficient funds are received.
Feinberg said it is unclear whether the funds are taxable.
"Virginia Tech thinks the money is taxable. Other individual family members have consulted with their
tax attorneys, and they say it isnt," he said. "That’s a decision that’s left to each family member."

06/05/2008
Suppol~ Grows For Teacher Bonuses (W~)age ] 010 Page 1 of 1

[Nonresponsiv [
From: Anderson, Chdsty
Sent: September 24, 2007 8:23 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Ken’i; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers,
Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin,
Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private - Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend
L.; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy;
Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez;
Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: U.S. Secretary Of Education Visits STARBASE, Wright-Part (FDHOH)

U.S. Secretary Of Education Visits STARBASE, Wright-Part (FDHOH)

By Mary Beth Lehman
Fairbom Daily Herald (OH), September 21, 2007
U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings answered to the call name "Starbuck" Thursday, when
she visited with students and staff at STARBASE, Wright-Part in Riverside.
Spellings and her entourage rolled into town on the Education Express, her No Child Lett Behind tour
bus, and met with military families at The Prairies Community Center in Riverside, before heading to
Indiana Thursday evening and Cincinnati today.
Spellings toured classroom activities, as students from Miamisburg participated in mission control,
flight-simulator and rocket launch activities. She also stopped to read to a group of Wright Care daycare
children from the book "The Story of Ferdinand," as part of the "Read for the Record" program.
The STARBASE program is part of the educational outreach from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
The program invites fifth graders from area elementary schools to join in a.five-week program to
examine math and science in an interesting way, through the study of space and flight.
Spellings said the program is on track with one of the United States’ administration’s goals to foster
math and science learning in young children.
"It’s a great program," Spellings said. "It makes math and science interesting and exciting. I didn’t meet
one kid today ,,vho wasnt excited about learning."
Spellings said the president just signed new legislation called the "America Competes Act" that will
work to expand math and science programs, areas of learning that will lead to the jobs of the future.
STARBASE Executive Director Kathy Schweinfurth said the program is important to start Day~on-area
children on a pathway to loving math and science so they could consider working for Wright-Part, as
they grow older.
"These are our neighbors," Schweinfurth said. "lfwe can go out and invite these children here to learn
about math and science, they’re more likely to want to work for us in the future. It is a big investment on
our part."
Fairborn Superintendent Dave Scarberry attended the visit, along with other area school officials who
got their chance to meet the secretary.
Scarberry said this will be the third year for Fairborn to participate in the STARBASE programs, and it
has benefited the students to learn more from the Wright-Part education outreach.
"We are very grateful for the opportunity to be a part of it," he said.

06/05/2008
Secreta7 of Education Criticizes Propos~al (NYI~)~ Page 1 of 3
~age °~ul J1

IN_nresp°nsi
From: Ditto, Trey
Sent: September 20, 2007 8:05 AM
To: Ditto, Trey; Yudof, Samara; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cadello,
Dennis; Cohn, Kdstine; Colby, Chad; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble,
Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin,
Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private - Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend
L.; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy;
Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez;
Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Tucker, Sara (Restricted)
Cc: Anderson, Chdsty
Subject: Spellings’ Bus Tour (Politico)

Secretary’s bus tour and Yeas mid Nays blurb ~nentioned below
http://d~q~.polifi co.com/plavb ook/
Politico Playbook: Another confirmation fight

Good morning. On Friday and Saturday, the NRA will hear from seven presidential candidates (not
counting Newt- four live and three via video- six Republicans plus Gov. Richardson) during its
"Celebration of Amedcan Values conference" at a Washington hotel.

Bloomberg’s Heidi Przybyta gets a jump on the drama with "Giuliani, Romney Shilts Fail to Allay Gun
Owners’ Suspicions":

"Guns haven’t much figured as an issue in the Republicans’ 2008 presidential campaign,
overshadowed by the war in Iraq and health care. That will change tomorrow, when the nation’s
largest gun-owners’ advocacy group, the National Rifle Association, holds a forum where its members
will assess the leading Republican candidates’ commitment to their cause. At least two of the party’s
frontrunners, former NewYork Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt
Romney, have histories of support for gun control. While the two are shifting their stances, it may not
be enough to overcome the suspicions of gun owners, who may be more attracted by former
Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson."

The NRA says presidential candidates who have confirmed participation are Sen. McCain, Fred
Thompson, Giuliani and former Gov. Mike Huckabee. Via videotape message: Romney, Gov.
Richardson and Rep. Duncan Hunter.

Kevin Madden says Gov. Romney, who will be elsewhere, will "address issues important to NRA
members and reaffi~ his support for the Second Amendment." (Promise?)
Other speakers (an interesting list): Newt Gingrich; John Ashcroft; Sens. Mitch McConnell, John
Thune and John Barrasso; Rep. John Dingell; former Rep. Harold Ford, Jr.; Gov. Haley Barbour;
former Gov. James Gilmore; and Glenn Beck.
ALSO FOR YOUR RADAR SCREEN:

1) ANOTHER GOP OPEN SEAT: Rep. Jerry Weller (R-Ill.), engulfed in a scandal about his overseas
real estate investments, will not run for re-electi~, Republican sources tell The Politico’s Josh
Kraushaar and Patrick O’Connor.
http:llwww.politico.comlblo.q, slthecq~ptlOgO711s ~ller the next Republican to bow out.html
Roll Call adds: "Democrats point particularly to Weller’s district, which runs due west from the Indiana
border just south of Chicago, doglegging south and through Bloomington, as a potential pickup
opportunity. Former President Bill Clinton carried the district throughout the 1990s, while President
Bush received 49.5 percent of the vote there in 2000 and 53 percent four years later .... Despite the

06/05/2008
Secretmy of Education Criticizes Propos~al ~Y~)~ ~ Page 2 of 3
~’age ]u]2

apparent hospitable environment, House Democrats have been slow in recruiting a strong candidate
less than Nvo months out from Illinois’ eady filing deadline -- though that could change with Weller’s
departure."

2) OMAHA WORLD-HERALD: "U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns is resigning to run for the
U.S. Senate in Nebraska. The White House scheduled an announcement for this morning by
President Bush, who will be joined by Johanns, a senior administration official said Wednesday
evening. David Kramer, former Republican Party chairman for Nebraska, said that Johanns’
resignation is "imminent" and that the former governor will make a formal announcement about his
Senate bid in a week to 10 days. A~ler reports surfaced about Johanns’ plans, some critics quickly
went on the attack. Johanns would be leaving the U.S. Department of Agriculture before Congress
approves a new farm bill, which happens every five years, said state Democratic Party spokesman
Eric Fought."

3) THE OTHER CONFIRMATION FIGHT - Jon Ward of The Washington Times picks up on the buzz
in both parties over Steven Bradbury, 49, http:llwashinqtontimes.comlappslpbcs.dlllarticle?
AID=/20070920/NATION/109200057/1002&template=printart the nominee to succeed Jack Goldsmith
at OLC:
"The public White House push for confirmation of the nominee for attorney general will be
accompanied in coming weeks by a much less-visible effort to get Senate approval of the man who is
advising President Bush on the extent of his terrorism-fighting powers. The top spot in Justice
Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) has been officially vacant since July 2004, when Jack L.
Goldsmith resigned in part over disagreement with the Bush administration’s legal grounds for several
assertions of executive power. Mr. Bush nominated Steven G. Bradbury, Mr. Goldsmith’s deputy, on
June 23, 2005, but that appointment since has languished in the Senate. Mr. Bradbury’s nomination
passed the Senate Judiciary Committee but a handful of unnamed Democratic senators placed holds
on Mr. Bradbunfs nomination at different times, in an attempt to force the Bush administration to turn
over information on other matters. White House officials said that atter the attomey general
nomination, Mr. Bradbury’s nomination is their next pdodty this fall, though they have nine major slots
at a depleted Justice Department to fill."

4) AN INSTANT CLASSIC - The Politico’s Ben Smith jumped on the verbate on Sen. Clinton at a
N.Y. funder last night: "Vice President Cheney came up to see the Republicans yesterday. You can
always tell when the Republicans are getting restless, because the Vice President’s motorcade pulls
into the Capitol, and Darth Vader emerges."

5) Washington Post, top orAl, col. 1 : "Past Clouds Candidates’ Donor Lists: Names From ’90s
Scandal Among Clinton ’Bundlers,’ "By John Solomon and Matthew Mosk: "A list of the donors who
have ’bundled’ large sums from dozens of individuals to give to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential
campaign includes several figures who were involved in the 1990s Democratic Party fundraising
scandal that tamished her husband’s record."
YAWN: "Clinton includes on her list of’Hillraisers’ - those who have committed to raising more than
$100,000 for her White House bid - several financiers linked to past troubles. They include Marvin
Rosen, the former Democratic National Committee finance chairman whose efforts to reward six-
figure party donors with attendance at White House coffees and overnight stays in the Lincoln
Bedroom became the focal point of Senate hearings into fundraising abuses.... William Stuart Price,
the Oklahoma oilman also on the ’Hillraiser’ list, stunned a courtroom in 1995 when he detailed how
his former gas company had tried to ’gain infiuence’ with the Clinton administration by providing
$160,000 in money and membership in a dtzy Washington golf club to the son of a Cabinet secretary.
...Also on the list is former senator Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.) ....
Torch! Solid!
6) ARNOLD AND BILL - L.A. Times, "Schwarzenegger touts healthcare plan, takes GOP to task
again," By Jordan Rau: "Gov. Amold Schwarzenegger said Wednesday that a healthcare overhaul
would not be derailed by "Mickey Mouse"-type concerns about covering illegal immigrants. He also
compared Califomia’s Republican Party to an obese person in denial, and predicted that Rudolph W.
Giuliani would be his party’s nominee for president. The comments came in an eclectic discussion
with The Times’ editorial board in which the governor championed his $9-billion plan to expand water
storage efforts and promoted his proposal to require everyone in the state to have health insurance.

06/05/2008
Secretary of Education Criticizes Propos~ (NY~I]~)~ ~ ^ Page 3 of 3
vage

... Earlier in the day, the governor- embodying the "post-partisan" approach he has been touting all
year- teamed with former President Clinton to celebrate an El Monte school’s effort to fight obesity."

7) PAGING DAVIDS MARANISS AND SIROTA: AP, "Evoking Vietnam clash, University of Vvisconsin-
Madison students to protest Halliburton visit": Organizers expected anywhere from dozens to
hundreds of students to tum out to protest the company’s visit to an engineering career fair. They
hope to discourage students from talking to Halliburton representatives. Some planned to carry signs
saying, "Cudy, offcampus!," a reference to the Dow Chemical representative who visited the school,
William "Curly" Hendershot.

8) OUT AN D ABOUT: Former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner (D) worked a roomful of noshing
businesspeople at the VIP reception before Alan Greenspan’s speech at George Washington
University yesterday. Shepherding Warner (GWU ’77) yeas the new Dan Sullivan - personal aide
Andrew Smith, a DNC veteran and Georgetown grad. Andrew already has his MarkWamer08
business cards (no apostrophe before the 08 - that would be so 20th centur,j). When it was pointed
out to Wamer that attendees craving the Benjamins should be listening to HIM, not Greenspan,
Warner replied diplomatically: "He has the knov~edge."

Congresswoman Jane Harman, explaining to The Week’s Margaret Carlson why "Thelma and Louise"
is a Capitol classic: ’~hat about women who rob banks and drive over a cliff isn’t about Washington?"
Senator Collins says the sequel would be about: Jane Harman and Susan Collins!

9) DESSERT, from Washington Examiner’s "Yeas and Nays": Secretary of Education Margaret
Spellings earned major cool points Wednesdaywhen she showed up at Cleveland’s Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame as part of her ongoing Midwest bus tour. And she even sang. Spellings sang the chorus
to Stevie Wonder’s "Signed. Sealed. Delivered. I’m Yours," and a group of students analyzed the
voice vibrations as a science lesson. "You just can’t help but tap your toe and sing along," she told
Yeas & Nays. "It’s great that they are teaching science and math through sound and using the rich
resources of the museum to reinforce it all." And did the tour of the museum bring backfond
memories for the secretary? You bet. "1 still remember that one of my first dates was to a Peter
Frampton concert," she said. And no: Despite earlier revelations that Karl Rove once asked her out
on a date, it wasn’t him.
SECONDS: LONDON (AP) - Kanye West has 50 Cent’s number. The rapper beat out 50 yet again,
this time at Britain’s Mobo (Music of Black Origin) Awards, where he won Best Hip Hop act on
Wednesday. On Tuesday, West was crowned the victor in the pair’s hotly contested battle to see
which one of their albums, released on the same day, would sell the most in the first week: West’s
"Graduation" sold 957,000, while 50’s "Curtis" sold 691,000 in the United States. West also beat 50
on top of the British album charts. 50 was supposed to attend the Mobos but canceled his European
appearances this week.

Y’all enjoy graduation - don’t register late or drop out. Tips, links and videos to Playbook(at)
Politico.com. Credits: The Playbook 24/7 team of Aoife McCarthy, Erika Lovley, Avi Zenilman and
Richard Cullen.

06/05/2008
S eeretm3r of Education Criticizes Propos~ (NYT) . Page 1 of 1
~’age 1014

Nonresponsive
From: Ditto, Trey
Sent: September 20, 2007 7:57 AM
To: Yudof, Samara; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Keni; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie;
Maddox, Lauren; Pdvate - Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.;
Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessiea; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy;
Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tmcy Young; Tucker, Sara Mart!nez;
Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Tucker, Sara (Restricted)
13c: Anderson, Chdsty
Subject: Spellings is Rocking (Yeas and Nays)

http://www.examiner.com/blogs/Yeas and Nays/2OO7/9/20/Spellings-is-rocldalg

Spellings is rocking
September 20, 2:14 AM
Seeretary of Education Margaret Spellings earned maj or
cool points Wednesday when she showed up at Cleveland’s
Rock and Roll Hall of Fmne as part of her ongoing Midwest
bus tom’. And she even sm~g. Spellings sang fl~e chorus to
Stevie Wo~der’s ’%igned. Sealed. Delivered. I’m Youls,"
and a group of students analyzed the voice vibrations as a
science lesson.

"You just can’t help but tap yore toe and sing along," she
told Yeas & Nays. "It’s great that they are teaclfing science
and math through sotmd and ush~g the rich resources oftt~e
museum to reinforce it all."
~p And clid the toar of the museum bring back fond memories
for the secretary? You bet.

"°I still remember that one of my first dates was to a Peter Frampton conce~t," she said. And
no: Despite earlier revelations that Karl Rove once asked her out on a date, it wasn’t him.

06/05/2008
 Support Crrows For Teacher Bonuses (W~)age 1015 Page 1 of 2

Nonrespons1
From: Anderson, Chdsty
Sent: September 19, 2007 8:19 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers,
Sarah; O-ibble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin,
Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend
L.; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy;
Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez;
Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Ladies Who Lunch With Laura (CSM)

Ladies Who Lunch With Laura (CSM)

By Linda Feldmann
The Christian Science Monitor, September 19, 2007
The phone call came out of the blue: Would I be interested in having lunch with Laura Bush in the
White House residence?
Urn, yeah. My instructions were to meet the first lady’s press aides on the driveway in front of the
briefing room, 11:30 &m. sharp, Sept. 17. All told, about 20 female White House reporters were invited.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and Ambassador Karen Hughes, two of President Bush’s
Iongtime aides from Texas, would join us.
Suddenly, we were Ladies Who Lunch, not Ladies Who Wolf Down Sandwiches at Our Desks.
Columnist Helen Thomas, another invitee who has covered the White House since the Kennedy
administration, confirmed my suspicion that this was indeed an unusual event. She could not recall
another one quite like it.
We were told the luncheon would be on the record. Then, it shilted to "on background," a journalistic
term that means quotes can be used, but with attribution agreed upon in advance. But the usual "senior
administration official" would not do for Mrs. Bush, since she is not one. Alter some deliberation, we
agreed to call her a "source close to the presidert."
But alas, once we had gathered upstairs in the living room called the Yellow Oval, the first lady told us
the lunch would be "social and off the record, so we can be free to say what we really want to say."
"1 wanted to ask everyone here for the fun of it," Mrs. Bush said.
Alter an on-the-record discussion on education and international public diplomacy, we filed into the
cozy private dining room where the Bushes usually have breakfast. That’s when we went offthe record,
but I do have clearance to discuss the menu, the accoutrements, and the White House curator’s alter-
lunch tour.
As expected, everything was just so - the gold-accented decorative dinner plates, the hand-
calligraphed place markers, the bouquets bursting with roses and accented aith crab apples. The menu
was light, but sumptuous: a tangy salad of citrus fillets, hearts of palm, and chicory and butter lettuce; a
creative melange of pancetta-wrapped sea bass, balsamic bordelaise, and ricotta and spinach ravioli
with artichokes; and for dessert, "Chocolate Chat." Not a "chocolate cat" - as my daughter the French
student wondered ~hen I showed her the printed menu - but a chocolate microphone and spiral-bound
reporter’s notebook.
Alter lunch, curator Bill AIIman took us on a tour of the White House’s most famous bedrooms - the
Lincoln and the Queen’s, which are still used by guests. What is now called the Lincoln Bedroom was
used as a cabinet room and office by President Lincoln, but now contains a big, ornate bed bought by
Lincoln’s wife. The bed was originally used in the room where we had lunch, but was moved into
Lincoln’s old office af[er President Truman’s reconstruction of the White House. No doubt, the most

06/05/2008
Suppol~ C~’ows For Teacher Bonuses (~)age ] 0] 6 Page 2 of 2

prized artifact in there is a handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address, the only one of five that Lincoln
signed and dated.
The fact that the big rosewood bed has survived is a matter of some gratitude for Mr. AIIman. In the
191h century, he explained, it was normal for an incoming president to have a garage sale. "Congress
said, ’Here’s money to move in, and if that’s not enough, sell off the old stuff and buy what you want,’"
AIIman said. "So every four or eight years, there would be a public auction of what they called ’decayed
property’ or anything they felt no longer fashionable and stylish."
The last big sale was in 1903, ~en President Theodore Roosevelt renovated the White House. "Now,
everything in the house belongs to our office to care for permanently," said AIIman. To this day,
furnishings that once belonged to the White House are being returned.

06/05/2008
 Page 1017

INonresponsi L- :=
From: Yudof, Samara
Sent: September 25, 2007 12:48 AM
To: Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn, Kristine; Colby, Chad;
Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private-
Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica;
Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele,
Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy
Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, C~thia; Young, Tracy; Anderson, Christy; Tucker,
Sara (Restricted); Schray, Vickie; Oldham, Cheryl; Schneider, Mark
Subject: Need to pick a college? New websites can help (USAT)

USA TODAY

Need to pick a college? New websites can help

By Mary Beth Marklein, USA TODAY
A year has passed since a conm~ission appointed by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings
called on colleges to provide clearer, comparable information to families.

Since then, higher-education groups of all shapes and sizes have been developing their
responses -- some in hopes of fending off congressional or federal intervention.

On Wednesday, for instance, the non-profit National Association of Independent Colleges

and Universities is to launch a website on which students can compare 600 of its 1,000
melmber schools using a standard format. Other groups plan to roll out similar efforts this
fall.
Today, the Education Department itself weighs in with a revamped version of its 7-year-old
site featuring inforraation such as academic majors, tuition and average financial aid for
nearly 7,000 schools.

The site, College Navigator (collegenavigator.ed. gov), provides no new inforination, such
as net price or student performance; such additions would require legislative or federal
approval. Nor are data on part-time or transfer students avail~Jole.

The site also does not include the level of detail offered by some co~m~ercial sites. U.S.
News & World Report, for example, lists the number of full-time faculty and average class
size. The College Board allows users to include interests, such as dra~r~, cheerleading or
jazz clubs.

But Spellings says the new, more user-friendly site will better serve key audiences,
including low-income students, their parents and families in which the kids would be the
first to plan for college.

"We’re on a journey here, and the fact that we’ve started ... is a huge step forward," she
says.

The site draws primarily from information that institutions must report to the National
Center for Education Statistics as a condition of receiving federal aid. Institutions
include two- and four-year public and private non-profit schools and for-profit
institutions; credentials range from certificates to bachelor’s degrees or higher.

Like the original site (called College Opportunity Online Locator), College Navigator
enables users to search for colleges based on location and program of study. But the new
site requires fewer steps to prodnce the same results and allows users to factor more
criteria into their initial searches, including tuition and SAT or ACT scores.

Users also can build and save a list of favorites, tweak criteria without having to start
anew and view side-by-side comparisons of up to four institutions. In a nod to adult and
 Page 1018
working students, users can search for schools that offer distance learning, weekend and
evening courses, and credit for life experience.

The site design, based on feedback from 90 people in 11 focus groups nationwide, remains a
work in progress. Improvements are ongoing, and plans call for a Spanish-language version
and campus crime statistics.

Spellings says it’s too soon to consider measures of student performance, something the
commission recommended as a way for colleges to be more accountable. Though a number of
relatively new national tools are available, "the state of the art is in its infancy," she
says.

That’s fine with Doug Bennett, president of Earlhmm College in Richmond, Ind. He, like
many of his peers, says he would resist federal oversight on student learning measures.
Though he sees no "real harm" in improving an Education Department website, there’s more
to be done on a related problem: He’s spending today with ~]other education group that is
looking to minimize the influence of U.S. News rankings. "This is the beginning of a very
important, long conversation, " he says.
 Page 1019

N°nresp°nsiL_
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: September 23, 2007 8:47 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah;
Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug;
Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey;
Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey,
Liam; ’TracyYoung’; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara;
Simon, Ray
Subject: WEEKEND NEWS SUMMARY, 9.23.07

WEEKEND NEWS SUMMARY

9.23.07

1.No Child Left Behind law is up for rene~val but some say changes are needed (Media General)
2. Mixed Grades for a University’s Gro~vfl~ Plan (NYT)
3.Welcome or Not, Orthodox~y Is Back in Russia’s Public Schools (NYT)
4. Dis~’ict High Schools Greet 1,200 Fresh Faces (W. Post)
5. To Africa, For Culture and Credits (W. Pos~)

1. No Child Left Behind law is up for renewal but some say changes are needed
Sunday, Sop 23, 2007
By Khristopher J. Brooks and Gil Klein
Media General

From the hallways of Congress to srnall classrooms in Bristol, everyone in public education is talkiIN about four
letters: NCLB.
The federal No Child Left Behind Act - considered by many to be the most important yet con~oversial
education law since the mid-1960s - is up for reauthorization by Congress.

Whether you talk to school officials, teachers, parents or local legislators, everyone seems to have strong
opinions on the act.
The general consensus is that NCLB, which aims for all students to be proficient in math and reading by 2014,
needs a few changes before it goes to a final reauthorization vote. NCLB, approved in 2002, will be re-evaluated
evely five years for its effectiveness.

"The biggest criticism of this is ho~v are we going to make all students proficient by 2014 when all kids are
leamfl~g at a different level?" said Je~mifer Rouse, federal programs director for Bristol Tennessee’s school
system. "We don’t know if that’s a realistic goal. In fact, we question that."

Some view NCLB as a law with an mneasonable deadline and unfair penalties. Another common complaint is it
puts too much emphasis on test scores and not enough on learning.

WHAT IS NCLB?
 Page 1020
Signed into law in Janum7 2002, NCLB was designedto make school systems more accountable for academic
progress through federally mandated testing.

EvelTyear, students across the nation take a statewide exam - the Standards of Learning [SOLs] in Vhginia and
the Comprehensive Assessment Program [TCAP] in Tennessee. Test scores are then sent to the federal
govenunent for assessment on academic growth.

Withtest results as evidence, schools are required to show that students are lealning more every year. School
systems that show progress in 29 categories - or federal benchmarks - receive an adequate yearly progress status,
or AYP.
States are required to publish a school system’s AYP status, letting parents know how their kids fared that year.

For schools and systems that don’t comply, there are penalties.

Ifa school fails to meet AYP two years in a row, it’s considered "in need of improvement" and must offer
parents the choice of sending their kids to another school.

Ifa school fails to meet AYP for four straight years, it faces stiffer corrective actions such as restructuring the
school through state takeover or private management.

"The law seems like it’s almost punitive," said Debbie Morelock, federal projects supervisor for Sullivan
County schools in Tennessee. "But [federal government officials] needto come here and help us and guide us
on this."

No Child Left Behind is the Bush adnfinistration’s updated version of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary
Education Act.

The goal is for all students to perfolrn at grade-level proficiency by 2014 regardless of race, poverty level or
disability.

"[NCLB] is changing tl~e waythe leaning process happens for ore kids," said Alminia Wheder, a Bristol
Tennessee parent who says she’s fi-ustrated. "They study for these tests, but realistically - when you get to
college - colleges don’t evenuse half the stuff that’s on those tests."

One of NCLB’s most talked-about features is Title I, which is the government’s plan to narrow the educational
achievement gap by giving more money to schools with mostly disadvantaged students. Although it has endured
scruliny over the last five years, many federal legislators see NCLB and Title I as a good way to close ttmt gap.

At the local level, Sullivan County has 13 Title I schools and typically receives $1.8 million in Title I funding.
In the Twin City, Bristol Virginia has five Title I schools and usually gets about $775,000, while Bristol
Tennessee has four Title I schools and regularly receives $620,000.

Bristol-area school officials like Morelock say NCLB has changed their daily operations and recordkeeping,
mostly through mountains of cumbersome paperwork.

Doug Arnold, superintendent of Bristol Virginia Public Schools, said he spends hours reviewing test data from
different students in search of areas where improvements can be made.

Rouse, on the other hand, said she spends "too manyhours" sorting through and signing paperwork pertaining to
NCLB.
 Page 1021

On any given day, Rouse fills out forms for state education officials detaihng characteristics of the school
system’s students who are trying to learn to speak English, counting how many highly qualified teachers the
schools have or signing papers that confirm she met with principals at Title I schools.

"From what I hear from others, this is way too much papelwork," Rouse said.
Since the law passed, Rouse said NCLB has forced her and other local officials to pay closer attention to
different student subgroups, like disabled students or the economically disadvantaged. That’s because school
systems now have to further focus on raising the academic progress of those students, she said.

Morelock echoed Rouse’s statements.

"The most difficult pat for us is sel~cing our special needs childien and our English language learners,"
Morelock said. "When it comes testing time, we have to test them all on the same level as other students."

For Morelock, NCLB tasks include working with reading specialists and talking to technology personnel who
install reading software in classrooms.

Morelock said NCLB also has changed the curriculum taught at the elementary level. Now, in its 17 elementary
schools, Sullivan Cotmty teachers instruct for 90 minutes on reading and 90 minutes on math, she said.

"We are emphasizing math and reading because that’s what’s going to be on the test," Morelock said.
tN NEED OF CHANGE?
As school administrators go about their day, they constantly hear two main criticisms of NCLB from their staffs.

The No. 1 problem is money. The federal government has mandated the changes, but does not provide enough
money to implement them, educators say.

The second criticism most often heard is that NCLB forces educators to "teach to the test," meaning a teacher’s
cun~iculum is based on what will be on the statewide exarns later that year. Students are taught what they need to
know to pass a one-day test rather than focusing on learning sldlls for a successfitl, productive future.
Many Bristol teachers say they spend their semesters focusing solely on the questions and material that will be
on the statewide exam.
They do that so tests scores will show students malting progress, thus allowing the school to earn AYP status for
the year.
"As NCLB came into fruition, my push has been more to teach to the test," admitted Katie Sword, a science
teacher at Vance Middle School on the Tennessee side of town.
And the criticisms don’t stop there.

For example, Wheeler, who has two children in Bristol Tennessee schools, said she and other parents feel
students are being forced back to school earlier eve~2~year so teachers can get a jump-start on teaching material
that will be on the exams.

"But when you send them to school that much earlier, how much are they actually paying attention?" Wheeler
3
 Page 1022
asks. "It’s so hot outside that they don’t even want to be there."

Wheeler also said evaluating students through forced testing is not a good way to measure progress.

"I think these tests are geared in a way of grading the teacher more so than the kids," said Wheeler, who worked
as a substitute teacher. "If kids don’t do well, then that means the teacher - in a roundabout way - has failed."
Tracy Easterling, a math teacher at Vance, said she can’t teach detailed lessous to her students because she must
first make sure she covers all the material that will be on exams.

"I taught before NCLB and there was more flexibility and more time to be creative and just spend more time on
a unit where you found students interested rather than making sure you covered eve~Nthing," Eastefling said.

Arnold, in Bristol, Va., agrees the measure is underfunded.

"The demands for paperwork, the recordkeeping, the bookkeeping [and] the testing is nowhere near funded," the
superintendent said. "I know it’s underfunded."

Sword, the science teacher at Vance, agreed.

"If they’re going to require children to be to grade level, there’s got to be a lot of support out there for children
who need tutoring," she said.
Another of Arnold’s critidisms is that NCLB demands that all students - regardless of learning style - understand
the same course work at the same time.

"For example, a special education student who has a learning disability is expected to meet the same benchmark
as an academically gifted student who has no learning impediment," Arnold explained. "Let’s be realistic in how
we compare [special education students] to someone who doesn’t have a learning disability."

Because students learn in different ways and at different rates, Arnold said NCLB’s 2014 goal is unrealistic.
"It’s a slap in the face to education to label a school or school division as not adequate because you don’t meet
one of X nurnber of arbitrm3r benchmarks," he said. "And to arbitrarily say in 2014, we’re all going to meet 100
mastery in eveiNthing probably is asking for something that never was and never will be."

AT THE FEDERAL LEVEL

Sit down with almost any local educator, and they’ll go on and on with their gripes about NCLB.
Meanwhile, federal legislators have been discussing ways to retool NCLB for the next five years.

"No Child Left Behind is a promising program, but it needs to be improved and funded adequately by the
federal government in order for our schools to achieve the goals t!~e program has mandated," said U.S. Rep.
Rick Boucher, a Democrat who represents Southwest Virginia. "Improvements could be made to provide greater
resources to assist states in providing the best training possible for educators and enhancing school
infrastmctm’e."

Boucher said he’s willing to vote again for NCLB if a few changes are made, especially the requirements for
disabled students.
 Page 1023
U.S. Pep. David Davis, R-Tenn., said he’ s also inclined to support NCLB reauthorization because "I don’t think
anybody wants any child left behind."
"But some of the concerns I have is that of special needs chil&en," Davis said "There are some chil&en that
can get from point A to B to C, but then there’s some kids who will never get to that, so we need to find a way
to conect that."
Davis, who represents Northeast Tennessee, said he has other issues with NCLB, particularly that lawmakers
should take more time worldng on a new version.

"This is a piece of legislation we should have been looking at all year," he said. "I think we ought to do it right,
not quickly."

U.S. Pep. George Miller, D-Cali£, chai~nan of the House Education and Labor Conm~ittee, proposes two
changes. The federal government should help pay for bonuses up to $12,500 annually for highly qt~ified
teachers willing to work at schools in inner cities and l~al areas that are tough to staff, he said. And schools
should not have to rely only on single tests in reading and math to determine if students ae making academic
progress. He proposes that states be allowed to consider tests in other subjects.

Furthermore, Miller said, "it doesn’t make sense" for a state to completely reorganize a school because one
small group of students doesn’t meet federal requirements for progress. Schools should be allowed to focus on
the group having difficulty, he said, "without going through wholesale interventions."

U.S. Education Secreta-y Mmgaret Spellings is way of any chartges that loosenthe requirements. The law
already is flexible, she said, for special education students and students learning to speak English.

"I believe in my heat, mind mid soul that a time period from 2002 to 2014 is not an lmreasonable expectation to
have lots and lots more kids reading on grade level," Spellings said.
Miller’s draft creates "gigantic loopholes," she said, that would make it "too easy for low-perfo~sning schools to
escape needed intervention and improvement."

"But I believe that in this country, kids should be reading on grade level in a period of 12 years," Spellings said.
"That’s what our expectation ought to be."

Miller and Spellings agree that the law should be changed so tint student progress is measured as each class
progresses, rather than measuring one class against the perfo~rnance of the class ahead of it, as the law now
requires.

Discussions and debate over NCLB will continue until both legislative bodies come to an agreement. The debate
is being followed closely by educators, locally and across the nation.
"We think inthe first five years of No Child Left Behind, we have done a remarkable job of getting people
focused on the task at hand," Miller said. "But we now know enough to recognize there may be other factors that
give us a more complete picture before we rush to judgment and star characterizing people as failures."

2. M~xed Grades for a University’s Grov~h Plan

By ALEX MINDLIN
The New York Thnes
Sep~tember 23~ 2007
 Page 1024
For five decades, Fordham University’s campus near Lincoln Center has had the feel of a cathedial close. The
campus, which extends from Columbus to Amsterdam Avenue between 60th and 62nd Streets, is relatively
tmderbuilt. At its heart is a grassy plaza fiom which the sky is visible in three directions. The land was sold to
Fordham in the 1950s by the city, which had acquired it using eminent domahl.

In 2005, citing enrollment that was double what could comfortably fit, Fordham proposed to vasty expand this
campus over the next 25 yeas, tripling the built space on its land with eight new buildings in a horseshoe
anangement. The tallest buildings, at 50 and 55 stories, would be a pair of private apartment towers on
Amsterdam Avenue. Proceeds from the sale of those lots would help finance Fordham’s other new buildings,
including 25- and 31-story dormitories along Colttmbus Avenue.

To carry out the plan, Fordham is asldng the city to waive some requirements governing height and setback, and
to allow underground parldng space for 470 cars. On Sept. 10, the university’s plans were the subject of two
preliminary hearings at the Department of City Planning. Among those present were representatives from a local
group called Fordham Neighbors United, which has criticized the size of the proposed buildings.

Three days before the hearings, Representative Jen’old Nadler, who holds a Fordham law degree, and ttnee state
legislators wrote to the university’s president, the Rev. Joseph McShane, urgh~g him "to revise a plan that, as it
stands, we cannot currently support."

The officials predicted that placing new buildings onthree sides of the campus would "create a foreboding sense
of impregnability," isolating Fordham from the neighborhood. They asked the university to shift more of the
project’s bulk into buildings that would not be visible from the street.
B~ian Byme, Fordham’s vice president for administration, said in an e-mail message that such a change was
"impossible except at extraordinary cost" and would "destroy the plaza" at the center of the campus.

Dr. Byme also defended the tu~iversity’s proposal to sell pats of its once-public land, saying that any
resix-ictions on use of the parcel had expired. "We have an opportunity to take advantage of the increased value
of that property," he said. "But we’re not doing anything with the money except developing the campus for
educational purposes."

3. Welcome or Not, Orthodoxy Is Back in Russia’s Public Schools

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
The Ne~v York Times
September 23, 2007

KOLOMNA, Russia - One of the most discordant debates in Russian societyis playing out in public schools
like those in this city not fat from Moscow, where the other day a teacher named Ii]na Donshina set aside her
textbooks, strode before her second graders and, as ifspealdng from a pulpit, posed a simple question:
°’Whom should we learn to do good from?"

"From God[" the childien said.

"’Right!" Ms. Donshina said. "Because people he created crucified him. But did he accuse them or curse them or
hate them? Of course not! He continued loving and feeling pity for them, though he could have eliminated all of
us and the ~vhole world in a fraction of a second."
Nearly two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the retm-n of religion to public life, localities in
Russia are increasingly decreeing that to receive a proper public school education, childi’en should be steeped in
 Page 1025
the ~vays of the Russian Orthodox Church, including its traditions, liturgy and historic fignres.

The lessons are typically introduced at the urging of church leaders, who say the enforced atheism of
Communism left Russians out of touch with a faith that was once at the core of their identity.
The new cm-riculum reflects the nation’s continuing straggle to define what it means to be Russian in the post-
Communist era and what role religion should play after being brutally suppressed under Soviet rule. Yet the
diive by a revitalized church to weave its tenets into the education system has prompted a backlash, and not only
from the remains of the Communist Party.

Opponents assert that the Russian Orthodox leadersttip is weakening the constitutional separation of church and
state by proselytizing in public schools. They say Russia is a multiethnic, pluralistic nation and risks alienating
its large Muslim minority if Russian Orthodoxy takes on the trappings of a state religion.

The church calls those accusations unfounded, maintaining that the courses are cultural, not religious.

In Ms. Donshina’s class at least, the chil&en seem to have their own understanding of a primary theme of the
coarse. "One has to love God," said Kristina Posobilova. ’We should believe in God only."

The dispute came to a head recently when 10 prominent Russian scientists, including two Nobel laureates, sent a
letter to President Vladimir V. Putin, protesting what they termed the "growing clericalization" of Russian
society. In addition to criticizing religious teachings in public schools, the scientists attacked church efforts to
obtain recognition of degrees in theology, and the presence of Russian Orthodox chaplains in the militm%
Local officials carry out education policy under Moscow’s oversight, with some latitude. Some regions require
the courses in Russian Orthodoxy, while others allow parents to remove their children from them, though they
rarely, if ever, do. Other areas have not adopted them.

Mr. Putin, though usually not reluctant to ovenule local authorities, has skirted the issue. He said in September
that he preferred that childrenlearn about religion in general, especially four faiths with longstanding ties to
Russia - Russian Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism. But the president, who has been photographed
wealing a cross and sometimes attends church services and other church events, did not say current practices
should be scaled back.

°°We have to find a form acceptable for the entire society," he said. °°Let’s think about it together."

Polls show that roughly half to two-thirds of Russiaus consider themselves Russian Orthodox, a sharp increase
since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. Clergy members frequently take part in government events, and
people often weal crosses. But Russia remains deeply secular, and most Russial~s say they never attend church.

About 10 to 15 percent of Russians are Muslim, most of whom live in the south, though Moscow and other
major cities have large Muslim populations. With emiglation and assimilation, the Jewish population has
dwindled to a few hundred thousand people, of 140 million. Muslim and Jewish leaders have generally opposed
Russian Orthodoxy courses, though some say schools should be permitted to offer them as extracunicular
activities.

"We do not want Muslim cttildi’en forced to study other religions," said Marat Kham’at Murtazin, rectc~ of the
Moscow Islamic University. "Muslims should study their own religion."

Dining imperial Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church wielded enormous influence as the official religion, and
virtually all ctfildren took a Russian Orthodox course known as the Law of God.
 Page 1026

One of the scientists who signed the letter to Mr. Putin, Zhores I. Alferov, a recipient of the Nobel Prize in
Physics in 2000, said he feared that the com~try was returning to those days. He recalled that his own father had
to study the Law of God lmder the last czar, Nicholas II.

"’The church would like to have more believers," said Mr. Alferov, a member of Parliament in the Communist
bloc. "But they can have their religious schools and their Sunday schools. In noxrnal government schools,
absolutely not."

Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow, leader of the church, has repeatedly asserted that to appreciate the arts, literature,
heritage and history of Russia, children need to know about Russian OxChodoxy. He described the scientists’
letter to Mr. Putin as "’an echo of the atheistic propaganda of the past."

Five years ago, Kolomna, 60 miles south of Moscow, was one of the first cities to take up the curriculum. Local
church and education officials noted that before the revolution, Kolomna was a Russian Orthodox center, site of
many cathedrals and monasteries that were demolished or used as warehouses and the like trader Commtmism.
Given the area’s history, they asked, is it not fitting that students learn about Russian Orthodoxy?.

"The goal, I would say, is that all the powers that be, the church and the govenunent, make sure that people,
children, know their history and their roots," said the Rev. Vladimir Pakhachev, a church leader here who helps
oversee the curriculum.

For example, Father Pakhachev said, it would be absurd to study the Russian language without learning about
SS. Cyril and Methodius, the two ninth-century brothers who are credited with helping to create Cyrillic, the
alphabet used in Russian. The brothers were monks and significant religious figures, and that aspect of their
lives cmmot be ignored, he said.

At Public School No. 3 here, in the shadow of a restored cathedral, the courses are voluntm-y, but occur one
period a week during the school day, and are taught byregular teachers. No parents have ever asked that their
children be exempted, said a school official, Anna Kikhtenko.

"’No rights are being violated," she said. "Children fiom Muslim families, the parents often say, "We are living
among Russian Orthodox people. We also want our chil&en to understand what these beliefs are about.’ "

Rece~Ny, Oksana Telnova, a sixth-grade teacher, descaibed to her class how Grand Prince Vladimir introduced
Ortt~odox Christianity to Russia in 988 after rejecting other religions, an event that the church calls the Baptism
of Russia. Some chil&en read aloud verses t}om the Bible.

"Sacred orthodoxy transformed and revived the Slavic soul after becoming its moral and spiritual foundation,"
Ms. Telnova said, quoting Patriarch Alexy II. ’’Thiough the ages, Chiistianity helped to create a great country
and a great culture."
Nearby, Ms. Donshina, the second-grade teacher, led her students in reciting the Ten Commandments before
pointing to a tiny tree at the front of the room with branches but no leaves.

"Faithin God is as important for every human as the root for a tree," she said. "But our tree unfortunately has
died just like a human soul can die without doing good. This is what happens to people who do not do good
things and do not follow God’s laws."

She asked the children to choose from a group of flowers, some with Chiistian virtues mitten on them, some
with undeshable qualities, and attach those with the virtues to the tree.
 Page 1027

She ended with a discussion of the Russian saints, saying that they °’have shown us how one must live to be
close to God." With that, she dismissed the class, but not before giving a piece of chocolate to each child.

4. Dista’ic~ High Schools Greet 1,200 Fresh Faces

Ninth-Graders Shifted In as City Eliminates Junior High
By TheMa Labbz
The Washington Pos~
SumLay, September 23, 2007; Cll

Nikolas Mikolaski bobbed his way through the throngs of students at Woodrow Wilson Senior High School on
a recent day, lugging his textbooks in a backpack because lockers for ninth-grade students hadn’t arrived yet.

The 15-year-old dropped his heavy bag to the floor and sat down to lunch with a group of fellow freshman,
displaying none of the sheepistmess that sometimes accompanies being at the bottom of the high school totem
pole. Better to be a lowly freshman, he said, than to have stayed another year in jtmior high.
"I like my teachers. I like my classes," he said. "It’s awesome."

For the first time since the 1940s, the D.C. schooi system has shifted all ninth-graders to high schools and
turned its eight jullior high schools into middle schools, joining 12 middle schools already in existence. The
move affects about 1,200 students.
The adjustment puts tile District in the company of other Washington region school systems, such as those in
Prince George’s and Fairfax colmties, which use the middle school model. If sixth-graders are shifted out of
elementalsr schools in the 2008-09 school year as planned, all middle schools will have a full complement of
sixth-to eighth-grade students.
Students and parents say they are excited about the transfolrnation plan and optimistic it will lead to higher
academic achievement.
Research shows that ninth grade is a critical educational juncture. It’s when students leave a highly stmctmed
environment for the maze of high school, with more teachers, more homework and more independence,
academically and socially. Students who don’t adjust to the added responsibilities at that turning point are more
likely to di’op out.

To accommodate the ninth-graders, Wilson officials have put them in a wing decorated with international flags
as a tribute to student diversity and a sign that reads "Freshman Academy." Lunch is one of the few times dining
the day when the younger students mix with older ones

All D.C. high schools have freshman academies, but they differ depending onthe needs of the schools and its
students, officials said. According to the city’s Master Education Plan, the propose oftmning junior high schools
into middle schools is to have students grouped together in age-appropriate environments.

"Ninth grade transition is a great way to introduce incoming ninth graders to the new graduation requirements as
well as jumpstart their high school experience in an environment that focuses on college readiness," Schools
Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee said in a statement.
Rhee is convening a task force to study the sixth-grade transition to middle school next year, spokeswoman
Mafara Hobson said.
 Page 1028
Nmnerous national foundations have been funding initiatives that focus on ninth-graders and the transition to
high school.

Rebecca Dedmond, director of the School Counseling Program and Freshman Transition Initiative at George
Washington University, said being part of a smaller group can cushion the shock of freshman year.
"In middle school, students are nmAtred and have small classes and have an identity," Dedmond said. "They go
from that to ninth grade and say to themselves, ’Where’s my locker? How an~ I going to find my way to class?
The teacher doesn’t know myname?’ " In the midst of the confusion, Dedmond said, students must laythe
fotmdation for their futures as they pick classes and hear about impending SATs and college applications.

Dedmond has worked with several school systems on creating a course, known as an "advisory," in which a
smaller group of students meets with a teacher mid works on developing social and academic skills.

In the District, the advisory will come to Ballou Senior High School within weeks, Principal Karen Smith said.
At the Southeast school, ninth-grade students take their core classes -- English, math, science and social studies
- on one floor and such electives as art, music mad physical education in other parts of the building.

On a recent night at Wilson, about 40 parents gathered in the school library for an orientation about what their
children can expect this year. Counselor Emyrtle Be~mett gave a brief overview of new graduation requirements
mid told them that most freshmen would be taking the PSAT next month.
Freshman Academy director @egory Bargeman explained that ninth-grade teachers are divided into teams that
work with a group of students. The team meets weekly to discuss field trips, student attendance and academics.

Jackie Mikolasld, Nikolas’s mother, said she was reluctant at first to send her son to Wilson because it has so
many students, close to 1,500. She offered him his choice of high schools, including private school.

But he wanted to go to Wilson. She said she felt reasstned after orientation that the interim principal, Jacqueline
Williams, and the teachers would take care of the students. And Mikolasld was impressed when, over the
summer, an information packet came in the mail stuffed with facts about high school. "They are very organized
for a big school like that," she said.

The freshman class at Wilson jumped this year to 362 fiom 154. The ninth-gn~de lockers ar~rived and were
installed last week. Nikolas signed up for one.

"It’s a lot better," Nikolas said, "Now I don’t have to lug my stuff around all over the place."

5. To Africa, For Culture and Credits

U.S.-Born Students Are Going Back to Their Family Roots
By Karin Brulliard
The Washington Post
Sumlay, September 23, 2007;

As the first day of school approached tiffs month, Brian Agugoesi, 13, packed his bags with pens and notebooks.
He also included Honeycomb cereal, whichis impossible to get at his school, and tablets to fend off malaria,
~vhich u~ffol~xtnately is not.

The Randallstown, Md., boy was pacldng for his second year at Gnmdtvig International Secondary School in the
Niger River Valley of southeast Nigeria, an institution that, according to its Web site, boasts a water borehole
and "network of tinTed roads" on a 10-hectare campus. Gmndtvig also offers, according to Brian, packed school
l0
 Page 1029
days and teachers who require ~e-flouters -- such as Brian the time he forgot to empty the trash in his dorm
room -- to cut the campus grass "tmtil they’re satisfie&"
Brian’s parents, Rita and Charles Agugoesi, chuckled at that story on the recent eve of Brian’s flight to Lagos. It
is just what they wanted when they decided, like many of their Nigerian fiiends, to send their U.S.-bom child to
school in their Afiican homeland.
"Every individual comes from somewhere," said Rita Agugoesi, a social worker. "When you have children, you
want them to know where you came from."
Immigrants’ jomneys to America have long been inspired by educational oppo~mities for children. But unlike
previous generations ofimmignants, who often encouraged their kids’ full assimilation, today’s newcomers strive
and sometimes struggle to transmit traditions to chil&en submerged in a high-speed, diverse American culture.
For some Africans, many of whom came to the United States for higher education, the answer is filll immersion
-- in Africa. A few years abroad, immigrant parents say, teaches children about Africa and, even better, some
perspective about life in America.

"There are a lot of people over there who 0ae dreaming to come here. They would be willing to have one of their
fingels chopped off to come here," said Cosmas U. Nwokeafor, whose elder son spent three years in Nigeria and
whose younger son will go there in December.

On a recent night, Nwokeafor, who toiled his way from busboy to Bowie State University professor and
assistant provost, stretched out his arms in his spacious, frestlly built Upper Marlboro home. "This was not made
ina day."
Africans are immigrating to the United States faster than ever, and they are among the best-educated of all
immigrant groups. But the African immigrant population, at about 1.4 million, is relatively small andnew, so
there is scant research on parenting and second-generation integration. No one tracks how many children of
Afiican immigrants attend school in their ancestral lands.

Community leaders say the practice is most common among Nigerians and Ghanaians, whose countries offer the
unusual combination of relative political stability and established boarding schools with strict discipline and
rigorous courses in English. At $5,000 to $10,000 a year, the schools are generally more affordable than
American private schools.

Nwokeafor said he and his wife, Catheline, made great efforts to teach their four children traditional Nigerian
songs and folk tales about turtles and lions. They took thegn to Nigeria often, taught them to address adults as
"sir" and "auntie," and spoke to them in Igbo, their language.

But they wondered whether it was enough. The children told stories about American fiiends talking back to
teachers and telling their parents to "shut up."

"I dolft even know ifI could spell my name the next dayif I did that," Chinedu, 14, the younger son, said softly
on a recent night.

Once, Nwokeafor noticed that a photo album -- filled with snapshots of the fanlily posing by tile Mercedes-Benz
and the grand white house they keep in the village of Umubasi in southern Nigeria -- was missing from its spot.
Chinedu confessed that he had taken it to school to prove to teasing classmates that Africans did not "live in
trees, like monkeys."

"Whatever we try to put into them is being challenged by the dominant culture," Nwokeafor said. "At times, I
ll
 Page 1030
feel so sot17 for them because they are in a battle. They don’t know whether to believe their parents or the
dominant cultme."
Uche~ma Nwokeafor, 20, no longer has doubts. He spent seventh ttu’ough ninth grade shaling a dorm room with
12 other students at a school in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. The crack-of-dawn treks to fetch bath water fiom a tap a
mile away, 5 a.m. prayers, 7 a.m. classes and weekends cutting grass with a machete, he said, taught him that
"you have to work for your own."

Now a lanky social-work major at Bowie State who wears hip black-rimmed glasses, Uche~ma remembers
fondly the basketball tom~lament he played in with his Nigerian classmates, who called him "Americana." He
banters fluently in Igbo with his father and listens to Nigerian pop music in his car. He said he feels "like the
tree Afiican American."
"Cultme-wise, it changed mylife," Ucherma Nwokeafor said. "Those three years, it showed me another place
called home."

That sort of review has made Chinedu enthusiastic about his upcoming year in Nigeria. A stellar student who
dreams of attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he hopes Nigeria will help him focus.

"Here, I’m with all my friends," he said. "I have too many dis~actions."

Cosmas Nwokeafor said that he is too "overprotective" to send his two daughters to Nigeria and that other
parents he knows feel the same. In most cases, immigrants say, children are sent abroad for a few yeals in their
earlyteens and then complete high school and prepare for the SAT in the United States.

Not evely alumnus has glowing memories. Riverdale area resident Faraday Okoro, 20, said attending grades
nine and 10 in a Nigerian school hurt his grades. Students there, he said, were incredibly competitive, and that
made him work hard. But although 75 was a top grade there, it still translated to a C on his U.S. tr~cript.
His mother, Adaku Okoro, decided for that reason against sending Faraday*s brother and two sisters, to their
relief. (Faraday’s sister Maryland, 15, wrote a letter to her parents, making a case for not having to go. "But I
would suggest that I could visit," she concluded.)

Neve~lheless, Faraday and his mother agree that the sojourn taught him valuable lessons. He learned that getting
malmia felt "just like being really sick," grew to love soccer and, his mother said, became less obsessed with
buying the latest Nike shoes. An aspiring fihnmaker, the Prince George’s Community College student said his
time in Nigeria sparked his love of cinema.

"They don’t have consistent po~ver, and once they turnit on, and the television came on, and you have a movie,
it seemed, like, tmreal," he recalled. "I learned more about Nigeria -- and maybe you can stretch and say the
worldin general .... I can set a movie in a foreign place and really go into detail into how a character fi’om a
foreign land will act."

The Agugoesis said they hope to retire in Nigeria and wanted their ttuee sons to feel comfortable there. They
started talking to Brian about going to school there when he was in fifth grade. He was game.
Rita Agugoesi said she alInost changed her mind when she took Brian to Nigeria last fall. Then she sa~v her
exceedingly shy son mingling with other students. Brian did not complain the whole year, except about the
snakes that sometimes slither across the school grounds.

"It’s the same," Brian, deep-voiced and tall, said nonchalantly when asked to compare Nigerian schools with
12
 Page 1031
schools in subm’ban Baltimore.

For now, the Agugoesis say they are pleased ttkat Brian came back for his summer vacation more mature and
relaxed than a year ago, with a voracious appetite for books and Nigerian "Nollywood" films.

"Sometimes you feel so alone, doing it all by yourself; raising them, trying to pass on the culture," Rita
Agugoesi said, sitting in the hving room, near Brian’s suitcases, which bulged with Pringles, peanut butter and
shiny &ess shoes. "It has really made a big difference."

13
Support Crro~vs For Teacher Bonuses (W~)age ] 032 Page 1 of 2

Nonresponsiv[
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 20, 2007 8:23 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers,
Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin,
Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private -Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend
L.; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy;
Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez;
Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Colleges, Pressed By Spellings And Cuomo, Step Up Scrutiny Of Possible Conflicts In
Their Business Relationships (CHRONED)

Colleges, Pressed By Spellings And Cuomo, Step Up Scrutiny Of Possible

Conflicts In Their Business Relationships (CHRONED)
By Paul Basken
The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 20, 2007
Higher-education leaders, under pressure from the secretary of education, are planning a stepped-up
examination of all possible conflicts of interest in American colleges’ operations, in light of the
continuing student-loan scandal.
Representatives of several college associations and a number of college presidents have been invited
to meet with officials of the American Council on Education on Thursday in Washington to review
potential areas of legal and ethical vulnerability and possible steps that colleges could take to avoid
them.
The meeting will follow a different gathering in Washington in June at which the secretary, Margaret
Spellings, warned college leaders that both they and the Education Department faced the possibility of
further public embarrassment from investigations like the one into financial relationships between
colleges and student-loan companies being pursued by New York State’s attorney general, Andrew M.
Cuomo.
"It seems clear that similar questions may be raised about other campus offices in the near future,"
David Ward, the council’s president, wrote in his invitation to Thursday’s strategy session.
"Given the public controversy and attention, I think we would be seriously remiss if we did not
investigate this issue," Mr. Ward wrote.
Pressure to Act
Ms. Spellings, in an interview on Tuesday, said she had felt the need this summer to press the college
leaders to take action.
"1 said, you know, ’Gang, we need to be for a solution here,"’ she said, describing the June meeting at
which she first raised the need to consider potential conflicts of interest beyond the issue of student
loans.
"Leadership can either come from the academy and be informed by the experience they have, or it can
be forced on them by others -- be it attorneys general, people in Congress, the secretary of education,"
Ms. Spellings said. "And I just think, if we think we’re the finest system in the wodd, with the world’s
best thinkers and problem solvers -- that’s what the academy is about -- that that kind of leadership
ought to be coming from the community."
Mr. Cuomo has been investigating contracts between pdvate lenders and colleges, exploring whether
the lenders have been providing illegal inducements to win student-loan business. In some cases,
colleges have received payments for steedng students to certain lenders, or lenders have paid colleges
based on the volume of loans that originated from students at the institution.

06/05/2008
Support Grows For Teacher Bonuses (W[~)age ] 033 Page 2 of 2

More than two dozen colleges have agreed to settlements with Mr. Cuomo’s office and signed a code
of conduct governing their relationships with lenders. At least six college administrators lost their jobs
atter being accused of accepting financial benefits from lenders, and one top Education Department
official remains on leave.
Other state attorneys general around the country have followed Mr. Cuomo’s lead, starting their own
investigations into student lending, and Mr. Cuomo has taken steps to expand his work into other areas
of the relationship between colleges and businesses, including companies that provide study-abroad
programs.
"In many cases, vendors have relationships that are too cozy with schools, and benefit the schools and
the vendors but not the students," a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, Jeffrey Lerner, said in an interview last
month. "Under every rock we turn over, it seems like we find a new program that needs more
oversight."
Examining Potential Conflicts of Interest
At the meeting scheduled for Thursday, Mr. Ward said he hopes to lead a "candid, off-the-record
conversation" about current practices regarding conflicts of interest and what, if anything, should be
done to strengthen them.
In a recent interview, Mr. Ward described American colleges as being caught between Mr. Cuomo’s
investigative zeal and the growing demands they face to lower costs and find more creative ways of
financing their operations.
"In the last 15 years, there’s been a fairly uninhibited pressure, within and without universities, to be
entrepreneurial," Mr. Ward said.
Potential problem areas could range from credit cards for alumni to policies governing luxury boxes in
sports stadiums, he said. "All of this sounds, when you first do it, fairly innocent," Mr. Ward said. And
those practices "may be just fine," he said, "but we need to do a review."
College presidents ~ho will attend this week’s meeting understand both the pressures they face to be
more creative in managing their budgets, and the need to make sure their actions are beyond reproach,
said Ricardo R. Fernandez, who is chairman of the council’s Board of Directors and president of
Herbert H. Lehman College of the City University of New York.
"At CUNY we’re taking it very seriously -- maybe because Mr. Cuomo is our attorney general," Mr.
FernSndez said.
The changes on college campuses initiated by rvk Cuomo could strengthen the hand of those
"defenders of the pure public-utility concept of higher education," including many faculty members who
have been warning about getting too close to the corporate wodd, Mr. Ward said.
"I’m thinking of trying to see if we can sustain a debate about our soul, if you like," he said.
Mary Andom contrilx~ted to this report.

06/05/2008
 Support C~’ows For Teacher Bonuses (W[~)age J 034 Page 1 of 2

Nonresponsi
From: Anderson, Christy
Sen{: September 21, 2007 8:11 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis;,Cohn,
Kdstine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers,
Sarah; O-ibble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin,
Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private -Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend
L.; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy;
Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez;
Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Bus Tour Clips (3)

Education Secretary Says ’No Child’ I~ostly Works (ClNE)

By Ben Fischer, Bfischer@enquirer.com
The Cincinnati Enquirer, September 21, 2007
Bus tour bdngs Spellings to Cincinnati
HYDE PARK - As Congress contemplates changes to the 6-year-old No Child Left Behind law, U.S.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said Thursday that America’s schools need even more
accountability standards.
Among the Bush administration’s major goals, shared by business groups nationwide and locally, she
said, is to expand the law’s provisions into high school grades.
"The business community, I think would say, they want more No Child Left Behind, not less No Child
Left Behind," Spellings said.
Spellings, President Bush’s top education official, spent a little more than three hours in Cincinnati on
Thursday, on the second day of a three-day, four-city bus tour to tout the 2001 education act.
The law, which transformed public education by requiring that all students become proficient in reading
and math by 2014, is up for reauthorization this year.
It’s a prime opportunity for educators, teachers mions and recently empowered Congressional
Democrats to make changes to an oft-criticized law. Traveling on a motor coach painted school-bus
yellow, Spellings delivered a two-pronged political message during hei time in Cincinnati.
The first part was that the administration is open to some changes, such as dstinguishing between
schools that just barely fall short of meeting federal goals and those that show deep, sustained failures.
The other part was that changes such as giving schools more alternative paths to meeting goals are
non-starters, she said.
The simple, clear goals, while demanding, have forced achievement up at struggling schools, she said.
Spellings first met with a small group of business leaders and former Congressman Rob Portman at the
Queen City Club downtown. Reporters and the public were excluded.
John Jacobs, chief executive of Unifi Cos. and co-chairman of the Cincinnati Business Committee’s
education task force, said businesses are asking for better graduation rates, more rigorous high
schools and more students moving on to college.
"We need children to grow up to be educated, productive adults," Jacobs said
"We desperately need them."
From there, Spellings moved on to an event at Withrow High School where she demonstrated a new
tool to help high school students estimate earlier in their high school years the amount of financial aid
they are likely to receive from the government.
That event, with about 150 students, parents and teachers, was also closed to the general public.
Cincinnati Public Schools Superintendent Rosa Blackwell did not spend any one-on-one time with
Spellings during her visit, but has lobbied in the past for what she calls "some tweaking" to No Child

06/05/2008
Support Crrows For Teacher Bonuses (W~)age ] 035 Page 2 of 2

Left Behind - but no fundamental changes.

"1 continue to believe it’s probably one of the best things that has happened for children of color and
children who have special needs, who for many years were overlooked," Blackwell said.
Withrow International High School Principal Charlene Cleveland, who took part in the event with
Spellings, said money is atop her wish list as No Child Let~ Behind is debated
"We do an excellent job, but with more funding there are some other areas that we could expand upon,"
she said.

New Tool Helps High School Students Prepare For College (WCPO)
WCPO-TV Cincinnati, Ohio, September 20, 2007
The U.S. Department of Education unveiled a newtool in the Tri-state this ’~ek to help high school
students prepare for college.
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings visited Withrow University High School Thursday to kickoff
the federally funded program FAFSA-4caster.
It’s a planning tool to help high school students learn about the financial aid available to them.

Spellings Is Rocking (EXAM)

Examiner, September 21, 2007
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings earned major cool points Wednesday when she showed up
at Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as pat of her ongoing Midwest bus tour. And she even
sang. Spellings sang the chores to Stevie Wonder’s "Signed. Sealed. Delivered. I’m Yours," and a
group of students analyzed the voice vibrations as a science lesson.
"You just can’t help but tap your toe and sing along," she told Yeas & Nays. "It’s great that they are
teaching science and math through sound and using the rich resources of the museum to reinforce it
all."
And did the tour of the museum bring back fond memories for the secretary? You bet.
"1 still remember that one of my first dates was to a Peter Frampton concert," she said. And no: Despite
earlier revelations that Karl Rove once asked herout on a date, it wasn’t him.

06/05/2008
 Suppolt Cn’ows For Teacher Bonuses (W~)age ] 036 Page 1 of 2

!~~
onrespons
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 21, 2007 8:11 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Ken’i; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers,
Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin,
Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend
L.; Mesecar, Doug; Morlfi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy;
Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez;
Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: In This Battle, No Effort Left Behind (HC)

In This Battle, No Effort Left Behind (HC)

By Julie Mason, Houston Chronicle
Houston Chronicle., September 21, 2007
When President Bush signed the No Child Le~t Behind education reform bill in 2002, it was the
capstone of a hard-won bipartisan alliance; the rewards of a tough sell to skeptics in his own party.
The bill is up for renewal and, demanding as the first-term battle was for Bush, this go-round looks
worse. Many Republicans are no longer on board Special interest groups are forming unlikely alliances
to torpedo the reauthorization.
For Bush, the stakes are high. The bill is a signature initiative and so far he has no other major
domestic policy accomplishments in his second term.
"We often say we passed the very best lawwe could five years ago, or five md a half years ago, but
certainly we can make some improvements based on what were learned," said Education Secretary
Margaret Spellings, who along with first lady Laura Bush is leading the renewal campaign.
Tides have shittedThe law, which stresses testing and accountability, set a goal of math and reading
proficiency for all students by 2014. Proposed enhancements include more finding and tougher
standards.
Critics claim it restricts educators and forces schools to teach to the test. Supporters contend the law
has forced public schools to perform better and is narrowing the achievement gap between Anglo and
minority students.
The 2001 bill passed 381-41 in the House and 87-10 in the Senate.
Butwith time to see the law in action and Bush less politically powerrul, the tides have shifted.
More than 60 House Republicans have co-sponsored a bill by Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., that would
allow states to exempt themselves from the law. A similar bill in the Senate is gathering strength.
In all, more than 100 bills have been introduced that would keep, change or abolish No Child Left
Behind.
Outside forces also play a role. Largely Democratic teachers unions, which strongly oppose the law,
are aligned with conservative Republicans such as Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who would like to shift
education back to local control.
Advocates for reauthorizing the law include business groups and civil rights organizations.
Lobbying has begunHow determined is the White House to overcome the dissenters and get the law
rene~d?
Laura Bush, the administration’s most popular member, is already lobbying Congress on behalf of the
bill.
"The test isnt really punitive, it’s not to punish people," the first lady said this week. "It’s just to find out
what the problems are. It’s like, you wouldn’t go to your doctor and say, ’Tell me what’s wrong with me
bt~ you cant run any tests.’ The outcry against the tests, to me, just seems really silly."

06/05/2008
Support C~ows For Teacher Bonuses (W[~)age ] 0:37 Page 2 of 2

As part of their campaign, Bush and Spellings discussed the education bill in a rare, invitation-only
briefing this week with female ~Nhite House reporters. And Spellings is on a Ix~s tour of the Midwest,
highlighting back-to-school issues and the No CNId Left Behind debate.
At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, she sang a chorus of Stevie Wonder’s Signed, Sealed,
Delivered --an anthem, perhaps, for the White House’s hopes on the bill.

06/05/2008
SuiYport Ga’ows For Teacher Bonuses (W~)age ] 038 Page 1 of 2

Nonresponsive L
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 20, 2007 8:23 AM
To; Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers,
Sarah; @ibble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; rvlacGuidwin,
Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend
L.; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy;
Talbert, Kent; Ten’ell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez;
Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Ohio Clips (3)

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings Pushes No Child Left Behind (CLPD)

By Scott Stephens, Plain Dealer Reporter
The Cleveland Plain De_aler, September 20, 2007
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings’ big yellow school bus navigated its way through
Cleveland’s orange construction barrels and Indians game traffic Wednesday without so much as a
bump or a scrape.
Spellings can only hope the renewal of No Child Left Behind, the much-touted federal education reform
act she helped create, sees as smooth a voyage through Congress.
Spellings, a Iongtime confidante of President Bush and one of the chief architects of the 2001 bill, has
been making the rounds to build public support for reauthorization of the law, often viewed as the
cornerstone of the administration’s domestic policy.
She has been sharply critical of a draft proposal circulated by influential House Democrats and
Republicans that would take many suburban schools ofrthe hook if they raise achievement for most
students but miss academic targets for a few groups of children.
Others have criticized the law for being too focused on standardized testing, which they say penalized
high-poverty districts such as Cleveland.
"I’d like to see changes, too, but I don’t support watering down accountability," Spellings said during an
hourlong stop at the 5@-pupil Watterson Lake School in the Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood. "This is
not some pie-eyed, wild dream. This is something we can and must do."
It is something that has been largely accomplished at Watterson Lake. Last year, about 85 percent of
the school’s sixth-graders read at grade level. There was virtually no difference between the
performance of white and black children at the school.
Spellings, Cleveland schools Chief Executive Eugene Sanders and Principal Caren Geissinger walked
through the school and greeted children and teachers.
They helped Jackie Glenn’s sixth-graders with reading, worked with Mary Beth Leifner’s seventh-
graders on vocabulary, and helped David Roth’s kindergartners fashion a response to the Big Bad Wolf
after he blew the Three Little Pigs’ house down.
From there it was to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, where Spellings continued to beat
the drum for No Child Lett Behind and even belted out a rendition of the Stevie Wonder hit "Signed,
Sealed Delivered" - a reference to her faith that the law will be renewed.
She finished the day at an invitation-only "town hall" gathering at Collinwood High School, where she
fielded questions from a mostly friendly audience of about 150 parents, students and teachers.
Her next stop is Dayton, followed by Cincinnati and Indianapolis.
"No Child Left Behind works," Spellings declared. "It’s been a true game-changer in American
education."
But not everyone in the audience embraced those changes.

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Support Cnows For Teacher Bonuses (w[~)age ] 039 Page 2 of 2

"Testing, punishment, sanctions -it’s very unjust," said Jan Resseger of the United Church of Christ,
one of 140 groups seeking dramatic changes in the law. "And it doesn,t provide the funding to help
districts like Cleveland."
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
sstephens@plaind.com, 216-999-4827
Nation’s Top Educator Is In Cleveland (WKYC)
By Kim Wheeler
WKYC-TV Cleveland, Ohio, September 19, 2007
WATCH Town Hall meeting at 6 p.m.
CLEVELAND -- The U.S. Secretary of Education is visiting the Cleveland School District Wednesday
and will hold a National Town Meeting.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is in town in support of President Bush’s "No Child Left Behind
Act."
Secretary Spellings toured Watterson Lake School on the west side Wednesday afternoon.
Ninety-three percent of 3rd graders passed the math achievement test--a 30 point increase.
Many parents and educators feel, "No Child Left Behind" focuses too much on testing and doesn’t
include enough federal funding.
At 6:00 p.m., Dr. Sanders and Secretary Spellings will participate in a town hall meeting with parents
and school leaders to get input on methods to strengthen education in the United States. The
discussion will take place at Collinweod High School.
Education Reporter Kim Wheeler will help moderate the town hall event that will be broadcast live and
you can watch it at wkyc.com
Secretary Of Education’s Meeting Limited (CINE)
The Cincinnati Enquirer, September 20, 2007
U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings is expected to have a "town hall" meeting at Withrow
University High School this afternoon, but only part of the town is invited.
Because of limited space at Withrow, ~hat had been billed as a forum for parents will include only
about 100 people, Cincinnati Public officials said. Only parents, staff and community members who~’e
received invitations can attend Spellings’ 2 p.m. presentation, Janet Walsh, district spokeswoman, said.
Spellings is expected to discuss the FAFSA4Caster, a tool launched this spring to help families plan for
college financing.
Spellings’ speech is expected to follow a luncheon with members of the Cincinnati Business
Committee. There, Spellings is expected to answer questions about No Child Left Behind, the group of
federal education laws that Congress is considering reshaping.
The luncheon is not open to the public.

06/05/2008
 Support G~’ows For Teacher Bonuses (W~)age ] 040 Page 1 of 2

Nonresponsiv
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 20, 2007 8:23 AM
To: Anderson, Chdsty; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Ken’i; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers,
Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin,
Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private - Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend
L.; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy;
Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez;
Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Pelosi ’fully supportive’ of Miller’s efforts (Education Daily)

Pelosi ’fully supportive’ of Miller’s efforts (Education Daily)

By Frank Wolfe
Education Daily, September 20, 2007
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told Education Daily®that House Education and Labor
Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., is making the necessary changes to reform NCLB without
subverting the accountability measures in the original law, which Congress passed in 2001.
"I’m fully supportive of what Chairman Miller is doing, and I hope that we can maintain the momentum
to get it passed because I think it’s very important," Pelosi responded this week when asked to
comment on the committee’s discussion drY.
"NCLB was bipartism and received the support of many of us. As I traveled the country, people had
some concerns about its implementation. Chairman Miller listened in Washington. He listened across
the country and addressed the concerns without gutting the bill. I’m very proud of that work."
Congressional sources said a markup by the House committee may begin in the next several weeks, as
the committee staff compiles reactions from interest groups on the discussion dratt.
Last month in Boston, Pelosi told the National Conference of State Legislatures 2007 legislative summit
that Miller had listened to the public during a series of field hearings. She said the NCLB bill up for
reauthorization would be "so different.., that we are thinking about changing its name." Pelosi also
vowed the new bill would be fully funded.
This week, Pelosi and Miller suggested "multiple measures" would be part of a final bill, which House
and Senate sources expect to emerge from a conference committee before the end of the year.
"1 believe this bill addresses some of those concerns [about testing] by expanding how we measure
progress," Pelosi said of the discussion drNt. "But on the other hand, we want to see progress. We
want these children to be well served."
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions
Committee, said last week that he is open to a ~scussion of multiple measues, and the key issue will
be which measures to use and how to weigh them. Graduation rates and Advanced Placement courses
appear to be two of the top measures under discussion in the Senate committee.
Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., ranking member of the committee, told Education Daily®this week that he
and Kennedy have had "great meetings" with their House counterparts "in conjunction with" Education
Secretary Margaret Spellings, President Bush, and First Lady Laura Bush. Enzi expects Congress to
send a reauthorization bill to the White House for signature before the end ofthe year.
A bigger worry, Enzi said, is the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, which expired in 2003 but
has been extended by Congress three times. The recently passed College Cost Reduction and Access
Act is just a "small piece" of higher education and relies on reauthorization ofthe Higher Education Act
to work, Enzi said.
"We put a Band-Aid on higher education, but we need to cure the patient," he said. The Senate passed

06/05/2008
Support Ca’ows For Teacher Bonuses (W~)ag Page 2 of 2

its version of the reatthorization on a vote of 95 to 0, but Miller wants to pursue his own version of
reauthorization in the House.
"It shouldn’t be real difficult for the House to tinish up that portion, and that portion’s kind o1’ what’s
holding up No Child LetI Behind on this side," Enzi said.

06/05/2008
Support Ga’ows For Teacher Bonuses (W[~)ag@ ] 042 Page 1 of t 1

lNonresponsivI
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 19, 2007 8:19 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerti; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers,
Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin,
Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend
L.; rvlesecar, Doug; MorN, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy;
Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez;
Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Broad Pdze Clips (14)

NYC Public Schools Win Education Pdze (USAT)

By Bdttany Levine
USA Today, September 19, 2007
The NewYork City public schools won the largest education pdze in the country Tuesday, a $500,000
award that will fund scholarships for graduating seniors.
The Broad Prize for Urban Education honors large urban school districts that demonstrate the greatest
performance and improvement in student achievement while reducing achievement gaps plaguing poor
and minority students.
The four other finalists also received a portion of the annual $1 million prize ~yen by the Eli and Edythe
Broad Foundation. Bridgeport (Conn.) Public Schools, Long Beach (Calif.) Unitied School District,
Miami-Dade County Public Schools and the Northern Independent School District in San Antonio each
received $125,000.
The NewYork City Department of Education was honored for greater overall performance, greater
overall improvement and greater success at closing achievement gaps.
For example, New York City has a larger percentage of low-income students than the state average,
but the department’s low-income students achieved higher average proficiency rates than their
statewide counterparts in elementary and middle school math last year, according to Broad Pdze
statistics.
In high school math, the Hispanic-white achievement gap closed by 14% and the African-American-
white gap closed by 13% between 2003 and 2006.
"If it can be done in New York City, it can be done anywhere," Eli Broad said in prepared remarks.
Broad is a business mogul turned philanthropist who founded the Broad Prize in 2002.
New York City has been a finalist for the Broad Pdze the past two years, but this is the first time the
school system won. More than 70% of the district’s 1 million students are African-American or Hispanic,
and 75% are eligible for free or discounted lunches, Broad Pdze statistics show.
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings annomced the winner with Broad at a ceremony at the
Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. She said in a release, "With the help of strong, innovative
leadership, Broad Pdze school districts are proving that if we raise our expectations, our children will
dse to the challenge"
A panel of nationally prominent leaders from business, industry, government and public service sectors
chose the winner.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said he wants to be held accountable for his education record
above anything else. In his first term, he put control of the school system under mayoral authority and
has been in charge for nearly seven years.
The city’s education system is hardly perfect. While the overall graduation rate is inching upward,
roughly half of NewYork City high school students do not graduate in four years.

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New York Schools Win Award For Improvement (NYT)

By Jennifer Medina
The NewYork limes, September 19, 2007
New York City’s public school system, the largest in the country, yesterday won the Broad Prize, given
each year to an urban school district that has made great improvements in student achievement,
particularly in closing gaps between white and minority students.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who took control of the schools in 2002 and has made education a
cornerstone of his time in office, accepted the avcard yesterday in Washington along with Schools
Chancellor Joel I. Klein.
The two were flanked by high-ranking officials from both parties, including Education Secretary
Margaret Spellings and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California. The prize is awarded
each year by Eli Broad, a Los Angeles philanthropist and head of the Broad Foundation, which works to
improve large school districts nationwide.
"1 guess three times is the charm," said Mayor Bloomberg, who had been striving for this prize since its
inception in 2002. The city was a finalist the past two years.
Atler the ceremony, Mr. Klein said many cities saw New York as a model. "For so long in American
education it has been stuck and stymied," he said. "Under the mayor’s efforts, we’ve changed that."
Although the prize will give the city a boost of attention, it is not quieting critics of the mayor and Mr.
Klein. Before the award was announced, dozens of parents signed a letter to the foundation asking it
not to give the prize to New York. The letter said that the administration was "scornful" about parents’
concerns.
Since 2000, the Broad Foundation has given nearly $15 million to the city’s schools to finance principal
training programs, systems to track student data and other projects. It also gave the teachers’ union $1
million to start a charter school in Brooklyn.
Foundation officials noted that it did not pick the winner, relying instead on a panel of experts, including
two former secretaries of education, Rod PaNe and Richard W. Riley.
In choosing NewYork for the $500,000 prize, the panel noted that the city outperformed other large
urban districts in the state on math and reading tests and showed greater improvement at all grade
levels. Low-income, black and Latino students also showed more improvement than their peers in other
cities in the state, the foundation said.
"The strong leadership by the mayor, the chancellor and a progressive teachers’ union has allowed a
school system the size of New York City to dramatically improve student achievement in a relatively
short period of time," Mr. Broad said in a statement.
In a show of unity, the mayor and chancellor traveled with a large delegation, including Randi
Weingarten, the president of the city teachers’ union, and Ernest A. Logan, the president of the
principals’ union, who are olen at odds with the mayor.
Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who leads the House education committee,
praised the city for making changes in the schools quickly and being willing to "break a little china to get
ahead."
But back in New York City, David M. Quintana, a Queens parent who was consulted by officials judging
the system, said he was "disappointed" that the dty had received the award.
"They were asking how our voices wore heard," lVlr. Quintana said, "and across the board we told them
that the city didn’t listen to our views."
And Betsy Gotbaum, the city’s public advocate, who has been a vocal critic of Mr. Klein, said the award
ignored many problems. "If we are No. 1 in terms of achievement, it’s pretty sad news for the rest of the
nation," Ms. Gotbaum said in a statement.
Other finalists this yearwere Miami; Long Beach, Calif.; Bridgeport, Conn.; and San Antonio.
Diana Jean Schemo contributed reporting from Washington.
City Wins Top Urban Education Award (NYSUN)

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 Support Gro~vs For Teacher Bonuses (W~)aGe ~ 044 Page 3 of 11

By Elizabeth Green
New York Sun, September 19, 2007
New York City has won the nation’s most presti~ous pdze for urban education, known as the Broad
Pdze.
The announcement by the Broad Foundation is expected at noon today in Washington, D.C. Mayor
Bloomberg, the city schools chancellor, Joel Klein, and the president of the city teachers union, Randi
Weingarten, are scheduled to attend the announcement, spokesmen for the leaders said.
The prize was estal:tished in 2002 by the Los Angeles philanthropist Eli Broad to honor urban school
systems that narrowgaps between racial groups and boost the performance of poor students. It relies
heavily on test score data to determine which school systems are named finalists.
A member of the prize’s jury told The NewYork Sun that he favored the city above the four other
finalists because of its sheer size --with 1.1 million students and 1,450 schools, the public school
system here is the largest in the nation -- and its progress in closing the racial achievement gap.
"New York City’s got a terrific story to tell and I was very impressed with the rate of progress that’s been
made," the jurist said. "It’s a tribute to everyone who’s worked on it. The kids of NewYork are the real
winners."
He said votes had been tallied several weeks ago to decide which of tire finalist cities would win the
prize. The jury member asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak in advance of
today’s announcement.
This is NewYork City’s third consecutive year as a finalist.
When Mr. Broad offered his prize to the Long Beach, California, school district in 2003, he invited Mr.
Klein, who had just been named schools chancellor, to attend the announcement. NewYork City was
not nominated for the prize, but Mr. Broad challenged Mr. Klein to change that in coming years.
Mr. Klein reportedly said, "1 hope you hear the footprints, because these are big footprints coming up
behind you."
In the years since, Mr. Broad has been a vocal proponent and a financial supporter of Messrs.
Bloomberg and Klein’s reorganization of the school system.
The winner of the Broad Prize receives $500,000 in scholarships for graduating seniors.
CITY SCHOOLS AT HEAD OF THE CLASS (NYPOST)
By Charles Hurt And Yoav Gonen
The New York Pos!, September 19, 2007
WASHINGTON -The New York City school system won the nation’s top prize in public education
yesterday for greatest improvement in urban teaching.
The award- which US. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings called the Oscars of public education -
comes with $500,000 in college scholarships for New York high-school grad[Lares. "If it can be done in
New York City, it can be done anywhere," said Eli Broad, who with his wife established the Broad
Foundation to spur innovations and improvements in large city schools.
Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and Mayor Bloomberg accepted the award at the Library of Congress.
"While it hasn’t always been all sweet and nice, we have all pulled together," Klein said.
"1 have never been more privileged to serve with a group of people who are as committed, as talented,
and as uncompromising about changing the face of public education," he said.
Bloomberg shined credit to Klein and others, joking that his biggest contribution to education was as a
middling student who "made the top half of the class possible."
The four other finalist school districts - Bridgeport, Conn., Long Beach, Calif., Miami-Dade County, Fla.,
and San Antonio- each won $125,000 in scholarships.
A panel selected the finalists out of 100 districts, based on data compiled and analyzed by MPR
Associates Inc., a national education-research consulting firm.
The Broad Foundation said NewYork City, the nation’s largest district with 1,450 schools, 80,000
teachers and an annual budget of $17 billion, stood out for several reasons.
On reading and math in all grades in 2006, it outperformed other districts in the state that serve

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students at similar income levels, according to Broad methodology.

The city’s poor students and its black and Hispanic pupils also outperformed their peers in comparable
districts. The student body is 39 percent Hispanic, 32 percent black, 14 percent white and 13 percent
Asian.
New York was also heralded for progress it has shown in closing the achievement gap for Hispanic
children in high-school and elementary reading and math, compared with whites. More black and
Hispanic children are also taking the SAT exam, the foundation noted.
To choose the winner, teams visited each finalist district last spring to interview administrators, observe
classrooms and conduct focus groups with teachers and parents. Those research teams also talked to
community leaders and union representatives.
A nonpartisan jury of nine people from government, business, education and public service then
reviewed the performance data and the information from site visits.
NYC Wins Top Public Education Award (AP)
By Sara Kugler
AP, September 19, 2007
NEW YORK (AP)--The city’s school system, taken over about five years ago by Mayor Michael
Bloomberg, has won the country’s top prize for ~rban school districts for its student improvement and
success reducing achievement gaps between rich and poor, and minorities and whites.
New York City’s system --with 1 million students the nation’s largest- was awarded half of the $1
million Broad Prize for Public Education, handed out annually by The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation.
Graduating high school seniors will get the money in scholarships.
Eli Broad (pronounced "brode") said in a news release that NewYork is "a model of successful urban
school district reform." U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings joined the philanthropist in
Washington on Tuesday for the announcement.
The four other finalist school districts each won $125, 000 in scholarships. They are in Bridgeport,
Conn., Long Beach, Calif., Miami-Dade County, Fla., and San Antonio.
Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, who yeas in Washington for the event, agreed with critics that New
York’s system has a long way to go on graduatim rates and other performance issues, but said
important progress has been made.
"We’re privileged to have won," Klein said. "Obviously we have a lot of work ahead of us and we intend
to do the hard work .... At the same time, I think this is a moment to celebrata"
In his first term, Bloomberg wrestled away control of the school system from the now-defunct Board of
Education and picked Klein, a former federal prosecutor, as chancellor.
The Broad Foundation said NewYork City, with its 1,450 schools, 80,000 teachers and annual budget
of $17 billion, stood out for several reasons. On reading and math in all grades in 2006, it outperformed
other districts in the state that serve students at similar income levels, accorctng to Broad methodology.
The city’s poor students and its black and Hispanic pupils also outperformed their peers in comparable
districts. The studert body is 39 percent Hispanic, 32 percent black, 14 percent white and 13 percent
Asian.
New York was also heralded for progress it has shown in closing the achievement gap for Hispanic
children in high school and elementary reading and math, compared with whites. More black and
Hispanic children are also taking the SAT exam, the foundation noted.
"tf it can be done in New York City, it can be done anywhere," Broad said in a news release. "The
strong leadership by the mayor, the chancellor and a progressive teachers union has allowed a school
system the size of New York City to dramatically improve student achievement in a relatively short
period of time."
The changes and modest gains have won Bloomberg national attention -- nunerous mayors of other
big cities have sought his advice on school reform, and he has been trumpeting the achievements all
over the country, otten sounding like a presidential candidate.
While the overall graduation rate is inching upward, still roughly half of New York City high school

06/05/2008
Support Grows For Teacher Bonuses (W~P) Page 5 of 11
~age 1046

students do not graduate in four years.

"New York City still maintains dismally low graduation rates, especially for black and Latino students,
and the Department of Education has failed to engage parents," said Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum,
a vocal critic of Bloomberg’s reforms. "If we are No. 1 in terms of achievement, it’s pretty sad news for
the rest of the nation."
Klein acknowledged that an entire generation of students may pass through the system before gains
reach acceptable heights.
"It’s a mixed message -- we’ve made real progress, as have some others, but the road ahead is very
long and it’s going to take the kind of leadership that Mayor Bloomberg provides," Klein said.
The school year that began earlier this month saw a major reorganization, where the mayor eased his
more centralized system and gave principals more control over their own schools. Also beginning this
year, schools will be given letter grades, a system Bloomberg believes will bring more accountability.
NYC Wins Nation’s Top Public Education Award ONNBC)
WNBC-TV New York New York, September 18, 2007
NEW YORK -- The nation’s largest school system has won the country’s top pdze in public education,
which honors an urban district with the greatest student improvement and most success reducing
achievement gaps anong the poor and minorities.
The NewYork City school system of 1 million students was awarded the largest share of the $1 million
Broad Prize for Public Education, handed out annually by The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. It will
receive $500,000 in college scholarships for graduating high school seniors.
Eli Broad said in a statement that NewYork is "a model of successful urban school district reform."
The four other finalist school districts each won $125,000 in scholarships. They are in Bridgeport,
Conn., Long Beach, Calif., Miami-Dade County, Fla., and San Antonio.
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings was to join philanthropist Broad in Washington Tuesday
for the announcement. Former Secretary of State Colin Powsll and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were
to speak at the event.
New York City had not yet been notified it was the winner, but when asked about the possibility,
Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said in an interviewthat the top prize "shines the spotlight on our work
and does help us continue, puts wind to our back for the additional changes we want to make and the
things we need to do."
A panel selected the finalists out of 100 districts, based on data compiled and analyzed by MPR
Associates, Inc., a national education research consulting firm.
To choose the winner, teams visited each finalist district last spring to interview administrators, observe
classrooms and conduct focus groups with teachers and parents. Those research teams also talked to
community leaders and union representatives.
A non-partisan jury of nine people from government, business, education and public service then
reviewed the performance data and the information from site visits.
The Broad Foundation said NewYork City, with its 1,450 schools, 80,000 teachers and annual budget
of $t 7 billion, stood out for several reasons. On reading and math in all grades in 2006, it outperformed
other districts in the state that serve students at similar income levels, accordng to Broad methodology.
The city’s poor students and its black and Hispanic pupils also outperformed their peers in comparable
districts. The student body is 39 percent Hispanic, 32 percent black, 14 percent white and 13 percent
Asian.
New York was also heralded for progress it has shown in closing the achievement gap for Hispanic
children in high school and elementary reading and math, compared with whites. More black and
Hispanic children are also taking the SAT exam, the foundation noted.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said wants to be held accountable for his education record
above anything else. In his first term, he wrestled away control of the school system, putting it under
mayoral authority, and has been in charge for neady seven years.
The city’s education system is hardly perfect. While the overall graduation rate is inching upward, still

06/05/2008
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roughly half of NewYork City high school students do not graduate in four years.
"New York City still maintains dismally low graduation rates, especially for black and Latino students,
and the Department of Education has failed to engage parents," said Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum,
a vocal critic of Bloomberg’s reforms. "If we are No. 1 in terms of achievement, it’s pretty sad news for
the rest of the nation."
City Schools Recognized For Gains (AI~INY)
By Beth Murtagh
amNewYork, September 19, 2007
WASHINGTON- The New York City Department of Education garnered the "Nobel prize of education"
and $500,000 in college scholarships Tuesday for narrowing the racial achievement gap and boosting
overall performance.
"1 think this is a real tribute to the work teachers and principals have done in moving this city fonNard,"
Chancellor Joel Klein said of the Broad Prize for Urban Education. He accepted the award from
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings at a Library of Congress ceremony.
"If it can be done in New York City, it can be done anywhere," billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad said in
a statement. ’q-he strong leadership by the mayor, the chancellor and a progressive teachers’ union has
allowed a school system the size of New York City to dramatically improve student achievement in a
relatively short period of time."
The district won for greater performance overall md among minority students, and for reducing the
testing gap between Hispanic and African-American students and white students. In 2006, New York
City students’ reading and math scores for all grades outdid other districts in the state that served
students with similar income levels.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg praised school districts’ "ACE formula" -- shorthand for accountability,
competition and empowerment.
Atter his 2002 appointment, Klein led a massive restructuring of the nation’s largest school system,
confronting what Bloomberg called "institutional inertia."
But receipt of the prize was not celebrated by all.
"New York City still maintains dismally low graduation rates, especially for black and Latino students,
and the Department of Education has failed to engage parents," said Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum,
a critic of Bloomberg’s reforms."
Bloomberg acknowledged in his speech that NewYork City still has "a long way to go," but that he was
proud of the progress so far.
"You don~ do things in a revolutionary way, you do it in an evolutionary way," he said.
Two-time finalist NewYork City won over the school districts from Long Beach, Calif.; San Antonio,
Texas; Bridgeport, Conn.; and Miami-Dade, Fla., which will receive $125,000 each from the Eli and
Edythe Broad Foundation.
NYC Schools Win Education Award (CRAIN)
By Samantha Marshall
Crain’s New York Business, September 19, 2007
The New York City Department of Education has won the $1 million Broad Prize for Urban Education
for 2007. The largest education prize in the country, the Broad Prize is given out to large urban school
districts that demonstrate the greatest overall performance and improvement in student achievement.
The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation also rewards school districts that have closed the performance
gap among poor and minority students. The money goes directly to graduating high school seniors for
college scholarships.
New York won this year because in 2006 the city outperformed other districts in the state in reading and
math at all grade levels. Low-income African-American and Hispanic students also showed greater
improvement than their peers in other state districts.
Between 2003 and 2006 the achievement gap in high school between Hispanic students in the city and

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the state average for white students closed 14 percentage points, while the African-American-white
student achievement gap closed t 3 percentage points. The percentage of students at the most
advanced level of elementary school math also grew 7 percentage points for Hispanic children and 9
percentage points for black children.
"If it can be done in NewYork City, it can be done anywhere," said Eli Broad, the philanthropist who
started the education non-protit. "The strong leadership by the major, the chancellor and a progressive
teachers union has allowed a school system the size of NewYork City to dramatically improve in a
relatively short period of time."
Northside School District Awarded $125,000 In Scholarship Money (SABJ)
San Antonio Business Journal, September 19, 2007
For months, Northside Independent School District officials had been waiting on pins and needles to
~nd out whether the district would win the 2007 national Broad Prize for Urban Education.
However, the wait ended with word Tuesday thatthe honor wen to the NewYork City Department of
Education. U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced the winner at a luncheon at the
Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Public schools in the Big Apple will receive a $500,000 check from the Eli and Edythe Broad
Foundation for winning the 2007 award.
But even though San Antonio’s Northside did not win the big prize, the district will still receive a check
for $125,000 just for being a finalist. The money will be used toward scholarships to graduating seniors.
"Our students are still winners," Superintendent John Folks says, who was in Washington, D.C., for the
awards ceremony. "It’s a tremendous honor to be one of five finalists in the nation and to be recognized
as one of the best school districts in the United States."
The other finalists were: Bridgeport Public Schools in Connectic~l; Long Beach Unified School District
in California; and Miami-Dade County Public Schools.
Northside became a finalist for the award because students outperformed other students in Texas with
similar demographics in reading and math at all grade levels, according to the Broad Foundation.
In addition, Northside’s test scores demonstrated that the achievement gap was narrowing for minority
and low-income students. This is the first time Ncrthside has ever been a fin~ist for the national award.
The Broad Foundation, based in Los Angeles, was established by Edythe and Eli Broad. The
foundation’s mission is to improve urban K-12 public education. Broad founded two Fortune 500
companies, SunAmerica Inc. and KB Home.
Northside ISD Gets $125,000 In Scholarships (SAENTX)
By Gary Martin
San Antonio Express-News, September 19, 2007
WASHINGTON --They came for the brass ring and grabbed runner-up status instead, but Northside
Independent School District educators were feeling good about taking home $125,000 in college
scholarships Tuesday as one of four finalists for the 2007 Broad Prize in Urban Education.
About a dozen Northside administrators and board members were on hand at the Library of Congress,
where the winner --the NewYork City Department of Education -- was announced by Secretary of
Education Margaret Spellings. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Secretary of State Colin Powell
spoke at a luncheon for the honorees.
The $500,000 top prize is given annually to the urban school district that demonstrates the greatest
overall performance and improvement. The prize money is donated by philanthropist Eli Broad, a real
estate baron who has made public education a philanthropic priority. Each of the four tinalist districts
will get $125,000.
"It is really an honor to be nominated," Spellings said. "Everybody is a winner."
She said that, in many cases, Board Prize nominees often outperform their suburban peers, achieving
higher participation rates by minorities taking college admission tests and closing the achievement gap
between ethnic and economic groups.

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Northside, the fourth-largest school district in Texas, has 85,000 students. Hispanics make up 62
percent of the students; Anglos, 26 percent; and African Americans, 8 percent.
One of the fastest-growing districts in Texas, Northside is increasing by 4,000 students each year.
Katie Reed, president of Northside’s board of trustees, said the selection of the district as a finalist was
recognition that "we are doing a great job."
Other finalists were Bridgeport Public Schools in Connecticut, Long Beach Unified School District in
California and Miami-Dade County Public Schools.
U.S. Rep. Charlie Gonzalez, D-San Antonio, said Northside embraced the challenge of educating a
large, diverse student body with innovative programs.
"They were able to get their arms around the challenge," Gonzalez said.
The judges found that African American and Hisl:anic students from Northside outperformed their peers
from other Texas school districts in 2006 in reading and math at all grade levels.
Students at Northside also showed the greatest overall improvement, from 2003 to 2006, of peer Texas
schools across all ethnic and income levels in reading and math.
Participation by Hispanic and African American students taking the standardized test for college
admission also increased for students in Northside during that period.
During a panel discussion, Superintendent John Folks said the most important initiative implemented at
Northside allowed teachers to see and compare data on every student.
Folks also said it was important to get the community and other groups involved in new education
initiatives.
"You have to have strong communication: to your staff, to your community, to everyone involved," Folks
said. "We have to show people and convince people that that is what is going to be best for the kids."
The Education Department will begin notifying students about the scholarships and encouraging them
to apply. Scholarships of $10,000 are available for students attending four-year universities and
colleges. Students applying to two-year schools can receive $2,500.
Bridgeport Public Schools Win Improvement Award (HARTC)
By David Lightman, Washington Bureau Chief
The Hartford Courant September 19, 2007
Bridgeport Public Schools won $125,000 today as a finalist for the Broad Fomdation Prize, which
recognizes the nation’s most improved urban school districts.
The New York City Department of Education won the top $500,000 award, while runners-up included
Bridgeport, Long Beach (Calif.) Unified School District, the Miami-Dade County (Fla.) schools and the
Northside Independent School District in San Antonio.
Bridgeport Superintendent John J. Ramos Sr. said the money will be used for college scholarships. The
district was a finalist last year and used the money to help 14 students.
Ramos was upbeat after the elaborate 90-minute ceremony at the Library of Congress, where the
grand prize was announced by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.
"This is like the Osca’s for public education," she beamed.
Ramos said atterward he was pleased. "We won because we’re here," and Pep. Christopher Shays, R-
4th District, proclaimed, "This is a tremendous boost to the city of Bridgeport."
Eli Broad, foundation founder, said New York was chosen because "if it can be done in New York City,
it can be done anywhere." Among the achievements cited were that, in reading and math at all grade
levels last year, the city outperformed other districts in NewYork state that serve students with similar
income levels.
Bridgeport, with 34 schools and 21,722 students, was lauded for similar success. The system’s
population is z16 percent Hispanic and 42 percent African-American. Ninety-five percent of students are
eligible for free or reduced price school lunches. Among the points cited by the foundation jury, which
consisted of former U.S. secretaries of education, corporate officials and members of Congress:
Using the prize’s methodology, Bridgeport outperformed similar districts in Connecticut in math and
reading at all grade levels.

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The city’s low income, African-American and Hispanic students outperformed their peers in similar
Connecticut districts.
The city showed more improvement than other districts in the state serving stt~dents at similar income
levels in math at all grade levels, and in elementary and middle school reading.
Bridgeport "narrowed the achievement gap between the district’s Hispanic students and the state
average for white students" in reading and math at all grade levels.
City’s Schools Enter Top 5 For Broad Prize (ConnPst)
By Peter Urban
Connecticut Post, September 19, 2007
WASHINGTON --Although NewYork City walked away with the biggest prize, Bridgeport School
Superintendent John Ramos was all smiles Tuesday that his department was a finalist for one of the
most prestigious education awards in the nation.
"We did win because we are here," Ramos said. "There were 100 eligible school systems and that
Bridgeport is a finalist speaks volumes."
Bridgeport was one of tire finalists for the 2007 Broad Prize for Urban Education, a national competition
to reward urban school districts that demonstrate the greatest overall performance and improvement in
student achievemert.
As a finalist, the city’s schools will receive $125,000 from the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation that wilt
go to high school seniors for college scholarship~ Bridgeport was also a finalist last year and divided
the $125,000 prize among 14 deserving students, Ramos said.
Ramos hopes to claim the top spot, which includes a $500,000 scholarship prize, next year.
"We need to continue to build on the work we have done and continue to focus and kick up our
strategic planning," he said. "It’s not winning for the sake of winning but for what it represents."
About 300 people gathered inside the Library of Congress Tuesday for an awards ceremony where
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings congratulated New York City and the four other finalists for
demonstrating that large city school systems can close the achievement gap between the wealthy and
the poor.
"1 love this award because it recognizes that great things can and do happen and are happening in
American education," she said.
Spellings joked thatthe awards ceremony was like the "Oscars, " only withoutthe Hollywood bling.
"1 wish l was dripping with jewels and a fancy dress," she said.
While there were no movie stars, members of Congress lined up to praise the five school systems for
their efforts including Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Ca., and Rep.
Christopher Shays, R-4.
"This is just a tremendous boost for the city of Bridgeport," Shays said.
Bridgeport Mayor John M. Fabrizi also attended the ceremony and was the first to shake NewYork City
Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s hand when the winner was announced.
Fabrizi, who attended Bridgeport public schools and is a former teacher, said that being named a
finalist is a prize in itself.
"We did win. We won national recognition. We won inspiration. We won encouragement. And, we are
winning in the classroom," Fabrizi said.
The three other finalists for the prize were: Long Beach Unified School District in California, Miami-
Dade County Public Schools in Florida, and Northside Independent School District in San Antonio,
Texas.
The five large urban school districts each demonstrated improved student achievement.
The Broad Prize pointed out that Bridgeport outperformed other districts in Connecticut serving
students with similar income levels in reading and math at all grade levels in 2006. Its low-income,
Hispanic and black students also outperformed their peers that year.
The city’s schools also narrowed the achievement gap between Hispanic students and the state
average for white students in reading and math at all grade levels. Bridgeport was also recognized for

06/05/2008
Support Grows For Teacher Bonuses (W[~)ag Page 10 of t 1

engaging the local b.~siness community in the education process.

NewYork Schools Win Broad Prize; Long Beach Is A Finalist (LBPT)
By Kevin Butler
Long Beach Press-Telegram, September 19, 2007
LONG BEACH - The New York City school district has received the 2007 Broad Prize for Urban
Education, beating previous winner and repeat finalist Long Beach Unified School District, it was
announced today.
But LBUSD is not walking away from the contest empty-handed. As a finalist for the award, it will
receive $125, 000 in scholarships for this year’s senior class.
"Congratulations to New York," said LBUSD spokesman Chris Eftychiou. "They join a select group of
school districts, including Long Beach, that are leading the way in public education.
"The good news is that our well-deserving students will receive 125,000 dollars in scholarships, and we
are consistently being recognized as one of America’s best school systems," he added.
The NewYork City Department of Education will receive the $500,000 prize, given to urban school
districts that show the greatest overall performance and improvement in student achievement while
reducing achievement gaps among ethnic and economic groups.
LBUSD, which received the prize in 2003, is the first past winner to again become a finalist in the
awards program, which was started by The Broad Foundation, a Los Angeles-based philanthropic
organization founded by businessman Eli Broad- pronounced "Brode" - and his wife, Edythe.
The LBUSD was among five finalists competing for the award this year. The other finalists will also
each receive $125,000 in scholarship money.
The other finalists were Bridgeport Public Schools in Bridgeport, Conn., Miami-Dade County Public
Schools in Florida and the Northside Independent School District in San Antmio.
LBUSD was judged on its record subsequent to its 2003 win. The district also was a finalist for the
award in 2002.
"The prize is important, bd[ what is more important is that our schools are continuing to improve,"
E~ychiou said.
The LBUSD scholarships will be awarded based on financial need and demonstrated academic
improvement, Eftychiou said.
The Broad Foundation cited several LBUSD accomplishments that led to the district being named a
finalist this year. Among the achievements, according to Broad officials:
In 2006, Long Beach outperformed California districts serving students with similar income levels in
reading and math at all grade levels: Elementary, middle and high school, according to The Broad Prize
methodology.
Low-income, African-American and Hispanic students also outperformed their peers in comparable
California districts in reading and math at all grade levels.
Between 2003 and 2006, Long Beach showed greater improvement than other California districts
serving similar income levels in middle and high school reading and math, according to The Broad
Prize methodology.
The district’s low-income students showed greater improvement than their peers in similar California
districts in math at all grade levels and in middle and high school reading, Broad officials said.
Between 2003 and 2006, Long Beach narrowed the achievement gap between Hispanic and white
students in elementary reading and math at a greater pace than the state as a whole.
Between 2003 and 2006, LBUSD narrowed the achievement gap between African-American students
and their white peers in elementary and middle school reading and in elementary school math. The
improvement ottpaced that of the state as a whole.
The Broad winner was announced at a Washington, D.C., ceremony attended by Long Beach Mayor
Bob Foster, LBUSD Superintendent Chris Steinhauser and other district officials.
Kevin Butler can be reached at kevin.butler@_.presstelegram.com or (562) 499-1308.

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Learning From Long Beach Schools (LAT)

The Los Angeles Times, September 19, 2007
The city’s school district is again recognized as anong the nation’s best. LA. should take note.
Once again, Long Beach Unified School District has been recognized as one of America’s best.
Although NewYork City won the Broad Prize for Urban Education on Tuesday -- a distinction awarded
to the district for demonstrating progress in closing the achievement gap bergen black and Latino
students and whites -- Long Beach, which won the prize in 2003, made history by returning this year as
a top-five finalist.
It did so by improving on its past performance in a way that should be an inspiration for urban school
districts everywhere -- especially a big one just to its north. So what is the "Long Beach Way" that has
educators from Japan to Romania visiting the port city?
* Education trumps politics. Mayor, school board and superintendent stay focused on instruction, and
there is extensive parent, teacher and community participation. Thus, actual work gets accomplished.
Last week, the Long Beach school board meeting lasted ~ minutes. In L.A., it can take that long just
for the board to get through its inspirational "moment."
* Standards for dress, behavior and achievement are in place and upheld. Those reforms, instituted 15
years ago, have freed teachers and administrators to concentrate on the classroom.
* Race is explicitly a part of the district’s ongoing instructional conversation. Supt. Chris Steinhauser,
one of California’s heroic educational leaders, demands that every school close its achievement gap --
including those in which the test scores of white students lag those of black ones.
* New teachers get help. They aren’t just thrown into the classroom to sink or swim -- they go through
two years of training once hired. And they are trained to teach English learners.
* Finally, and perhaps most important, Long Beach has truly ended social promotion. Roughly 1,000
students a year, most of them black or Latino, are held back rather than allo~d to progress to the next
grade. That’s tough medicine that L.A. has been unwilling to take.
The results are enviable. As a result of opening rigorous courses to all -- not just honors students --
African American enrollment in Advanced Placement classes is up 105% the percentage of Latinos in
AP classes is beginning to mirror the racial composition of the district and, every year, an additional
1,000 students pass AP tests.
Long Beach still has a way to go. At the present rate, the gap will close in 2022. But the district shows
no signs of resting on its laurels. Its progress gives all who care about educating all children confidence
that it can be done.

06/05/2008
 Page 1 of 12
Page 1053

lNonresponsiJ.
Neale, Rebecca
Sent: September 22, 2007 8:47 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers,
Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin,
Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private -Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend
L.; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy;
Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; ’Tracy Young’; Tucker, Sara Martinez;
Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara; Simon, Ray; Ridgway, Marcie
Subject: WEEKEND NEWS SUMMARY, 9.22.07

WEEKEND NEWS SUMMARY

9.22.07

1. Columbia U. to Let Iran President Speak (AP)

2. Quick Lod(down After College Shooting (W. Post)
3. Basic Instincts (NYT)
4. Mass. Testing (WSJ)
5. U.S. ed chief visits charter school in Inch/(Indy Star)
6. Q&Awith secretary of education (Indy Star)
7. U.S. schods chief touts No Child Left Behind (AP)
8. U.S. Secretary of Education Wants’No Child Left Behind’ Law Renewed (WISH-TV)

1. Columbia U. to Let Iran President Speak

By AMY WESTFELDr
The Associated Press
Friday, September 21, 2007

NEW YORK -- Columbia University planned Friday to go forward with a speech by Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while the city mobilized securityto protect him from
protests during his New York visit.

Ahmadinejad, who is to arrive in New York on Sunday to address the United Nations
General Assembly, is scheduled to speak at a Columbia question-and-answer forum on
Monday. His request to lay a wreath at the World Trade Center site was denied and
condemned by Sept. 11 family members and politicians.

Several Columbia students _ even some who planned to rally against him _ said they
supported his appearance.

"He’s a leader of a large nation and what he says is important, even if it’s wrong," said
Dmitry Zakharov, 25, a Col umbia U n ivers ity graduate student.

Ahmadinejad has called the Holocaust "a myth" and called for Israel to be "wiped off the

06/05/2008
 Page 1054 Page 2 of 12

map.,’ The White House has said Iran sponsors terrorism and is tryingto develop nuclear
weapons. Columbia canceled a planned visit by the Iranian president last year, citing
security and logistical reasons.

Rallies are planned outside the university building where he was to speak and at the United
Nations, prompting city and state officials to prepare a security detail for him. The city
police and the U.S. Secret Service are charged with protecting the Iranian leader along with
dozens of heads of state arriving for the assembly.

No threats have been called in, police Detective Joseph Cavitolo said Friday.

The Iranian mission has not disclosed Ahmadinejad’s specific itinerary. Ahmadinejad told
CBS’ "60 Minutes" that he would not stop at the World Trade Center site after his request to
lay a wreath at the base of the twin towers was denied.

Leaders voiced mixed opinions about his Columbia appearance.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he wouldn’t go listen to him. "1 think he’s said enough that I
find disgusting and despicable," he said.

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, said in a statement that "anyone who
supports terror, pledges to destroy a sovereign nation (Israel), punishes by death anyone
who ’insults’ religion ... denies the Holocaust and thumbs his nose at the international
community, has no legitimate role to play at a university."

The governor took a different approach.

"His comments defy logic, history and reason," Gov. Eliot Spitzer said. "He is someone
whose views we scorn. But that said, he is here in the state and will be protected by the
NYPD and state police and everyone else."

2. Quick Lockdown After College Shooting

Delaware State Students From D.C. Hurt in First Such Incident Since Va. Tech Case
By Daniel de Vise and Susan Kinzie
The Washington Post
Saturday, September 22, 2007; B01

DOVER, Del., Sept. 21 -- A fight over a card game escalated into a shooting Friday at
Delaware State University that left two 17-year-old students from the District injured and
prompted authorities to shut down the campus.

The vi.ctims were Shalita Middleton and Nathaniel Pugh, a D.C. schools spokesman said.
Middleton, who was a cheerleader at Woodrow Wilson High School, was shot twice in the
stomach and was in a hospital in serious condition. Pugh, who attended Dunbar High
School, according to the spokesman, John Stokes, was shot in the leg and ankle. The dispute
arose at a game night Tuesday, students said.

06/05/2008
 Page 1055 Page 3 of 12

It was the country’s first campus shooting since a gunman killed 32 people at Virginia Tech
in April, and the university’s response showed how much that day has saturated campus
life. Less than an hour after the police received a call about the shooting around I a.m.,
administrators met and sent warnings by flier, Web site and phone and in person, knocking
on doors in dorms. The lesson they learned from Virginia Tech, university spokesman Carlos
Holmes said, was: "Don’t wait."

Many students said their first thought was of Virginia Tech, of a gunman on a rampage. But
the case was quite different: It happened at night and did not appear to be a random
shooting.

"This was not an act of terrorism," said the campus’s police chief, James Overton. "This was
not a crazed gunman who found his way onto campus ....This was a Delaware State
student who caused this action."

Students remained locked in their dorm rooms for much of the day Friday, with classes
canceled, nonessential employees told to stay home and access to the historically black
university restricted. Of the 3,700 students, 1,200 live on campus.

By Friday evening, two students identified by the police as "persons of interest" had been
taken into custody. Still, officials said classes would be canceled Saturday.

Darryl Salley, a freshman from Washington who has been friends with Middleton since
childhood, said the fight began after a game of Spades.

Police said the shooting happened after a group of eight to 10 students left the Village Cafe,
a dining hall on the campus, shortly before i a.m. Four to six shots were fired at the Campus
Mall, a pedestrian area, Overton said.

Ryan Robinson, a freshman from Bear, Del., had climbed into bed after writing a paper
when he heard three gunshots. "Three seconds later" officers were there, he said, and he
felt safe enough to peer out the window. "You just saw everybody running to their dorms,
trying to get out ofthe way ....Maybe 150 people were outside trying to see what was
going on."

In the chaos, he saw Pugh on the ground. He saw students pick Pugh up and carry him to a
dormitory. "1 just wanted to stay low," Robinson said, "get out of the way."

Minutes after the shooting, he heard a knock at the door. He immediately thought of the
shootings at Virginia Tech, and he refused to open the door until he learned that the person
outside was his hall adviser.

Salley was in the cafe when the shooting happened. He came out to find his friend on the
ground. "They had Shalita on the floor, and my friend Fats was holding her," he said. "She
was just laying there."

He said other students carried Pugh to Evers Hall. "After that, the ambulance came to get

06/05/2008
 Page 1056 Page 4 of 12

[Pugh] and a helicopter came and got Shalita. And then they told everybody to go back to
the dorm."

Middleton was taken to Christiana Hospital in Newark, Del., with serious wounds. "They
could potentially be life-threatening," Holmes, the university spokesman, said.

Carolyn Dowdte, a neighbor of Middleton’s mother, said she had talked with her several
times yesterday and was told about Middleton’s condition and surgeries.

At Wilson High on Friday, the school psychologist consoled members of the cheerleading
squad. Sharron Pittman-Brice, the head cheerleading coach, said tha~ when Middle, on tried
out, "1’11 never forget, she came to me and said, Tm Shalita Middleton, and I’m representing
thebig girls.’ That became her nickname. We called her BG for big girl .... She was the best.
She had all the energy inthe world."

Middle, on was an outgoing student who was intent on attending Delaware State, said
Ravyn Hall, an adviser with the nonprofit D.C. College Access Program. "She’s a fighter, and
when she has the willpower, she can’t be stopped. I just pray that she pulls through," Hall
said.

Pugh was taken to Kent General Hospital in Dover.

Salley said the two wounded students are friends. "Everybody knows who did the shooting.
But nobody told .... Depending on where you come from, it’s not the right thing to do," he
said.

This was "students against students," said Allen L. Sessoms, the school’s president.

"This is safer than some of the places they come back to. But they bring some of the
tensions and some of the issues with them to campus ....This is a case of our students
making very poor choices and acting incredibly badly."

Delaware State started the school year in mourning, after four current and incoming
students were shot execution-style at an elementary school in Newark, N.J., in August.

"We’re still not over that shooting in Jersey," said senior Franz Delima, a physics and
engineering major. "We still haven’t gotten over that, and now this thing happens."

He said he was impressed by how quickly the school responded. "That’s one of the mistakes
Virginia Tech made -- they didn’t lock down campus," he said.

In the months since that attack, which brought harsh criticism to Virginia Tech’s
administration for not warning students that a gunman was at large, many college
administrators added crisis alert systems.

Schools revamped Web sites, added security officers and updated emergency plans made
after the Sept. 11 attacks.

06/05/2008
 Page 5 of 12
Page 1057

Students at George Mason, Georgetown, George Washington and Catholic universities and
at the University of Maryland, among other schools, can sign up for cellphone text-message
alerts. Some schools, such as Georgetown and American, have held simulated campus
shootings with city police officers.

Delaware State officials said they used "multiple redundancies" to notify people, but they
did not send either text messages or e-mails to all students, which some students said
would have been the quickest way to notify everyone.

"We can’t assume people are going to read their e-mails at :~ a.m.," Sessoms said. "We went
around and knocked on doors."

3. Basic Instincts
Creative? College Costs Will Test You
By M, P. DUNLEAVEY
The New YorkTimes
September 22, 2007

YOU might be relieved to know that College Savings Month, formerly known as September,
will soon be drawingto a close.

I hate those artificial designations. They’re meant to inspire people to action, but a month
of nudging can become overbearing. I received a news release recently stating that families
needed to be more aggressive in tapping one obvious source of college funding:
grandparents!

Enough already. I am as concerned as any parent. I have a 1-year-old who will be taking
college entrance exams any day now, and the cost of a college education looks scary enough
from here. According to Mark Kantrowitz, the publisher of FinAid.or~ a leading source of
financial aid information, the bill for my son’s four-year education could be four times what
it would be today.

Given the average cost now -- from soup to books to coming home for the holidays, it is
nearly :~50,000 at a public college and more than ~120,000 at a private one, according to the
College Board -- the future is daunting.

So in honor of October, which I’m renaming Let’s Rethink This Month, let’s start to consider
some creative, open-minded college savings strategies.

Balancing the desire for a good education with what’s affordable is a tough calculus, says
Galia Gichon, president of Down-to-Earth Finance, a financial education organization in New
York. "Many people seem to feel they have to provide for their children, often at the
sacrifice of their own savings," Ms. Gichon said.

Parents aren’t the only ones making a sacrifice when families choose a college that’s
desirable but perhaps not affordable. According to FinAid.org, students at public colleges

06/05/2008
 Page 1058 Page 6 of 12

graduate with an average of 5:17,277 in loan debt; for private school graduates, the average
debt load is 528,138.

Ambitious parents, or their children, may argue that a more expensive private education is
worth the money in the long run. The Ivy League halo is well established, but its financial
benefits are not well documented. While completing at least a bachelor’s degree typically
makes a huge difference for your child’s future earning power -- "About 5:1.2 million during
their earningyears," said Mr. Kantrowitz, who based his analysis on Census Bureau data --
it’s unclear whether a private degree confers a similar income boost compared with a public
degree, over the long haul.

Small wonder some parents are pursuing cheaper options.

"Many families still believe that a high price tag gets you more for your money," said Lillian
Imbelli, director of admissions at the Loyola School, a private high school in Manhattan. She
says the best college is one that matches a child’s needs and may not require spen.ding
more.

Her daughter found a good fit at Boston College, a private institution, and her oldest son is a
self-taught chef who works at Chanterelle, a top restaurant in Manhattan. "My youngest
son," she said, "wasn’t sure what he wanted. So we decided that a state school, with a very
solid education, was best. I said, Why pay 550,000 a year when we can pay 520,000?"

"I’m the product of a state university, SUNY Stony Brook," she added, "and I’m very happy
with the education my son is getting."

OTHER parents are investigating hybrid options. Because Jane Benedict, a secretary in East
Falmouth, Mass., couldn’t afford to pay for her oldest son’s college tuition, she said, "He is
doing all his prerequisites at a local community college." He works at a bank, pays his own
tuition and plans to transfer to a state college next year, she added.

One or two years at a community college, which costs on average about 52,100 a year --
and often allows the student to live at home -- can save families a bundle. Some states
even offer "articulation agreements," policies that give community college students who
meet certain criteria guaranteed admission to a four-year state school.

You can even get somewhat creative about saving. Upromise.com is a program that helps
parents save a small percentage of the expenses they charge on various debit, credit or
retail cards; you can now deposit that money into a proper 529 state-sponsored investment
account.

Of course, creativity only gets you so far. Don’t forget to save early and often. Or ca II the
grandparents.

4, Mass. Testing
By GUY DARST
The Wall Street Journal

06/05/2008
 Page 1059 Page 7 of 12

September 22, 2007; Page AIO

BOSTON -- Massachuse{ts Gov. Deval Patrick has produced one surprise after another since
taking office nine months ago. He stunned people by spending 512,000 on office curtains,
by suggesting that union construction workers be asked to find illegal immigrants at job
sites, and by sayingthat the 9/13. terrorist attacks were partly about "the failure of human
beings to understand each other and to learn to love each other."

But his biggest surprise is the scope of a planned overhaul of what is probably the nation’s
best public school system -- a reform effort he calls his "Readiness Project." He has asked for
reports on 66 proposals ranging from making school days longer to droppingtuition in
community colleges. The fear is that he’s about to emasculate testing requirements put in
place more than a decade ago.

It’s not an irrational fear. The governor is strongly supported by labor unions that oppose
the tests, has appointed a testing critic to the Board of Education, and aims to kill school-
district performance audits.

Back in the 1992-93 school year, the Bay State instituted rigorous testing requirements,
including exams 10th-graders must pass in order to graduate from high school.
Massachus~ts students usually do well on the exams of the National Assessment of
Educational Progress. But fourth-graders and eighth-graders in the past two years came in
first, or statistically tied for first, in both English and mathematics on the NAEP. No state had
ever done that.

Many credit the success to the state’s testing regime, the Massachusetts Comprehensive
Assessment System (MCAS), and the reforms that came with it, including money (inflation-
adjusted state aid to local education has doubled since 1993). Unlike the dumbed-down
standards of some states, the MCAS "proficiency" award tracks well with the same NAEP
designation.

A writer for the liberal Washington Monthly said in 2001, when the tests were given for the
first time, "The MCAS, and the reforms that have come with it, may be the best thing to
happen to poor students in a generation in terms of improving the quality of their
education."

Each student gets five chances to pass English and math exams and may continue to try
after leaving school. Eighty-seven percent of the class of 2009 passed both on the first try,
an increase from 84% last year and 68% for the class of 2003. More than two-thirds
achieved a "proficiency" rating. After five tries, 97% pass. Even a majority of dropouts have
passed. The tests are sophisticated: English requires a brief essay; math requires a showing
of the work on some questions for which partial credit is possible.

The anti-testers, however, aren’t happy. "In states throughout the country, student
assessment is done with multiple measures including course work, projects, in-depth study
and grades, along with standardized test scores," two of them wrote earlier this year. Gov.
Patrick insists he supports MCAS as one measure of achievement. In announcing his

06/05/2008
 Page 1060 Page 8 of 12

"Readiness Project" in June, he said, "Being ready means public education that is about the
whole child, not just success on a single standardized test." That’s the kind of language that
can be code for junking standardized tests.

Former State Senate President Tom Birmingham, a Democrat and Rhodes Scholar, is from
Chelsea, Mass., a gritty Boston suburb with schools so bad that they were given to Boston
University to run in the :2980s. He worked with three Republican governors to strengthen
education. He found the governor’s appointment of Ruth Kaplan, an activist and founder of
the Alliance for the Education of the Whole Child, to the Board of Education "troubling."
And he has said that his "understanding of Ruth is that she’s Janey one-note" against MCAS.

James Peyser, chairman of the Board of Education until last year, also says he "worries"
about Ms. Kaplan’s appointment. As does former Board of Education member Rober~a
Schaefer. She fears the governor "is about to gut" the testing requirement by making it just
one of several measuring sticks schools use.

Gov. Patrick has already demonstrated a willingness to bend to union desires. In January,
the ~tate Labor Relations Commission ordered the Boston Teachers Union to back off of a
threat to call a strike. Gov. Patrick’s response was to propose a budget that would zero out
the commission. The legislature funded it anyway.

The legislature, however, went along with his proposal to get rid of another union bugbear,
the Office of Educational Quality and Assessment. The EQA examines the performance of
dozens of school districts across the state each year. And accordingto an analysis of 76 EQA
reports by the Boston-based Pioneer Institute, 44 of those 76 districts had curricula that did
not meet state standards -- their students could have been facing MCAS without havin~
been taught some of the material on the tests. The governor this year recommended
defunding the agency and the legislature agreed, giving it just enough fundin~ to wind up its
work. Ms. Schaefer, calls the move "a mistake." Instead, she says, the agency "should have
been strengthened."

So far, many of the people the governor has turned to help him institute reforms dispute
the idea that the governor will water down standards. One of whom is Paul Reville. He’s a
lecturer at Harvard and in the early 1990s was instrumental in helpingto create MCAS. This
year the 8overnor tapped him to be the new chairman of the state Board of Education. If
the 8overnor did want to dilute MCAS, he said recently, "1 hardly think he would have
chosen me [to be chairman]."

Chris Anderson, executive director of the Massachusetts High Technology Council and a
member of the Board of Education, says the state needs to do better and not view "the 49
[other] states as competitors." Instead, Massachusetts educators need to worry about India
and China.

But the fact that debates over education center on whether the state will backslide is a bad
sign. Massachusetts should be pressing ahead -- closing the achievement gap between
white and minority students, for one thing - not resting on its laurels. The 8overnor wants
reform. But if he wants better schools, he’ll need good testing.

06/05/2008
 Page 9 of 12
Page 1061

Mr. Darst is a retired deputy editorial page editor of the Boston Herald.

5. U.S. ed chief visits charter school in Indy

The Indianapolis Star
By Andy Gammill
September 21, 2007

INDIANAPOLIS -- The U.S. secretary of education visited an Indianapolis charter school and
the city’s children’s museum Friday as part of a Midwest bus tour to promote a federal
accountability law.

Margaret Spellings said the~No Child Left Behind law, which is now upfor renewal, holds
schools accountable while empowering parents and students.

A congressional proposal would allow schools to get credit for tests in subjects other than
math and reading. Supporters of the plan say that would make No Child Left Behind more
flexible.
Spellings says the law can be improved, but cautions against changes that would create
loopholes.
"The law is working," she said. "More kids are performing better since this law passed. We
need to stay the course."

The 2002 law requires annual testing in grades three through eight in math and reading.
Schools that miss yearly goals face consequences, such as having to pay for tutoring or
replace principals.
At the Andrew J. Brown Academy in Indianapolis, Spellings called on Congress to tweak the
five-year-old education accountability legislation and renew it.

Some Indiana school officials believe some schools should not be held to the same
standards, particularly those with high numbers of children who speak English as their
second language or special needs students.
"On special education we need to, you know, advance the state of the art and how we
intervene and how we assess students, but to make the demand for accountability go away
will actually cause that work not to happen," said Spellings.

At the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, Spellings toured exhibits and said science will
help prepare students to be innovators of tomorrow.

Spellings’ three-day bus tour also included stops in Cleveland and Cincinnati. She last visited
Indiana in 2005, when she attended the state’s annual high school summit sponsored by the
Indiana Department of Education.

6. Q&A with secretary of education

No Child Left Behind; its lessons, its future

06/05/2008
 Page 10 of 12
Page 1062

The Indianapolis Star

September 22, 2007

Margaret Spellings, U.S. secretary of education, is responsible for enforcingthe

controversial No Child Left Behind Act, which sets up an accountability system for schools.
Before being appointed secretary, she served as a domestic policy adviser to President Bush
and helped create No Child Left Behind.
Spellings was in Indianapolis on Friday as part of a Midwestern bus tour promoting the
reauthorization of the act, and visited The Children’s Museum.
o,uestion: Are there lessons learned, changes you would like to see in No Child Left Behind?

Answer: Oh yes, we have learned a lot in the 51/2 years. We need todo a better job of
giving our schools credit for the job they were doing. But 51/2 years ago, only a handful of
states were doing annual assessments. Indiana was one of them, I’m proud to say ....

Obviously unions are not very enthusiastic about the idea that we start to pay people who
do the most challenging work and who get results. But you know what? We need to start
thinking about highly effective teachers instead of highly qualified teachers, sothat’s going
to be an important part of the law.

O.: M any schools with low test scores are in urban settings. How do we fix urban schools?

A: It’s going to take a variety of strategies. Obviously the things that are going on at the
school I was at this morning, the charter school, Andrew J. Brown. Charter schools, there’s
great potentiality there. But you know what it’s going to really take is more time and earlier
intervention. That’s what they do at these very successful schools. They work harder; they
go longer. They engage parents and families. It’s not any one thing. I see those things
working all over the country.

We know what we have to do; we just have to have the will to do it and to continue to hold
ourselves accountable for doing it. That’s what’s so important about No Child Left Behind. If
we don’t have that accountability, we reduce the will, the appetite, the motivation to really
do that work.
Q: Has No Child Left Behind sparked changein American schools?
A: You bet. It has been a huge game-changer. I dare say prior to the passage of No Child Left
Behind, people didn’t think about the federal role (in education) at all. There was no
accountability. We just sort of put the money out and hoped for the best .... Now we look
ourselves in the mirror and say we need every kid on grade level by 2014, and that’s just not
too much to ask.

Q: Is it realistic to expect that every single child in the U nited States will pass state tests by
20147

A: Hell yeah, absolutely. There are plenty of legitimate accommodations for kids who are
transitioning. There is i percent of the student population who’s so profoundly disabled
that they shouldn’t be a part of the accountability system.
We have transitional timelines so that kids who are coming intothe school who don’t speak

06/05/2008
 Page 11 of 12
Page 1063

English can get upto speed in their language before we assess them for accountability
purposes. You know, two-thirds of the English-language learners in our country were born in
the United States of America .... So the Congress believes, and 1 certainly do, that it’s not
asking too much for a United States citizen in the end of the third grade to be able to read
on grade level.

O.: Many educators object to No Child Left Behind. Are they the problem, or is there truth to
what they say?

A: Sure, there’s some truth to what they say; that’s why we’re tryingto make improvements
to the law. But I also want to say this: People do have anxiety about this task before us. I
mean 50 percent of our African-American and minority kids are getting out of high school
on time. We ought to have anxiety about that.

And you know change is hard for grown-ups, for all of us. But it’s necessary, and we have
got to pick up the pace if we want to meet this great goal to have every kid on grade level by
2014.

O.. In the campaign, you helped the president work on pronunciation. How does one go
about that?
A: Well, I’ve tried. The one that he struggles with is "nuclear," as I’m sure you are aware.
We’re still working on it.
-- Andy Gammill

7. U.S. schools chief touts No Child Left Behind

Assodated Press
September 21,2007

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) _The U.S. secretary of education visited an Indianapolis charter school
and the city’s children’s museum Friday as part of a Midwest bus tour to promote a federal
accountability law.

Margaret Spellings said the No Child Left Behind law, which is now upfor renewal, holds
schools accountable while empowering parents and students.

A congressional proposal would allow schools to get credit for tests in subjects other than
math and reading. Supporters of the plan say that would make No Child Left Behind more
flexi bl e.

Spellings says the law can be improved, but cautions against changes that would create
loopholes.

"’The law is working," she said. "’More kids are performing better since this law passed. We
need to stay the course."

The 2002 law requires annual testing in grades three through eight in math and reading.
Schools that miss yearly goals face consequences, such as having to pay for tutoring or

06/05/2008
 Page 12 of 12
Page 1064

replace principals.

At the Andrew J. Brown Academy in Indianapolis, Spellings called on Congress to tweak the
five-year,old education accountability legislation and renew it.

Some Indiana school officials believe some schools should not be held to the same
standards, particularly those with high numbers of children who speak English as their
second language or special needs students.

"’On special education we need to, you know, advance the state of the art and how we
intervene and how we assess students, but to make the demand for accountability go away
will actually cause that work not to happen," said Spellings.

At the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, Spellings toured exhibits and said science will
help prepare students to be innovators of tomorrow.

Spellings’ three-day bus tour also included stops in Cleveland and Cincinnati. She last visited
Indiana in 2005, when she attended the state’s annual high school summit sponsored by the
Indiana Department of Education.

8, U.S. Secretary of Education Wants ’No Child Left Behind’ Law Renewed
Sept. 21~ 2007
By Leslie Olsen
WISH-TV News 8 ~i) Noon

INDIANAPOLIS - In Washington, the House and Senate are wrestling with whether to
reauthorize the federal No Child Left Behind law.

In Indianapolis Friday morning, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings called on

Congress to tweakthe five-year old education accountability legislation and renew it.

Some Indiana educators don’t think all schools should be held to the same accountability
standards, especially schools with high numbers of children who speak English as their
second language, and special needs students.

The secretary disagrees.

"On special education we need to, you know, advance the state of the art and how we
intervene and how we assess students, but to make the demand for accountability go away
will actually cause that work not to happen," said Spellings.

Secretary Spellings is finishing a three day bus tour through the Midwest.

Her first Indianapolis stop was the Andrew J. Brown Academy, a charter school which boasts
big test score increase.

06/05/2008
 Page 1065

[Nonresponsi
~rom: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 18, 2007 8:44 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah;
Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug;
Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey;
Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey,
Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, C~thia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Su~t: NCLB Plan Risks ’Slippery Slope’ (EDWEEK)

NCLB Plan Risks ’Slippery Slope’ (EDWEEK)

By Howard P. "Buck" McKeon
Education Week, September 18, 2007
This year’s reauthorization of the No Child Lett Behind Act has extraordinarily high s~akes, and with high stakes comes
heated rhetoric. Atter more than a year of public hearings and private consultation with parents, educators, and experts,
Congress is drawing nearer to introduction of a bill to reauthorize the landmark law. Unfortunately, it seems the closer we come
to introducing a bill, the more our dialogue deteriorates into finger-pointing and a game of"he said, she said."
U.S. Rep. George Miller of California, the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, has offered a thoughtful
Commentary entitled "Ending Accountability Loopholes." His premise is one with which surely no one could argue. A fundamental
principle of NCLB was, and is, its unprecedented commitment to accountability for results. Put another way, the law for the first
time ever demands that in exchange for billions of dollars in federal education spending, schools must show academic progress
for their students.
I strongly agree with Chairman Miller’s assessment that loopholes in the law must be closed, and the issues he identified
are prime candidates for bipartisan reform. However, rather than blaming the U.S. secretary of education, I believe our time
would be better spent focusing on the future of the law, not its past implementation. But even more than that, I strongly disagree
that the solution to our accountability challenges is to close some loopholes while opening others.
The issue of N-size-the minimum number of children needed in a subgroup for that group to be counted in determining
adequate yearly progress, or AYP, under the law-is a valid concern. I agree that reducing the maximum N-size to a reasonable
figure, such as the cap of 30 proposed in the current legislative dratt, is a simple, common-sense solution to ensure that
significant student populations are not excluded from NCLB’s accountability systems.
Chairman Miller also takes exception to the use of "contidence intervals" in calculating student proficiency. Here, too, we
agree that by inserting these mechanisms into their accountability systems, states may intentionally or unintentionally be skirting
genuine accountability and shortchanging their students. These intervals add unnecessary complexity and confusion for schools
and states, not to mention the parents who need good, reliable information about student achievement.
Chairman Miller has proposed a cap on confidence intervals, which he describes as margins of error or ’~ggle room."l
appreciate that proposal, and would advocate closing this loophole completely by eliminating altogether the use of this statistical
subterFuge that could mask the true number of students who are not proficient in reading and mathematics.
Unfortunately, in closing some accountability loopholes, we run the risk of opening new ones through the creation of new
mechanisms for assessing school performance-mechanisms that could lead us down a slippery slope of complexity and
confusion.
Proposals to introduce new metrics for school performance pose a real threat to the laws focus on the fundamentals of
reading and math. They could dilute current accountability structures and divert attention from the most critical areas. These so-
called multiple measures could also greatly increase the number of tests students are required to take. That means increasing
the number of tests teachers are required to administer and s~ates are required to develop, all of which runs counter to the most
common refrains we’ve heard from parents and teachers.
I also have grave concerns about any proposal that would limit the options available to parents of children in
underperforming schools. A hallmark of the No Child Lett Behind law is its commitment to offering parents new options when
their children are in schools that aren’t making progress. This includes the option to transfer to a better-performing public or
charter school or to receive free tutoring, also known as supplemental educational services, or SES. The SES provisions are
 Page 1066
particularly important to students who may have fallen behind in core subject areas. By getting help quickly, students can catch
up. But without the help and support they need, students can fall further behind with each passing academic year that they
remain trapped in underperforming schools.
That is why I have proposed making supplemental services available to students even earlier, atter two years in which a
school does not make AYP. I cannot lend my support to any bill that significantly diminishes existing options for parents. I think
we should be doing more to offer meaningful educational choices, not less.
There’s another area of accountability that I think all too often is left out of the discussion, and that’s the issue of highly
qualified teachers. Too often, we separate the issue of teacher quality from the broader conversation about accountability and
results for students. But research and experience have shown us that one of the single most important factors when it comes to
improving student achievement is the quality of the teachers in the classrooms.
Chairman Miller and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings deserve great credi~ for their willingness to explore
innovative strategies to encourage and reward teachers for their success in improving student achievement. It’s disappointing,
but not surprising, that the major teachers’ unions have lined up in opposition to even the very modest proposals that have been
floated to provide these types of incentives to teachers.
I have long been an advocate of pay-for-performance mechanisms that give teachers the credit they deserve for student
achievement. I have championed the creation of a Teacher Incentive Fund to help states design and implement systems for
rewarding teacher performance. I commend both Chairman ~ller and Secretary Spellings for standing up to the education
establishment on this important issue, and I urge them to work together to include even stronger teacher incentives in the final
legislation. After all, teacher quality and accountability go hand in hand.
The debate over NCLB reauthorization stirs passion in stakeholders of all stripes, and it’s no surprise that critics are
speaking with loud voices. As policymakers, I do not believe we need to join the shouting match. Instead, we can work together
on common-sense reforms that close accountability loopholes without opening new ones; add new options for parents without
taking away existing ones; and adhere to the principles that produced a bipartisan bill in the first place. We have made great
progress by listening to stakeholders and, most recently, releasing a discussion draft and seeking public input. We have not yet
produced legislation that achieves our shared objectives, but with continued cooperation, I believe we can.
U.S. Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon of California is the senior Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee.
 Page 1067

Nonrespons
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 18, 2007 8:43 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah;
Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug;
Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey;
Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey,
Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, C~thia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Education Chief To Visit Thursday (ClNE)

Education Chief To Visit Thursday (CINE)

The Cincinnati Enquirer, September 18, 2007
U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, on a bus tour of the Midwest this ~ek, will stop in Cincinnati Thursday
afternoon to talk to parents seeking ways to pay for college and to business people who have questions about national education
policy.
Spellings is stumping for the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, a group of federal laws that holds public schools to a
standard of 100 percent proficiency in math and reading by 2014. Congress is considering changes to the laws.
Spellings first will speak to business people in an informal lunch session, which will be closed to the news media and the
public, about 12:10 p.m. Details are still being worked out, said C asey Ruberg, a spokeswom an with the U.S. Department of
Education.
Spellings is expected to discuss "the critical role of the business community to drive education reform and ensure students
are prepared for college and the workforce," according to her calendar.
Also Spellings will hold a "town meeting" with parents at Withrow University High at 1:55 p.m. to demonstrate the
FAFSA4Caster, a new tool enabling families planning for college to forecast how much they may be entitled to in financial aid.
Currently only high school seniors can apply for FAFSA financial aid,= but this tool expands access to that information for younger
high school students.
The session is open to the public.
Withrow University High is at 2488 Madison Road in Hyde Park.
 Page 1068

[Nonresponsi
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 18, 2007 8:42 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah;
Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug;
Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg,.Casey;
Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey,
Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: LBJ Naming Clips (3)

Department Of Education Building Renamed In Honor Of LBJ (HC)

By Kathrine Schmidt, Houston Chronicle
Houston Chronicle,, September 18, 2007
WASHINGTON -- As a curtain dropped to reveal a sign showing President Lyndon B. Johnson’s name in front of the U.S.
Department of Education headquarters here today, three generations of the Johnson family celebrated the lasting effects of his
education programs.
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings joined the late president’s daughters, Lynda Bird Johnson Robb and Luci Baines
Johnson, at a ceremony renaming the rectangular building after the Texan, whose tenure included passage of more than 60
education bills.
’qhis is one of the proudest days of our lives," said Robb. She and her sister were dressed in red suits and referred to the
president as "Daddy." "Without exaggeration, these acts revolutionized educa~ion in America on all levels."
The building was renamed thanks to a bipartisan bill sponsored by Texas lawmakers. President Bush signed it into law in
March. It is the ~rst government building here named for the former school teacher.
kathrine.schmidt@chron, com

Education Dept. Names Building After LBJ (KVUE)

KVUE-TV Austin, Texas, September 17, 2007
A former president from Central Texas was again honored in the nation’s capitol Monday.
The U.S. Department of Education Monday morning renamed its building after Lyndon B. Johnson.
U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and President Johnson’s daughters were at
the event.
"It is a very thrilling experience to have the education building named after my father because education didn’t mean
something to my daddy -- it meant everything to my father," said Luci Baines Johnson, daughter. "It was our passport out of
poverty, a man’s greatest hope."
After serving as a school teacher at a poor Mexican-American school in Cotulla, Texas, President Johnson passed 60
education bills during his six-yearterm in Washington.
Most recalled his passion for education and his unwavering vision to make America’s schools better serve underprivileged
children.
Education Building Renamed For LBJ (DMN)
By Todd J. Gillman, The Dallas Morning News Tgillman@dallasnews.com
The Dallas Momin~, September 18, 2007
Ex-president was teacher, pushed through Head Start program
WASHINGTON - LBJ’s daughters and a who’s who of the former president’s aides joined Education Secretary Margaret
Spellings on Monday to dedicate the Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building.
LAWRENCE JACKSON/The Associated PressFrom left: Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas; Rep. Gene Green, D-
Houston; Education Secretary Margaret Spellings; Lynda Johnson Robb; and Luci Baines Johnson on Monday helped rename
the U.S. Education Department building for former President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
With a distinctive "Little Red School House" over the entry, the massive headquarters near the Capitol and the Smithsonian
Air & Space Museum has been known to bureaucrats for years simply as "Federal Building 6 - or, as we insiders call it, FB6," Ms.
 Page 1069
Spellings said. "No one will be shedding any tears on the passing of this building’s previous name .... Whatever you do, do not let
the federal government name your children unless you think ’girl no. 3’ or ’boy no. 1’ has a nice ring to it."
Mr. Johnson’s first job out of college was teaching at a school for poor Mexican-Americans in Cotulla, Texas, and as
president, he liked to recall the experience when he pushed through Head Start and more than 60 other far-reaching education
laws.
"Education didn’t become a department until 1980, but make no mistake, this began with President Johnson’s calling it the
No. 1 business on this nation’s agenda," Ms. Spellings said.
Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who helped lead the effort to rename the building for LBJ, called the naming "a ~tting
tribute to this small town Texas teacher who went on to become known as our ’Education President.’" She also gave a pitch for
Congress to reauthorize President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, which ties school funding to student performance, saying it
builds on Johnson-era progress by boosting standards and accountability.
Ms. Spellings will stump this week in the Midwest for the measure, which critics say puts too high a premium on testing.
Ben Barnes, the former Texas lieutenant governor and an LBJ prot6g6, was among the hundreds of people on hand for the
dedication. First daughters Lynda Johnson Robb and Luci Baines Johnson recalled their father’s devotion to improving schools
and broadening opportunity. They then helped Ms. Spellings unveil a sign with the building’s new name.
Asked afterward whether the Johnson family supports No Child Left Behind, Ms. Robb was diplomatic, veering toward
unenthusiastic: "We want to give an opportunity to all our children to do the best they can... 1 am not going to criticize any
president here today."
 Page 1070

Nonresponsive
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 17, 2007 8:22 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah;
Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug;
Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey;
Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey,
Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, C~thia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Unions Assail Teacher Ideas In NCLB Draf~ (EDWEEK)

Unions Assail Teacher Ideas In NCLB Draft (EDWEEK)

By Alyson Klein And David J Hoff
Education Week, September 17, 2007
Rep. Miller says NEA, AFT had endorsed similar pay proposals.
Washington
The two national teachers’ unions mounted a vigorous lobbying campaign this week to rewrite language linking teacher
bonuses to student test scores and other incentive-pay provisions contained in a dratt bill for reauthorizing the No Child Left
Behind Act.
Members of the National Education Association circulated in the halls of Congress on Sept. 10 while the House Education
and Labor Committee held a six-hour hearing on the panel’s draft of a bill to reauthorize the 5½-year-old education law. At the
hearing, the panel’s Democratic chairman chastised union leaders for backing away from support for an eadier bill that had also
included pay-for- performance language.
The day’s events demonstrated the difficulties lawmakers face in forging a consensus on the fi.~ture of the law. Interest
groups as diverse as teachers’ unions and business leaders disagree on fundamental issues such as teacher pay, student
accour~ability, and other central elements of the law.
In a discussion dratt of the teacher-quali~y provisions released Sept. 6, the House education committee would encourage
districts to experiment with pay-for-performance plans and offer financial incentives to recruit teachers to hard-to-staff schools.
Among other provisions, the draft calls for using student test-score data as one factor in determining whethet teachers are
eligible for bonuses.
’Many of our state [affiliates] and locals are really open to looking at compensation and how compensation is addressed,
but they’re not open to having it mandated to them," Reg Weaver, the president of the NEA, which represents 2.5 million
teachers, told the education committee. "They’re not open to having [federal law] indicate that it should be based on s~udent
performance, when in fact they might not have any control over the students that come to them."
That statement and a similar one by Antonia Cortese, an executive vice president of the American Federation of Teachers,
drew a sharp response from the committee’s chairman. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., said that the unions had endorsed a bill with
similar pay proposals when he and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., introduced it two years ago and again in May. Most of
that bill-called the Teaching Excellence for All Children, or TEACH, Act-were included in he Sept. 6 discussion draft of NCLB’s
Title II.
’You’re both aware that the language in the legislation is the language that NEA and AFT negotiated and accepted and has
promoted and asked members of Congress to support over the last couple of years," Rep. Miller said, after having asked few
questions of the other 43 people to appear before the panel. ’It’s identical to that language."
Both Mr. Weaver and Ms. Cortese said that while their unions support the TEACH Act overall, they’ve long been wary of
the language requiring that performance- based pay be based on students’ test scores.
Ms. Cortese referred to a lel~er the 1.3 million-member AFT sent in 2005 to Rep. Miller regarding the proposed TEACH Act.
’We clearly state that while the AFT is supportive of the overall [TEACH] bill .... we do have a specific concern about its
support [for using] student test scores to evaluate teachers. Our position has never changed," she said.
The NEA has issued similar caveats in letters to the education committee supporting the TEACH Act, Mr.Weaver added.
O~her Issues on Table
The union leaders and other witnesses at the all-day hearing also addressed a myriad of issues facing Congress as it
 Page 1071
works to reauthorize the NCLB law, which is the latest version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Rep. Miller has
said he is aiming for his committee to approve a reauthorization bill this month.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., is working on a NCLB bill that he hopes to introduce by the end of the month, said
Melissa Wagoner, the spokeswoman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Sen. Kennedy is the
chairman of that committee.
The week before the House panel’s hearing, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and several other supporters of the
law were critical of the draft House bill, saying that several of its provisions would make it easier for schools and districts to make
adequate yearly progress-a key measure of success under the law-and wouldn’t hold them accountable for students’
performance in reading and mathematics. The draft would allow states’ accountability plans to consider test scores in other
academic subjects, as well as indicators other than student test scores, such as graduation rates and college- attendance rates,
in determining AYP. ("Spellings T~es Issue With NCLB Dratt," Sept. 12, 2007.)
But the teacher-pay proposals were the most contentious issues discussed during the Sept. 10 hearing.
NEA members from the congressional districts of every member of the House education committee roamed the halls and
talked to members who took breaks from the hearing. Most wore red stickers saying "A Child is More Than a Test Score," the
same slogan that appeared on T-shirts at the NEA’s annual convention in July.
The overall effect of the bill is "a blatant attack on collective bargaining," Dean E. Vogel, the vice president of the California
Teachers Association, an NEA affiliate, said in an interview ot~tside the hearing room. On the day of the hearing, the CTA
launched an online advertising campaign against the House committee’s NCLB draft, targeting Web sites popular among
grassroots Democrats.
’We’re ready in California to go to war," Mr. Vogel said.
A Matter for Bargaining?
In interviews, several Democratic members of the House education committee said that they support the union members’
desire that all teacher-pay plans that might be adopted under NCLB provisions be approved by teachers, either through collective
bargaining or local elections.
’Members [of the committee] are going to be insistent that that needs to be part of it," Rep. Raul M. Grijalva, D-Ariz., said in
an interview. Rep. Grijalva also mentioned that he would like the NCLB bill to include programs to improve middle schools, and
that he would want assurances that programs under the bill would be adequately financed.
Although addressing the concerns of teachers’ union members may win Democratic votes for the NCLB plan, such
accommodations could reduce Republican support.
’Unfortunately, the major teachers’ unions are throwing up roadblocks to even modest efforts at reform," said Alexa
Marrero, a spokeswoman for Rep. Howard P. "Buck’McKeon of California, the committee’s senior GOP member. "Mr. McKeon
would not support their proposal to undermine teacher incentives, and he hopes to work with Mr. Miller to include strong new
performance-pay initiatives in NCLB."
In the hearing, the NEA’s Mr. Weaver and the AFT’s M~ Cortese said that they wouldn’t be opposed to allowing local
affiliates to work with their school districts to include student achievement in pay-for-performance programs. But they say a
federal grant program would infringe on collective bargaining fights if it would require pay-for-performance or other incentive pay
as a condition of receiving the grant.
The NEA and the AFT would like Congress to require that any alternative- pay program be subject to collective bargaining.
The committee’s draft would only require that such programs be developed in consultation with unions.
In districts where collective bargaining by public employees isn’t allowed under state law, districts should have to get 75
percent of their teachers to approve any pay-for-performance programs funded by federal money, the unions say.
The Bush administration supports efforts to gain the endorsement of unions or nonunionized teachers for alternative pay
plans, said Amanda L Farris, the deputy assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education. But it also believes that all
such plans should emphasize student test scores.
"Student achievement always needs to remain one of the key factors for all of us," Ms. Farris said in an interview. "We want
to make sure we don’t lose sight of that."
Local Testing
V~hile the teachers’ unions focused on the pay plans, several staunch supporters of the No Child Left Behind law testified at
last week’s hearing in opposition to the draft bill’s proposal to add new elements to the NCLB accountability system. The current
system centers on achievement in reading and mathematics, the two subjects in which students must be tested annually in
grades 3-8.
The draft of the Title I proposal would allow schools to get partial credit for improving on tests in subjects other than reading
and math, including social studies and science. And the draft would establish a pilot project permitting tip to 15 states to use local
 Page 1072
assessments, in conjunction with state tests, for accountability purposes.
Dianne M. Pich6, the executive director of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, a Washington-based watchdog group,
said the dralt bill’s proposal for a pilot project permitting locally developed assessments would undermine the laws accountability
system.
’We believe this pilot has the potential to set back accountability and the movement for educational equity for years and
perhaps decades," she told the House lawmakers. ’qhese assessments would be developed and scored by teachers and others
at the local district, and then used to decide whether these same adults had done an adequate job teaching kids."
But panel members, including Rep. Miller, noted that the local tests would have to be developed with expert assistance, be
used along with state tests, and be approved by the federal Education Department.
’Nobody’s throwing out the statewide system," the committee chairman said. "It’s a question of whether or not you want to
make an effort to see whether you can construct an assessment system that is more helpful to developing the skills that most
people who rely on this education system tell us they think students are going to need."
Vol. 27, Issue 04, Pages 1,20
Stinting Fast, With An Eye On The Long, Rtm (I~, ~Y~), Page 1 of 1
b’age -~u~,~

Nonresponsive

From: Ditto, Trey

Sent: September 16, 2007 9:49 PM
To: Ditto, Trey; Anderson, Christy; Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith;
Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn, Kristine; Colby, Chad; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill;
Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly;
MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John;
Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth;
Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna;
Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; TracyYoung; Tucker, Sara
Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara; Simon, Ray
Subject: USNews Washington Whispers: It’s Back to School for Secretary ’Starbuck’

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/washington-whispels/h~dex.html

It’s Back to School for Secretary ’Starbuck’

September 16, 2007 12:09 PM ET
Now this is the way to go back to school: Wrap a
supercomfy executive motor coach in yellow to make it
look like a real school bus, grab a Starbucks tall Soy
Misto, and take two field trips, one to the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame and Museum for some karaoke and a second
to shoot rockets at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. A
dremn? Not for Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.
The Bush hipster says that, s exactly what she’s doing this
week in a bid to promote math and science and the
reauthorization of the administration’s teet~aing No Child
Lef~ Behind Act. She calls her tour "Empowering Paents,
Empowering Children," a slogan thal,’ll be painted on the
bus.

The sdence part takes place itt Cleveland, where

Spellings--President Bush’s American Idol fan--will steer
her bus to the rock center to have her vocal vibrations
measured while crooning a tone by her fave, Stevie
Wonder. " ’Sign, Sealed, Delivered’ may be the name of a
song, but i~s also the action Congress needs to take to
reauthofize No Child Lett Behind so all kids can be at JOE CIARDIELL0 FOR USN
grade-level reading and math by 2014," she says. Then it’s
on to Wright-Pat for a math and science lesson in its
Starbase prog~mn, where kids launch water-propelled
rockets. Just like real pilots, pmlicipants get handles, and
the coffee-loving Spellings is to be dubbed "Starbuck."

06/05/2008
Starting Fast, With An Eye On The Long,Run (I~ ~Y~)~, Page 1 of 9
b’age

From: Ditto, Trey

Sent: Septeml~r 16, 2007 11:17 AM
To: Anderson, Chdsty; Anderson, Chdsty; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerd;
Cariello, Dennis; Cohn, Kristine; Colby, Chad; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah;
Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie;
Maddo×, Lauren; Private - Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.;
Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy;
Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez;
Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara; Simon, Ray
Subject: WEEKEND N EWS SUMMARY 09.16.07

WEEKEND NEWS SUMMARY 09.16.07

White Plains Journal News: (Based offa Ledge King story) Story is about 921 letters
Anchorage Daily News on what Sen. Murkowski would do to fix NCLB
National Review Online: (ran in local NY CBS website) Without consensus NCLB will not
be reauthorized
Baltimore Sun op-ed: ’~CLB has flaws, but ehmtges can be made that preserve its basic
goals Of school accountability and student improve~nent."
WaPo: ’~’he Loudoun Coratty School Board has approved a wish list of changes to the No
Child Left Behind Act for Congress to consider when it reauthorizes the law tiffs Fall."

Domination by some student lenders raises conce~s

By FROM STAFF, WIRE REPORTS

College students trying to cover the soming cost of a post-secondary education have more
than 3,000 fedeixlly qualified lenders to choose from - at least in theory.

At 921 colleges, tmiversifies and l~ade schools last year, including at least nine in the Hudson
Valley, a single lender handled the majority of federally backed stadent loans that help pay
for tuition and related expenses.

That has federal officials and student groups concerned that some schools may be improperly
steering bonowers to lenders the schools prefer to use, regmdless of whether it’s the best deal
for the student.

Federal education officials sent letters to the 921 schools June 29, reminding them they’re
baned titan pressming students to choose a specific lender.

"When we see pat~ms that me troubling, we will act on them," U.S. Education Secretary
Margaret Spellings recently told reporters. Such steps could include regular monitoring, fines
and, in the worst cases, re~noval fio~n the federal loan progrmn.

Education officials say the letters weren’t based on any evidence ofvcrongdoing. But probes
by New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo and others earlier this year raised
concerns about the practices by financial aid officers at several schools.

06/05/2008
Stm~ing Fast, With An Eye On The Long,Run (N~ ~Y~,~ Page 2 of 9
~age -luf~

Data obtained by Ga~mett Ne~vs Service under the Fleedom of Information Act shows the
921 schools that received letters me locatedin 46 states and two U.S. tenitories. They range
fi’om well-known state institutions to trade schools that specialize in vocations such as
mtrsing, comnetology and cooking.

A single lender handled evely federally backed student loan at 239 of the schools, mostly
smaller career institutions, according to the data. At another 400 schools, a single lender
handled between 90 percent and 99 percent of student loans.

Sallie Mac, the nation’s largest private provider of federal student loans, topped the list of
dominant lendel~. S allie Mac handled the majority of federal student loans at 209 schools in
2006-07 and lent a total $1.4 billion.

In White Plains, the relationship of Pace University and Sallie Mac came trader scrutiny in
April during the investigation by Cuomo’s once.

"Pace hired Sallie Mac to staff financial aid call centers, and the Sallie Mae employees
wrongNlly identified the~nselves as Pace University en~ployees," read a statement froin
Cuomo’s office.

Pace spokesman Chris Co~3~ said students reaching the call center wele told they had other
choices for loans beside Sallie Mac and the school certified all loa~s regardless of who
originated them. The data obtained by Gaunett News Se~wice shows Pace made 88 percent of
the loans to students directly. The funding for the lomts came tl~ough Sallie Mae, under the
federal School as Lender program, according to Cory.

Co~y said that the call center agreement with Sallie Mac didit’t httt~ students.

"Nobody has ever showed us evidence that students or parents were misled or harmed by this
an’ange~nent," Cory said.

Nevertheless, Pace has changed its call cen~er practices. Since mid-August, Pace has handled
financial aid calls from students internally instead of using S allie Mac, according to Cory.

Pace has signed a code of conduct drafted by the attorney general’s office that prohibits
colleges or their employees fiom receiving anything of value fi’om a lending institution in
exchange for advantages to the lender.

At Mercy College, which operates a cmnpus in Dobbs Feny, 83 percent of the federally
backed student loans were handled by Sallie Mae, according to the info~nation obtained by
Gatmett. Mercy’s Mafionship with Sallie Mac also raised concerns atthe attorney general’s
once.

"Mercy College had tttree prefened lenders and did not always disclose that bon’owers could
choose a company not on the list," Cuomo’s office said in April. "Mercy also contracted with
SaNe Mac to have a call center staffed by Sallie Mac employees who did not identify
themselves as Sallie Mac employees."

Under an April settlement with the attolaey genel~l, Mercy agreed to adopt a code of conduct
for student lending, stop using Sallie Mac as a call center ope~ttor and provide $5,000 to help
fired a consmner education program for students and pments.

06/05/2008
Starting Fast, With An Eye On The Long,Run ~ ~Y~,~ Page 3 of 9
~age

The data obtainedby Gannett also shows that single lenders accounted for a high percentage
oflo~s at other area colleges:

-Citibank accounted for all the federally backed student loans at the Coclnan School of
Nursing at St. John’s Riverside Hospital in Yonkers last year. Data for the ctm’ent year
provided by the school showy that 274 of 341 students have loans through Cifibank.

Jim Foy, president and chief executive officer of St. John’s Riverside Hospital, said
Citibank’s brand nmne and reputation may have attracted students. But he added that students
are never steered to one lender. He said the school’s ptdlosophy is to provide students
information about multiple lenders and let them make the choice.

-At Ne~v York Medical College in Valhalla, Northstar Gum-antee accotmted for 99 percent of
the the federally backed loans. Donna Morimq:y, senior commm~icafions director for the
college, said Nodkstar has proven to be a reliable lender but added that students are not
pressured to choose any loan provider. She said the college has no finandal relationship with
Northstar.

-Citibank accounted for all the the federally backed loans for the nursing program of
Southern Westchester Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or BOCES. Citibank has
proven to be an a~-active choice for students pm~ly because of relatively low interest rates
and a grace period for beginning repayment, according to BOCES. But students also get
info]~ation about loan progiams from other banks, including HSBC, Bank of New York,
Chase, North Fork Bank and Wachovia.

"The students made their own financial decisions," said Evelyn McCo~mack, public
information coordinator at BOCES. "We in no way steered students in one particular
direction."

-The data showed that Citibank accounted for 99 percent of the the federally backed student
loans at Dorthea Hopfer School of Nursing at Mount Vernon Hospital, 87 percent at College
of Westchester in White Plains and 90 percent at Capri Cosmetology Lem~ting Center in
Nanuet. Officials at those schools cottld not be reached for comment.

Not eve~7one agrees that focusing on schools where one lender dominates the loan market is
the best approach. Haley Chitty with the National Association of Student Financial Aid
Administrators calls the strategy "overly simplistic."

He said most schools already recommend at least ttnee lenders, based on such factors as loan
te~ns, borrower benefits provided and customer service. They have developed such lists
because tsandlies asked thegn for help navigating the world of loans, he said.

"Market share is not an indication of the loan terms and benefits that students receive," he
said. "If a school has five lenders on a prefetTed lender list and one lender has the best loan
rates and bon’ower benefits, it would make sense that most students chose that lender."

Education officials said they will visit some of the 921 schools that received letters but
declined to say why.

"An 18-year-old inco~ning freslnnan who has never bon’owed anything before will look at the
(prefecTed) list and assume its the better lender to choose fiom," said Rebecca Thompson,

06/05/2008
Starting Fast, With An Eye On The Long,R~m Page 4 of 9
~’age

legislative director for the United States Student Association, an advocacy group. "Thafs
often not the case. Students are not being educated about their options."

In 2004, students left college with an average $19,200 in loan debt, according to The Project
on Student Debt.

Most lenders handling federal student loans charge the maxi~num 6.8 percent interest rate
allowed trader federal law, said Thompson.

Probes of other schools ~vhere one company dominated student lending fotmd that lenders
had given gifts to school ot~cials in exchange for being placed on preferred lender lists.
Some schools had allowed prefened lenders to stafftheir call centers and refused to ~’ocess
loan applications for students who chose other lenders.

Schools have begun adopting codes of conduct that bar officials from aecepfiug gifts from
lenders. And Congress tins proposed requiting at least th’ee choices on prefen’ed lender lists
and baning scliools from recommending lenders ht exchange for a financial reward.

The changes primmily would affect schools where students choose a plivate lender to
manage their federal loans - about three ofevely fore" schools. At other schools, federal loan
money goes straight to the school without students having to pick a lender.

Rating schools

Sen. ]tJztrkowski is right; federal criteria are flawed

The controversial No Child Left Behind Act is due to expire this yem; and as Congress works
on renewh~g it, U.S. Sen. Lisa Mm’kowski wants to fix one of the lawns more glaring
problenm. No Child Left Betfind uses an unfair and unhelpfid way to judge how well schools
educate childi-en.

Under the law, schools are not judged by what ldnd of academic progress individual students
make ~vhile they are at the school. Instead, schools are judged on a vaT limited snapshot: Do
X percent of students who happen to attend the school on testing day get "proficient" scores
in math and English?

The ratings tal<e no account of holy long a school or a school district has had to educate the
student. The student who recently ttansfen’ed is treated the same as one who has been there
since starting ldndergat~en. Progress is measured by ho~v test scores for this year’s students in
a pm-ticular grade compare to the previous ye~s students in that same grade.

That doesn’t ]nake a lot of sense. It’s a snapshot that co~npares two totally different groups of
students in t~vo different years.

What should ~natter is whether students are making adequate academic progress as they are
educated by a pm-licular school or school district.

That’s called a growth model, ,and that’s ~vhat Sen. Mmkowsld wants to see included in an
updated No Child Left Behind Act. Alaska is one of a handfitl of states that got special
federal pe~fission to include growth of test scores as a school rath~g factor. Sen. Mm’ko~vski
~vants to make sure the option is in place for all states. In talldng to the Fairbanks News-

06/05/2008
Statting Fast, WitliAn Eye On The Long.Run (1~ Page 5 of 9
b’age

Miner last inonth, she said she ~von’t support a bill that doesn’t allow gro~vth models.

Growth models ate allowed in a draft No Child Left Behind bill being considered in the U.S.
Hotlse Education Committee. The draft lets states be more flexible inhow they rate schools --
probably too flexible. The House ~neasm’e has drawn fue for allowing other ways ofraling
school progress besides student test scores, s~lch as graduation rates or college em’ollment.
The critics are fight to worly about alternative ratings that would relieve the pressure to
ensure that all students are learning the basics.

The House version would fix some of the more heavy-handed aspects of No Child Left
Behind. Today, schools have to pass muster in 31 categories, covering many different
subgroups of students, to made "adequate" progress. It’s an all-or-nothing rating. Miss in just
one categoly, mtd the school is made to look like a total failure. To fix that, the dlaft bill
distinguishes between schools where just one or two subgroups of students fail to measure up
and schools where there are wholesale shortco~nings.

No Child Left BeNnd has been useful because it ramps up the pressme on schools and
districts to educate all students. No longer can educators just write offdisadvantaged students
and those ~vho have fallen behind.

But there is also a danger of going too far the other way. Schools can become so focused on
producing the reqttired test scores, they fail to deliver a well-rounded education. There’s a
real risk that more advanced students will not be challenged attd that at, ~nusic and physical
activities will get short shliR.

It does seem that Congress is getting the message: No Child Left Behind needs to set more
helpful and realistic measures of school perfo~xn ance.

BOTTOM LINE: Sen. Murko~vski is on the right track Ixying to fix the No Child Left Behind
Act.

Who’s up? Who’s down

UP Sen. Ted Stevens: What’s tiffs? Green cied for Uncle Ted? Carbon caps? Better light
bulbs? Next he’ll be doing hmch with Deborah Williams.

DOWN Sen. Ted Stevens: Bill Allen says under oath he sent a Veco crew to work on Ted’s
Gird~vood house. Could be big la’ouble for big Ted.

EVEN City’s tax task force: Their work is done, and they recom,nend a broad sales tax,
which needs 60 percent voter approval. Yup, theft work is done.

UP Maggie the elephant: She’s goin’ to Califoruia[ Seventy-five warm acres and ajacuzzi!
About time. Send us a cat’d, old gift.

DOWN Shell: Ninth Circuit says no to Beatffo~t chilling appeal. No wells this year. Dutch oil
heavy~veight disappointed, but they’re still doing better than BP...

DOWN BP: Foul" Nol& Slope fires in a mo,~, but the company says there’s no pattern, and
"at the end of the day, eveiTthing worked as designed." Shoot. you mean BP c~{fics got all
fired up over nothing?

06/05/2008
Starting Fast, With Art Eye On The Long,Run (1~ ~Y~),, Page 6 of 9
~age lu~u

DOWN Anchol,’age school emollment: 500 fewer in K-6. Hey kids, school’s in! Come to
class or the district is out $1 million in state fimds. Remember NMLB -- No Money Left
Behind!

DOWN Hawaiian vacationers: Alaska Airlines buys Hawaiian Vacations. Want to go the
wildwild way? Say ’aloha’ to higher fares.

An Educational Quagmire
Sept. 16, 2007
(National Review Online)
This column was written by Chester E. FinnJr..
With every passing week, the 110th Congress looks less hkely to reauthofze the No Child
Left Behind Act (NCLB), the fate of~vhich will therefore hinge onthe 2008 election. This
contentious law cannot be revamped absent a fairly broad and bipartisan consensus. George
Miller and Nancy Pelosi could conceivably bring a bill before the House and possibly ram it
through on a near-straight party-fine vote (though such a move would provoke more
Denmcratic defections than GOP supporteas), but it would come unstuck in the Senate, ~vhere
it’s essential nowadays to have 60 finn votes for anything controversial. Which this would
sm’ely be.
The ~ruth is, despil~ all the fuss and feathers about NCLB, there’s little agreement on exactly
what ails or what might cure it - which is not to saythere’s a shortage of advice. A five-foot
shelf of books, studies, reports, commission recommendations, etc. is rapidly accumulating.
(I plead guilty to having helped contribute a few inches.) Its very ainplitude attests not only
to the length and complexity of the law, but also to the disputed nature of what, exactly, is
awry in NCLB 1.0 and what should be the essential attributes of version 2.0. Even more
important, underlying all the technical specifics are five immense dilemmas that go to the
heart of the matter.

¯ Is NCLB’s grandgoal itselfnai’ve and unrealistic? Politicians pledge that no child will be
left behind, yet I don’t know a single educator who seriously thinks 100 percent of American
ctfildren can become ’~proficient" (according to any reasonable definition of that term) by
2014 in reading and math. Exemptions have already been made for setously disabled
youngsters. In troth, raising American kids fiom their curwent proficiency level ofso~ne 30
percent to 70 or 80 percent would be a renmrkable, nation-changing achievement, yet I can’t
imagine a lawmaker conceding this. The first thing hurled back at hi~n wonld be, "Which 20
percent of the kids don’t matter to you?"

¯ Is theprogram upside down? My Fordham colleagues and I think NCLB inverted a

fundamental design principle: Congress opted to be tight with regard to means and loose with
regard to ends. It trusts eve~3r state to set its owrt standards, but micro~nanages measttrement
systems and sets rigid sequences for school and district inte~rentions. It would be far better to
promulgate a single national standard and assessment system, and then to Oust states,
districts, and educators to devise their own ~neans of getting there on their own timetables.
But half of Congress will recoil in hoaxor fiom the freedom and flexibility implied therein
while the other half will be put offby unifol~n standards.

Is the govenamental architecttu’e usable for this pttrpose? In LBJ’s day, it made sense for
Uncle S am to distribute his new education dollars via the traditional structures of state
education depm~nents and local school systems. Fore decades later, however, the main focus
of federal policy is altefng the behavior and pert’onnance of those veay institufious in ways

06/05/2008
Starting Fast, With An Eye On The Long,Run (i~I~ ~ Page 7 of 9
va~e ]u~u

they don’t want to be altered. It’s beyond imagining that the old, mulli-tiered architecture can
satisfactorily handle the new challenge of making it change its ways. Yet nobody is thinldng
creatively about altenmlive structures by wtfich NCLB’s goals might more effectively be
pursued.
Ceal Washington successfully pull off anything as co,nplex and ambitious as NCLB in so vast
,and loosely coupled a syste~n as American K-12 education, one in ~vhich millions of’°street-
level bureaucrats" can ignore, veto, or undermine the plans of distant lawmal(ers and
regulators? I’m no great fan of local control of schools but I’m even less a fan of bureaucratic
over-reaching.

Do the likely benefits exceed the ever clearer costs? Boosting sldll levels and closing learning
gaps are t~-aiseworthy societal goals. But even if we were surer that NCLB would attain
them, plenty of people - parents, teachers, la~vm akers, and interest groups - are alm:med by
the Nice. I don’t refer primarily to dollars. (I’hey’re in dispute, too, with most Democrats
w’ongly insisting that they’re insufficient.) I refer to tNngs like a hartowing cmaiculum that
sacrifices history, ar~ and literature on the altar of reading and math sldlls; to schools that
spend ever more of the year prepping kids to pass tests; to gifted pupils being neglected so as
to pull low achievers over the bat; and to the hoinogenizing of schools - including charter
schools - that crave the freedom to be different and offer parents distinctive choices.

So long as these monster questions lack agreed-upon answers, I don’t see much hope for an
NCLB consensus, and I don’t see much hope for NCLB 2.0 anytime soon.

Revamp NCLB to fulfill its lx’omise

By Brian Stecher

Congress has begun hearings on the reanttlorization of the No Child Left Behind law.
Members of Congress now have ample research to help them make key decisions on the
future of a law that affects most of the children in the United States.

What the research reveals is that NCLB has flaws, but changes can be made that presea~e its
basic goals of school accountability and student improvement.

Expe~ience with NCLB has prompted important questions, including: Why shortchange
important subjects such as science and social studies? Does it make sense for states to have
differing definitions of what makes a student proficient in a subject?. Should school districts
be reqttired to offer school-choice options when few parents take adwantage of the choice
progrmn s required by the law?

Research shows that schools are reacting to NCLB’s focus on reading and math by taking
time away from other subjects, such as science, social studies and physical education. If
parents and teache~ value these subjects, they ought to be included in NCLB’s accotmtability
system. And Congress should ensme that all educational outoo~nes important to society, not
just math and reading, are included in determining whether a school is performing well.

NCLB uses "profidency" to detelrnine whether students and schools are maldng progress,
yet each state defines proficiency differently. This leaves many cttildien behind theft" peeI, in
other states. If the goal is to foster achievement for all students, Congress should encourage

06/05/2008
Starting Fast, With An Eye On The Long,Rtm ~Y~)~ ~ Page 8 of 9
~age ] ubl

similar standards across all states.

Congress also ought to adopt the principle that schools shottld be rewarded for improving
perfoirn mace across the distribution of achievement, not just at the proficient level. RAND
Corp. research shows that teachers are focusing ~nore attention on students who are close to
the proficient level and less attention on those at higher mad lower levels.

There are "value-added" methods for computing progress that wottld accomplish fltis goal of
giving c~edit for improve~nent at all levels. Shifting to such measurements also would send
better signals to teachers who are struggling to meet the needs of students with limited
English proficiency and students with disabilities - without compromising the law’s important
steps to make sure these students are counted.

High-paying jobs reqttire higher-order skills, so schools should be encoreaged to promote

advanced lem3fing for all students. One way to encourage this is to have the accountability
system include problem-solving and higher-order thinking skills. Many of the cunent
multiple-choice tests focus exclusively on facts and routine tasks.

When a school fails to meet NCLB’s "adequate yearly progress" requirements, it is identified
as a candidate for "intervention." Since 2001, the number of schools - and school districts -
that reqtthe intet~centions has nearly outgrown the available resomces to b~ing them up to
grade. That is, the rttles identify more schools than states know how to se~-ce. There are
essentially two re~nedies for this: tSovide more resomces or identify fewer schools.

One idea Congress should consider is to set more reasonable mmual targets. Another is to
nanow interventions to schools that have either failed to show improvement for several years
or that serve rite largest narnber of students who are not proficient.

Research also shows that parents are not moving their eligible children fiom low-perfoinling
schools to high-performing schools. There are tlnee reasons for this: First, in many districts,
there are no high-performing schools to which students can aansfer. Second, research has
fo~md that many school disaicts that have eligible schools are not notifying eligible students
mad their parents in a clear mad timely rammer about the a’ansfer option. Finally, most parents
who are notified intime do not want to send their students to a school outside their
neighborhood.

Sarp~isingly, there is little evidence that the fe~v students who have opted for a trmtsfer have
demonsa’ated marked improve~nent. But supplemental services such as tutoring have shown
success in improving students’ performance. These se~cices were included in the miginal
NCLB bill, and Congress should consider incorporating more and earlier individual tutoring
into rite improveinent process, with a dhni~fished role for the transfer option.

Under NCLB, schools that repeatedly fail to meet perfol~nance standards are supposed to
face severe sanctions, including replacing all the staffor reconstituting the school with new
public or private leadership. In reality, states and districts are opting for lesser sanctions, such
as adopting a new cm~icttlmn. Tiffs suggests a disconnect between Congress and state and
local educators. Congress could reduce fltis discrepancy by legislating more mode~tte
sanctions for all but the most egregious failm’e or by crea~tg an enforeen~ent mechanism for
implementing sanctions.

Members of Congress have just begun discussions about whether to reautho~ize NCLB this

06/05/2008
Starting Fast, WithAn Eye On The Long,Run (1~ Page 9 of 9
~-’age ~u~z

session or put offthe task for another year. The challenge for lawmakers is to give schools
and teachers the tools they need so they canmake the law’s promise a reality.

Brian Stecher is a senior sodal sdentist at the RAND Corp, a nonprofit research
orgmtization. His e-~nail is brian stecher@~m~d.org.
School Board Recommends Changes in ’No Child’ Law

By Michael Alison Chandler

Washington Post StaffWriter
Sunday, September 16, 2007; LZ06

The Loudoun County School Board has approved a wish list of changes to the No Child Left
Behind Act for Congress to consider when it reauthorizes the law fltis fall.

The board’s 15-point list includes a proposal to allow English-language lemz~ers to wait three
years, rather than one, before taking the same high-stakes tests as theft native-speaking peers.
The list also contains suggestions for less punitive ways to count student scores.

The recommendations were approved 7 to 1 at the board’s Tuesday night meeting, with
member Joseph M. Guzman (Sugarland Run) dissenting. Mark J. Nuzzaco (Catoctin) was
absent for the vote.

"A lot of us were strong supporters of and believers in the original law when it was enacted
in 2001," said board men~ber J. Warren Get, in (Sterling). Since then, he said, he has seen
some regulations "adversely impact our students in Loudoun County."

The cotmty for the filst tsne faced sanctions this year when Catoctin Elementary School in
Leesburg failed to meet federal testing goals for the second yea in a row. Parents of Catoctin
students ~vere given the option to transfer their children to another school.

Catocfin’s pass rate this year for Hispmfic students Nldng the Virginia Standards of Learning
test in English did not meet the federal bencl~anark, according to results released last month.
But the majority of the more than 30 Catoclin students who are ttm~s femng had passing
scores on the test, according to Loudotm school officials.

The board recom~nended that the law be changed so the goverrunent ~m fund tutoring for
low-performing students before allowing then~ to leave their school. The board also
suggested that only students who did not pass their exams be allowed to t~gnsfer.

"This would help us preserve the community and neighborhood nature of our smaller
elementaly schools, where small class sizes already help our faculty to la~ow the students and
their families better," the board’s proposal says.

06/05/2008
 Page 1083

LN_°nrespnsi,
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 14, 2007 8:36 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah;
Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug;
Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey;
Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey,
Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, C:ynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: School District Back In Line For Broad Prize Education. (LBGazCA)

School District Back In Line For Broad Prize Education. (LBGazCA)

By Carla M. Collado
Lonq Beach Gazette ~CA), September 14, 2007
In just five days, the Long Beach Unified School District will know whether it won the prestigious 2007 Broad Prize for
Urban Education.
If it does win, it gets $500,000 in scholarships for graduating high school seniors (class of 2008). Even if it doesn’t win, it
brings home $125,000 in scholarship money.
First Lady Laura Bush and U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings will present the national prize on Tuesday at the
Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Gen. Colin Powell also are scheduled to speak
at the award ceremony.
The Broad Prize honors urban school districts that showthe greatest overall performance and improvement in student
achievement, while closing achievement gaps for minority and low-income students. This year, 100 of the nation’s largest urban
school districts were eligible for the award.
But of the five finalists, all eyes seem to be on Long Beach, as it is the first former Broad Prize winner (2003) to return to
the competition as a finalist.
’Our chances (of winning) are the same as anyone else’s," LBUSD Superintendent Chris Steinhauser said. "I’m very
pleased just to be named a finalist again."
The other finalists for the 2007 Broad Prize are: Bridgeport Public Schools in Connecticut; Miami-Dade County Public
Schools; the New York City Department of Education; and the Northside Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas.
In May, a team of educational researchers and practitioners from the Broad Foundation visited several LBSUD schools to
collect data on leadership and teacher development and course offerings, observe classrooms and meet with parents, principals,
school board members and community leaders.
Steinhauser attributed the district’s continued success in student achievement to its daily focus on student needs, and its
ongoing process of analyzing its strengths and challenges. He also pointed to LBUSD’s strong professional development-
teacher and stafftraining. For instance, the district’s MAP program - which trains teachers on elementary math - has led to huge
gains in student performance on state standards tests, he explained. Now, the district is looking at howto implement it at the
middle school level.
On Tuesday, Steinhauser will participate in a panel discussion with the superintendents from the other four finalist districts
to talk about those same issues. Jay Mathews, education columnist for the Washington Post, will moderate the discussion. But
Steinhauser said there’s really no way to prepare for such a talk.
’You just have to talk from the heart," he said. ’q-his is the work we do day-to-day."
Another Broad Prize win would undoubtedly make the LBUSD a model of how districts can sustain academic improvement
over time. Steinhauser said that would be his hope.
’If we win this time," he said, "it’s certainly going to send a very powerful message to other urban districts that you can be
on the road to improvement I~ (then) come back to win I~ and that reform is a journey, not a one-shot thing. Even just being a
finalist again proves that. It’s been hard work I~ thousands of professionals working each day.
’If Long Beach Unified can do it, then really any district can do it."
The Broad Foundation - founded by Los Angeles billionaire and business leader Eli Broad and his wife Edythe - also
announced last week that it’s awarding the LUBSD a three-year, $2.7 million grant for principal training and development. The
 Page 1084
grant will fund the district’s Aspiring Principal Apprentice Coho~ Program.
Each year starting in fall 2008, 15 people - from classroom teachers to assistant principals- will be chosen to become
principals’ apprentices, explained Kristi Kahl, program administrator for LBUSD leadership development. Each apprentice will
train on-site with their principal for an entire school year and ~end training sessions based on administrative standards, Kahl
said. (The mentor principals will be trained beforehand as well.)
The distdct currently has a program it started in 2006-07 where participants spend five days shadowing a mentor principal
and attending a series of workshops, Kahl said. That year, 19 people (mostly assistant principals) participated, she added. That
program will continue this school year, but by fall 2008 it will be phased out to make way for the apprentice program.
The apprentice program comes at a time when many LBUSD principals are becoming eligible to retire. Although the district
has an average principal tenure of more than 10 years, LBUSD staff projects there will be 48 principal vacancies in the next ~ve
years (out of 94), according to Kahl.
To learn more about the Broad Prize, visit www.broadpdze.org. For the LBUSD, visit www.lbschools.net.
 Page 1085

~Nonresponsiv
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 14, 2007 8:36 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah;
Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug;
Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey;
Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey,
Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Education Secretary Visits BR (BRADV)

Education Secretary Visits BR (BRADV)

By Jordan Blum And Charles Lussier, Advocate Staff Writers
Baton RouqeAdvocate, September 14, 2007
Spellings touts higher ed at LSU, meets local educators
Fresh off returning from a Latin American trip with LSU Chancellor Sean O’Keefe, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret
Spellings spent Thursday afternoon at LSU discussing how the state is playing educational catch-up to the rest of the nation.
Before heading to LSU, Spellings visited with local educators at Westdale Middle School.
Spellings’ trip also coincided with the release of $18 million in federal funds to hurricane-affected college campuses in
southern Louisiana, including nearly $700,000 to LSU Health Sciences center at New Orleans.
Spellings is a staunch defender of the much-debated No Child Left Behind Act. The five-year-old federal legislation is up for
reauthorization in Congress.
She also is the author of the controversial Spellings Report that sharply criticized the state of higher education in the U.S.
Spellings said she is "soA of pleased, but not satisfied" with the progress of higher education in Louisiana, which ranks last
in the South in college graduation rates.
’We peeled the onion and, is the news good? No, it’s not," she said. "But we know where we need to work and there’s kind
of an ownership in that and a commitment," she said during an interview.
’That’s huge because lots of places are still trying to pretend like everything’s" wonderful, Spellings said
Her prominent Spellings Report criticized the aloofness of higher education leadership and the lack of information flowing to
consumers, and argues that higher education in the rest of the world is catching up to or even surpassing the U.S.
’1 feel very good about it," Spellings said, when asked about the praise and criticism the report has received.
Colleges may criticize the methodology of college rankings like U.S. News and Wodd Report, she said. But at least it
represents some transparency that colleges are not offering on their own.
Westdale Principal Sherry Brock likes to describe her school as nine schools under one roof. On Thursday, Brock got to
show off her myriad programs for Spellings.
Spellings brushed up on vocabulary words in an overage acceleration course, took in the finer points of French and sang
an old spiritual song with the choir.
In the school library, a panel of 18 local educators gathered to tell her the things they’d like to see changed in the No Child
Left Behind Act.
The panel urged Spellings to consider changing how non-native English speakers are tested, holding private tutoring
companies more accountable, reconsidering its rules for school choice and giving schools more credit for individual student
growth even if they miss school targets.
The panel included state Superintendent Paul Pastorek and East Baton Rouge Parish Superintendent Charlotte Placide.
’No Child Left Behind has taken us from a real aspirational kind of approach that said, ’Put the money out, hope for the
best, hope to do what we can,’ to real accountability to the needs of kids," Spellings told them.
Spellings mostly listened, making no promises, but appeared sympathetic to many of the concerns she heard.
Linda Lewis is the principal of Capitol Pre-College Academy, one of two gender-based schools created out of low-
performing Capitol High School.
She said her school has seen some test score growth, but not enough. However, the federal law does not pick up the other
things going well at the school.
 Page 1086
’We’ve seen a culture change in the students," Lewis said. "We are able to see more students go to college."
Stmling Fast, With An Eye On The Long.t~un (1~, YT) Page 1 of 2
~’age 1087

IeNonresponsiv
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 11,2007 8:05 AM
Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble,
Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar,
Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil;
Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; 7"albert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia;
Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Teachers Unions Rip Changes To Education Act (wr)

Teachers Unions Rip Changes To Education Act (WT)

By Amy Fagan
The Washington Times, September 1 I, 2007
Leaders of the nation’s teachers unions yesterday told lawmakers that Congress is not doing
enough to loosen the tough requirements set by the No Child Left Behind Act.
The leaders of the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of
Teachers (AFT) were among representatives from more than 40 civil rights, business and
education groups who testified before the House Education and Labor Committee about a
bipartisan dratt proposal of changes to the law.
Committee Chairman George Miller, California Democrat, and Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon
of California, the top Republican on the panel, created the draft. The law is up for renewal this
year.
NEA President Reg Weaver said the dratt "makes only minor tweaks in the divisive and
dysfunctional law" and that his 3.2-million-member group opposes the proposals.
AFT Executive Vice President Antonia Cortese said the draft does not give enough flexibility to
teachers.
"We have a long way to go," she said.
Mr. Miller is trying to strike a middle ground between teachers unions and education groups that
want to relax the testing and tracking requirements and the business groups and the
administration that generally hope to keep in place much of the same level of accountability.
Mr. Miller and Mr. Weaver had a testy exchange yesterday over a provision in the draft that
encourages merit pay for teachers, which the NEA opposes. Mr. Miller said the NEA supported
the same language in past legislation, but Mr. Weaver said his group did not, according to the
Associated Press.
"You can dance around all you want. You approved the language," the AP reported Mr. Miller as
saying.
The 2002 lawrequires states to test students in reading and math and track their annual
progress. It holds schools accountable if their students don’t make adequate yearly progress.
Mr. Miller’s draft would relax the requirements, but not enough to suit the NEA.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is skeptical of a draft provision that would give states
more time to test students who are learning English in their native language.
The law allows states to test English language learners in their native language for three years,
with the possibility of an additional two years on a case-by-case basis. The draft proposal would
extend that to five years, with the possibility of the two-year extension.

06/05/2008
Starting Fast, With An Eye On The Long.Run (1~ Page 2 of 2
P’a~e

"That’s simply too long," Mrs. Spellings wrote last week in a letter to IVl’. Miller. "This would allow
a third-grade student to reach the tenth grade before ever being tested in English."
The draft proposal also would require states with 10 percent of English language learners who
share the same language to develop native language tests for that group and provide extra
funding for it.
PeterA. Zamora, attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund,
supports the provisions.
He said "bad politics" surround the English-language debate but that if children are learning
English, there is no harm if they are tested in their native language to accurately determine their
understanding of subject matter.
"Native-language assessments are not a fhreat to English-language acquisition," he said.
He said only a small percentage of English language learners would fall under the extension,
mostly recently arrived immigrants or those in dual-language programs. He said most English
language learners are U.S. citizens.

06/05/2008
Starting Fast, With An Eye On The Long.Run (N. YT) Page 1 of 2
b’age 1089

Nonresponsi 1.
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 11,2007 8:03 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble,
Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private - Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar,
Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil;
Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; V~lliams, Cynthia;
Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Teachers And Rights Groups Oppose Education Measure (NYT)

Teachers And Rights Groups Oppose Education Measure (NYT)

By Diana Jean Schemo
The NewYork Times, September 11, 2007
WASHINGTON, Sept. I0 --The drNt House bill to renew the federal No Child Left Behind law
came under sharp attack on Monday from civil rights groups and the nation’s largest teachers
unions, the latest sign of how difficult it may be for Congress to pass the law this fall.
At a marathon hearing of the House Education Committee, legislators heard from an array of
civil rights groups, including the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, the National Urban
League, the Center for American Progress and Achieve Inc., a group that works with states to
raise academic standards.
All protested that a proposal in the bill for a pilot program that would allow districts to devise their
own measures of student progress, rather than using statewide tests, would g~t the laws intent
of demanding that schools teach all children, regardless of poverty, race or other factors, to the
same standard.
Dianne M. Pich~, executive director of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, said the bill had
"the potential to set back accountability by years, if not decades," and would lead to lower
standards for children in urban and high poverty schools.
"It strikes me as not unlike allowing my teenage son and his friends to score their own driver’s
license tests," Ms. Pich6 said, adding, "We’ll have one set of standards for the Bronx and one for
Westchester County, one for Baltimore and one for Bethesda."
Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, who is chairman of the committee,
countered that district tests would have to be approved by the federal Education Department,
which he said would safeguard against any watering down of standards.
The law, a signature initiative of the Bush administration that passed in 2001 with bipartisan
support, requires schools to test all students annually in reading and math in grades three to
eight and to show all students progressing toward 100 percent proficiency regardless of
background. Schools in high poverty areas that fail to show sufficient gains face potentially harsh
penalties, including possible closing.
The proposals for changing the law, which has so far tagged 10,000 high poverty schools for
state and district intervention, move away from relying solely on test scores in math and reading
as a gauge of school progress. They would allow schools to include test results in other
subjects, as well as indicators like attendance, promotion, performance in advanced placement
courses and graduation rates to demonstrate academic strength.
The draft has also come under criticism from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and

06/05/2008
Stm-ting Fast, With An Eye On The Long.Run (l~I~ ~Y~ Page 2 of 2
~’age ]

Congressional Republicans.
Mr. Miller said he was not discouraged by the opposition, and indeed, many witnesses praised
the proposals as offering much-needed ttexibility to the law.
"1 think we’re doing well," Mr. Miller said after the hearing. "It’s not easy, but that’s not a
surprise."
Leaders of the teachers’ unions- Reg Weaver, president of the National Education
Association, and Toni Cortese, executive vice president of the American Federation of Teachers
-- told the committee that they would not support the bill in its current form and that they
objected to a proposal to count student test scores in granting pay bonuses.
Mr. Weaver’s testimony produced the sharpest exchange of the day, when Mr. Miller accused
the unions of reneging on an earlier agreement to support the measure when it was incorporated
into a 2005 bill proposed by Democrats and that was never adopted by Congress, which was
then controlled by Republicans.
But Mr. Weaver and Ms. Cortese disputed that account, saying that while they supported the
2005 bill over all, they had expressed concerns about any provisions that would mandate test
scores be included in determining pay.

06/05/2008
 Page 1091

Nonresponsiv
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 14, 2007 8:35 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah;
Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Mesecar, Doug;
Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey;
Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey,
Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: U.S. Secretary Of Education Tours Schools In Baton Rouge (WAFB)

U.S. Secretary Of Education Tours Schools In Baton Rouge (WAFB)

WAFB-TV Baton Rouqe, Louisiana, September 13, 2007
Westdale Middle School got an important visitor Thursday.
U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings toured several schools in Baton Rouge throughout the day.
We caught up with her at Westdale Middle.
It’s a magnet school focusing on old fashioned academic instruction and foreign languages. The secretary also visited LSU
and met with Chancellor O’Keefe.
 Page 1092

[~Nonresponsiv
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 14, 2007 8:34 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah;
Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug;
Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey;
Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey,
Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, C~thia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: More Grads Needed, Education Chief Says (AP)

More Grads Needed, Education Chief Says (AP)

AP, September 14, 2007
TULSA - The United States must produce more college graduates if it is to continue competing on a global scale, the U.S.
Secretary of Education said Wednesday.
’q-here’s no doubt that our system is the finest in the world .... but others are gaining ground," Margaret Spellings said
during a visit to the University of Tulsa.
Spellings has advocated for holding higher education accountable and measuring student learning.
She traveled with TU President Steadman Upham and other American college presidents to Asia last year to form
partnerships with colleges abroad, to encourage Asian students to attend school in the U.S. and to establish opportunities for
American students to study in other countries.
Upham invited Spelling to speak at the school’s annual back-to-school convocation.
Spellings believes students, including her own 20-year-old daughter, too often choose which college to attend based on
feeling and not rational thought.
The Education Department already gathers data on first-time, full-time, degree-seeking students who have not transferred
from another college - in other words, "traditional" college students, but more and more college students do not fit that mold, and
less data is kept on them.
U.S. News and Wodd Report magazine has, for years, made college data available but recently has been criticized by
some colleges.
"If not that, what kind of information can we provide?" Spellings asked.
The department has requested $25 million to foster accountability by creating data systems and helping colleges refine
their data collection, she said.
Information gathered so far shows the U.S. is ranked eighth or ninth for attainment of college education, and 17 percent of
high school freshmen receive bachelor’s degrees within 10 years.
"We have to pick up the pace if we’re going to be the wodd’s innovator," Spellings said.
College also must be made available to more low-income and minodty students, who go to college and graduate at much
lower rates than others, Spellings said.
She praised President Bush’s proposal to increase the Pell Grant, which is given to students based on financial need, from
about $4,300 to $5,400. She called for simplifying college financial-aid forms and processes.
"Not very long ago, one could lead a very comfortable life without going to college," she said. Now, "a college education is
becoming essential."
Starting Fast, With An Eye On The Long.Rml Page 1 of 1
~age t

Nonresponsive [
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 13, 2007 7:52 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Ken’i; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble,
Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private - Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar,
Doug; Morfli, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil;
Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia;
Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: The Good And Bad Of NCLB (W]’)

The Good And Bad Of NCLB (WT)

The Washington Times, September 13, 2007
As Congress debates the complexities of reauthorizing the No Child Lett Behind Act, a proposal from
Rep. George Miller, California Democrat, runs the risk of watering down the intent and spirit of the
program, which both Republicans and Democrats agree should be renewed before its expiration Sept.
30.
While certainly not without serious shortcomings, NCLB maintains an admirable goal of bringing all K-
12 students to proficiency in math and reading by 2014. Unfortunately, a proposal from Mr. Miller and
his fellow Democrats would muddy the waters of these standardized measures of student progress by
throwing non-academic factors into the mix.
Including such non-academic factors as graduation rates and the availability of Advanced Placement
courses, while undoubtedly important elements of a child’s education, convolutes the program’s
premise: ensuring our children are literate and can perform basic math computations.
The proposal from ~. Miller, chairman of the House education panel, would also result in many failing
schools escaping needed overhaul and monitoring. Instead of forcing them to address academic
failings, it gives them the option of garnishing their lack of substance with extracurricular window
dressings to eke past federal standards.
Press reports indicate Rep. Carol McCarthy, NewYork Democrat, hopes to insert into NCLB a
laughable proposal --though a somber waste of taxpayer money if enacted --that would divert
taxpayer dollars for state grants to schools that try to stop bullying on their canpuses. Not only is this
idea an absurd expansion of the nanny state that Democrats love to peddle, it also takes responsibility
away from parents, not government bureaucrats, who should be the ones instilling the values of
cooperation and civility in their children.
Members on both sides of the aisle considering the revamping of NCLB would do well to look at the
success of D.C., where a voucher program has allowed thousands of students to escape failing public
schools for private or charter schools under grar~s and laws authorized by Congress. Studies have
indicated parents are happy with the program, their children are performing better and student bodies
are more diverse and integrated because of it.
A bill introduced by Rep. Buck McKeon of California, the ranking Republican on the House education
panel, would give children in low-performing schools up to $4,000 to leave a failing school and enroll in
a private school of their choice. The measure rightfully has been endorsed by Education Secretary
Margaret Spellings.
Amid all the din surrounding NCLB, we urge lawmakers to select the best of the proposals and shun the
frivolous and superl]uous. Our children deserve it.

06/05/2008
Stmling Fast, With An Eye On The Long.Run ~.~ Page 1 of 2
~’age 10921

Nonresponsivl
Frern: Anderson, Christy
gent: September 11,2007 8:09 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble,
Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private - Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar,
Doug; Morfli, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil;
Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia;
Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Politics Hill Panel Ponders Future Of’No Child Lelt Behind’ (NPR)

Politics Hill Panel Ponders Future Of’No Child Left Behind’ (NPR)
By Claudio Sanchez
NPR Morning Edition, September 10, 2007
The House Education and Labor committee was set Monday to start a months-long debate over
the future of the education reform act No Child Left Behind, but a long-time supporter is
advocating for a break from the strictures that have come to shape it.
For five years now the law has imposed strict deadlines and requirements on the nation’s 90, 000
public schools
Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the laws co-author, has spent the last ~ve years defending No
Child Letl Behind. He rebuffed critics who said it was too burdensome, too sweeping, too
intrusive and too punitive.
But with the law up for reauthorization, Miller still supports its key prindples: mandatory testing, a
breakdown of students’ test scores by race and income, and sanctions for schools that dont
measure up.
"It is our intent to hold steadfast to those principles, but there’s a very clear perception in this
country that this law is not fair or flexible when it comes to judging students, teachers or
schools," Miller said.
Last week he conceded before a group of business leaders meeting in Washington that the laws
critics were right. The U.S. Education Department’s reliance on standardized tests to gauge the
success or failure of schools has provided an incomplete, if not distorted, snapshot at best.
So as chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, Miller along with the ranking
Republican on his committee, Howard "Buck" McKeon of California, are now calling for new
ways to measure a schools’ progress yea to year.
They are taking into account things like graduation rates, using local rather than state tests, or
simply giving some students more time to catch up in subjects like reading and math.
"None of this requires a retreat from accountability; from assessments that give us information
that will be useful," he said.
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings doesnt agree.
"1 find it in some ways amazing that we’re debating whether it’s reasonable or not to give every
child the basic skills they need to participate in our democracy and in this economy," she said.
Although her rebuttal was diplomatic, spellings told reporters atlerwards that she was "deeply
troubled" by the changes that Miller and his committee are considering.
"If this is moving more kids into more vigorous accountability I’m all for it. If it’s a retreat or
watering down or walking away from that, I’m not for it," said Spellings.

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Starling Fast, With An Eye On The Long.Run (i~. ~Y~ Page 2 of 2
b’age 1095

It’s not any single change that’s the problem, said Spellings. Instead, it’s the number and
combination of changes that could create all kinds of loopholes -- and possibly fewer services
-- for kids who really need them.
In just about every state, education officials insist the law is out of whack.
Billy Cannaday, Jr., Superintendent of Public Instruction for Virginia, said the law makes no
distinction between schools that are falling short by a little and those that are failing miserably.
"And worse yet, it does not appear to recognize schools that have a history of high performance.
It’s hard for the average citizen to make sense of that. The second area is more attention to how
to address the needs of English-language learners," said Cannaday.
At least one proposal that Congress is considering would give non-English speaking children ~ve
instead of three years to switch into English-only classrooms.
Secretary Spdlings opposes that idea too. In some ways, she said, a stalemate would be better
than a weaker law.

06/05/2008
Stmling Fast, With An Eye On The Long.Run (1~ Page 1 of 3
rage

~Nonresponsiv[
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 12, 2007 8:47 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble,
Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar,
Doug; Morfli, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil;
Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia;
Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Spellings Takes Issue With NCLB Draft (EDWEEK)

Spellings Takes Issue With NCLB Draft (EDWEEK)

By David J. Hoff
Education Week, September 12, 2007
Secretary says she is ’deeply troubled’ by sections that might soften accountability.
Washington
Despite their agreement on the overall goals and principles of the No Child Left Behind Act, Secretary
of Education Margaret Spellings and Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., differ on the accountability policies
they believe are needed to achieve those goals.
In a Sept. 5 letter to Mr. Miller, the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, Ms.
Spellings wrote that she was "deeply troubled" by several sections of a dratt bill to reauthorize the main
provisions ofrifle I of the NCLB law, which the chairman and the ranking Republican on the committee
unveiled last month.
Ms. Spellings said in a speech earlier that day that the draft bill’s accountability proposals would create
"big loopholes" that would allow schools to escape from the accountability system even though their
students weren’t on track to become proficient in reading and mathematics.
"Everyone knows that the more complicated the system, the easier it is to manipulate or obfuscate or
confuse the bottom line," Ms. Spellings said in her speech here at an event erganized by the Business
Coalition for Student Achievement. The coalition is made up of business, civil rights, and other groups
seeking to keep much of the federal education law’s accountability rules intact.
Speaking at the same event in advance of the secretary’s remarks, Rep. Miller said that reading and
math scores should remain the most important element of the NCLB laws accountability system. But
he would allow states to use test scores on a variety of academic subjects and other indicators when
calculating adequate yearly progress, or AYP, the key measure of performance under the law.
"We can make a fairer assessment of those students by using other statewide assessments of those
students’ subjects and to provide some portion of that question of whether or not they are making AYP,"
he said. "None of this requires a retreat from accountability."
Collecting Comments
Rep. Miller and Secretary Spellings made their speeches as the House education committee was
preparing to consider a bill to reauthorize the 5X-year-old No Child Lelt Behind law.
At the business coalition’s event, both said they remained committed to the laws goal that students will
be proficient in reading and math by the end of the 2013-14 school year. Both also endorsed the
concept that schools be held accountable for making progress toward that goal.
But their statements at and alter the event showed a rift between them over how to do so.
By Sept. 5, more than 10,000 people had submitted comments on the discussion dralt of the laws main
provisions that Rep. Miller and Rep. Howard P. ’£uck" McKeon of California, the education committee’s
senior Republican, had released Aug. 28. The dralt would alter accountability rules and make other

06/05/2008
Starting Fast, With An Eye On The Long.Run (i~ ~Y~ Page 2 of 3
~’age /

changes in the first section of Title I of the law. ("Draft NCLB Bill Intensifies the Discussion," Sept. 5,
2007.)
Last week, Fleps. Miller and McKeon released a dralt for the reauthorization of the other sections of the
NCLB law, which cover the Reading First program, efforts to improve teacher quality and effectiveness,
and several other programs serving K-12 schools. In the Title I dralt, some proposed changes have
widespread support, such as using what are known as growth models in the accountability system.
Such models track individual students’ progress toward meeting goals for adequate yearly progress
and use those scores to determine whether a school or district is making AYE
A dozen states have permission to use growth models under a federal pilot project, but all others
compare cohorts of students, meaning a school’s AYP status is calculated by comparing the
achievement of one year’s 3rd graders, for example, with that of 3rd graders from the year before.
But Rep. Miller, the most influential education pdicymaker in the House, and Secretary Spellings, the
Bush administration’s leading lobbyist and spokeswoman for the NCLB law, are divided on important
issues related to accountability and interventions in schools failing to achieve AYE
Rep. Miller argued that basing accountability decisions on reading and math scores alone, as the law
currently does, is unfair to schools. Those scores should be supplemented with test results in other
subjects, as long as such tests are reliable, he says.
"We’re asking for this information to be made available for a more complete picture" of how a school is
performing, Rep. Miller said in a conference call with reporters last week, shoffly alter he gave brief
remarks at the business coalition event.
High schools could use indicators such as graduation rates and college enrollment rates to
demonstrate their success, he added during the calls.
Such changes are intended to deal with criticisms that the law’s accountability system encourages
schools to focus narrowly on reading and math. But critics of the law say thatthe dralt bill doesn’t go far
enough in addressing that concern.
"The committee dralt falls short of that goal by overemphasizing testing at the expense of improving
teaching and learning [and] paying too little attention to correcting NCLB’s perverse incentives, which
narrow currioulum and reduce education to test-prep, especially for the ’lelt behind’ groups," the Forum
on Educational Accountability wrote in aSept. 5 letter to the leaders of the House education committee.
The forum is a coalition of education and civil rights groups that includes both major teachers’ unions as
well as associations representing superintendents, school board members, and other school officials.
But Ms. Spellings said that establishing new ways to calculate AYP would undercut the law’s ulfimate
goal that all children be proficient in reading and math.
"We’re on the right track," she said in a conference call with reporters on Sept. 5. "We don’t need to
water this law dowo and change directions now."
Tutoring Debate
In addition to her objections to the dralt House proposals on AYP, Secretary Spellings said she didn’t
like the draft’s proposed interventions in schools that fail to make adequate progress for two or more
years in a row. The draf~ bill would label such schools as "priority schools" or "high-priority schools."
Priority schools would be those that failed to make AYP goals for one or two of the racial, ethnic, and
other demographic subgroups of students that the lawtracks in each school. The high-priority schools
would be ones in which students miss their achievement targets in most or all subgroups.
Under the dralt, the priority schools would not be required to offer their students tutoring or the choice
of attending another school in the district. Under the current law, schools that fail to make AYP for two
years straight, even if only for a single subgroup, must offer school choice. If they miss AYP for a third
year, they must also offer tutoring.
"These kids who are eligible for service today suddenly would not have help" under the dralt bill, Ms.
Spellings said in the conference call, adding that 250,000 students would lose access to tutoring.
The Education Industry Association, which represents tutoring providers and other for profit education
businesses, expressed similar concerns in a statement released Aug. 30 (requires Microsoft Word).
Rep. Miller said that the dralt lists tutoring as one of several interventions administrators in the priority

06/05/2008
Starling Fast, With kal Eye On The Long,Run (i~. YT) Page 3 of 3
~-’age 109[}

schools could choose in efforts to improve achievement.

Although Ms. Spellings and Mr. Miller have their differences over the NCLB draft bill, the secretary said
she was hopeful that their commitment to the overall goals of the law would enable them to reach a
compromise.
"If we’re all working from the same assumptions and bright-line principles," she said in the call with
reporters, "maybe we just have some [legislative] dratting issues to work through."
Rep. Miller said he expected that the House education committee would consider an NCLB bill by the
end of September, and that a bill would be debated on the House floor and passed by the end of the
year.
The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee plans to take up its NCLB
reauthorization proposal this month and hopes to win the full Senate’s approval of the measure by the
end of the year.
Vol. 27, Issue 03, Pages 21-22

06/05/2008
Starting Fast, With An Eye On The Long.Run (Iq, YT) Page 1 of 2
~age 1099

[N,~onresponsi
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 11, 2007 8:07 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble,
Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private ~ Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar,
Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil;
Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia;
Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Draf~ Gives N on-English Speakers More Time (WT)

Draft Gives Non-English Speakers More Time (WT)

By Amy Fagan
The Washington Times, September 11, 2007
States where students are learning to speak English would be allowed to test those children in
their native language for up to seven years under a draft of proposed changes to the No Child
Left Behind law.
The draft, cratted by key House lawmakers, is the subject of a hearing today by the House
Education and Labor Committee. Lawmakers will hear testimony from more than 30 groups on a
range of issues.
The 2002 NCLB law-- which is up for renewal -- requires states to test students in reading and
math and track their annual progress, including children with disabilities and English language
learners (ELLs). Schools are held accountable if their students don’t make adequate yearly
progress.
The law allows states to test ELLs in their native language for three years, with the possibility of
an additional two years on a case-by-case basis. The draft proposal would extend that to five
years, with the possibility of the two-year extension.
"That’s simply too long," Education Secretary Margaret Spellings wrote last week in a letter to
committee Chairman George Miller, California Democrat, who crafted the proposal. "This would
allow a third-grade student to reach the tenth grade before ever being tested in English."
The provision is one of several in the dr~ over which the administration has expressed concern.
Top committee Republican Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon of California --who lent his name to
the dratt but hasn’t officially endorsed it --also has concerns with the ELLs provisions, an aide
to Mr. McKeon said. The aide said these provisions still are under discussion as the panel
prepares to introduce legislation.
The draft proposal also, for the first time, would require states with 10 percent of ELLs who
share the same language to develop valid and reliable native-language tests for that group. The
draft calls for extra funding to help states develop such tests and gives states two years to
develop a system -- of native language tests, portfolio tests, simple English tests or other
methods -- to measure ELLs.
Some community groups, such as First Focus, a bipartisan child advocacy organization, praised
NCLB’s provisions for special-needs children and the proposed changes.
"NCLB helped shine a light on some of the children who have traditionally been overlooked and
neglected -- English language learners and students with disabilities," said Melissa Lazarin,
director of education policy for the group. "The draft Miller-McKeon proposal reflects this

06105/2008
Staa~ing Fast, WithAn Eye On The Long.Rtm (1~ ~Y~).~ Page 2 of 2
~age 1 1 uu

continued commitment to English language learners and ensuring that all students be held to the
same high academic standards."
Educators have complained that NCLB is too rigid, and Mr. Miller said he would like to make it
more flexible.
His discussion draft would retain the law’s requirement that students reach proficiency in reading
and math by 2014. However, it also would allow states to use other factors in addition to reading
and math scores to determine adequate yearly progress, such as graduation rates, the
percentage of students completing college-preparatory courses and test scores in other
subjects.
The draft: covered the main sections of NCLB. A dratt proposal covering the rest of NCLB was
released late last week.

06/05/2008
Starting Fast, WithAn g~e On The Long.Run Page 1 of 2
~age 110~

IN,..~.nresponsi
FFom: Anderson, Chdsty
Sent: September 11,2007 7:52 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble,
Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar,
Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil;
Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia;
Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: "No Child’ Needs Better Way to Measure Schools, Lawmakers Say (Bloomberg)

"No Child’ Needs Better Way to Measure Schools, Lawmakers Say

By William McQuillen

Sept. 10 (Bloomberg) -- No Child Lelt Bettind, the U.S. education law aimed at improving
schools and holdirg officials accountable, needs changes allowing progress to be measured in
more ways than ttn’ough tesling, lawmake*’s said as they heard from spedalists on the subject.

Doze~ts ofwituesses, including an education professor at Stanford University and an adviser

to the nonpm-tisan Aspen Institute, told the House Education and Labor Committee at a
heating to@ in Washin~on that Congress must find ways to use more than test scores
without reducing accourttability.

Members of the House’s education committee last month released a working draf[ of possible
changes, such as excluding results for some non-native speakers of English and peunitting
states to develop assess~nents of progress. Today’s healing provided feedback on those
proposals.

"We would be negligent, whethe*" because oftmbfis or for other shortsighted reasons, to
refuse to ~nake significant improvements to the law, improvements that are necessal7 for it to
succeed as we intended," said George Miller, a California Democrat and chairman of the
Hous e’s education committee.
The law, up ~or renewal this year, requires aknost 50 million American public-school
children to be tested in reading and math. Co~npliance is a condition for states that seek $37
billion a year in federal school funds.

President George W. Bush signed the legislation in Janualy 2002, fiflf~ling a campaign
pledge to increase accountability in schools and requiting yearly improvement. Lawmakers
ate debating changes to the law as they seek to alleviate concerns that teachers spend too
much time focused on the tests, with plans to vote on the legislation late," fltis year.

¯ Blunt Iustrmnent’

Schools would be judged partly on graduation rates and college en_rolhnent, according to the
House proposal. Schools should also get cwdit for progress tluough the school year, Miller
suggested.

06/0512008
Starting Fast, With An Eye On The Long,Run (I~I~ ~Y’~,~ Page 2 of 2
~’a~e ] ] uz

Many people see the yearly improvement reqtth’ement as a" ’bhmt instrument that needed to
be refined," said Andrea Messina, a ~nember of the commission on No Child Left Behind at
the Aspen Institute, a research foundation. "Carrent law is a pass/fail standard that often does
not properly credit schools that are making significant progress with kids who have fur[he!" to
go reaching profidency."

Changes shouldn’t stop there, since the U.S. will have trouble coinpefing globally tnfless
incentives mid pay for teachers are increased, said Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of
education at Stanford, in California. U.S. schools are being outperformed more each year,
falling behind Sweden, Canada, Hong Kong and South Korea, she said.

Cnaduation rates fell to 69 percent in 2000 tiom 77 percent in 1969, Darling-Hammond told
the congressional pmlel. Lawmakers will have to be more ambitious in coming up with
standards that reqttire inore than" tilling inbubbles," she said.

’Serious Investment’

"S erious investm ant in the teaching force -- ultimately at a scale even more intensive than
this bill envisions -- ~vill be the basis on which those ambitious standards can be taught and
achieved," Darling-Haminond said.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said on Sept. 5 that any chmtges to No Child Left
Behind education law shouldn’t reduce reliance on use of math and English tests that measme
students’ skills ,and help hold schools accountable. The law could be made more flexible,
though she doesn’t want any changes that reduce the "unvmaished information on how
students are doing."

The draft released last month hasn’t been endorsed by the fifll education com~nittee and will
undergo changes before it is voted on, Miller said when releasing the proposals.

"’There me those who believe tiffs draft goes too far in modifying the oIiginal law and there
are those who believe it does not go far enough," said Representative Buck McKeon, of
California, the ranking Republican on the panel. "’ If there is one consistent message in the
comments we have received, it is that this thrift is far fiom perfect."

To contact the repol~er on this story: William MeQnillen in Washington at

bmcquillen@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated September 10, 2007 16:18 EDT

06/05/2008
Stat~ing Fast, With An Eye On The Long.Rm~ (1~ ~Y~.~ Page 1 of 3
~’age ~ °1

nsiv’

From: Anderson, Christy

Sent: September 13, 2007 7:58 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble,
Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; IVlacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar,
Doug; Morfti, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil;
Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia;
Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Pell Grant Increase Isn’t Enough, Leaders Of Historically Black Colleges Tell Secretary
Spellings (CHRONED)

Pell Grant Increase Isn’t Enough, Leaders Of Historically Black Colleges Tell
Secretary Spellings (CHRONED)
By Paul Basken
The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 13, 2007
This yeaCs annual conference of the nation’s historically black colleges and tniversities appeared to be
well-timed for Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, coming just as President Bush prepares to sign
into law the largest increase in federal student aid since the GI Bill.
Ms. Spellings, appearing before the conference here on Tuesday, did in fact bask in the praise of
college presidents whose students are among those standing the most to gain from last week’s
approval by Congress of legislation raising the value of the maximum Pell Grant over the next five
years.
Yet many made clear during a question period that the Pell Grant increase, approved by Congress last
week, wasn’t nearly enough for their struggling colleges and their students, and that they expected her
to do more.
"While we applaud the increase in the Pell Grant to $5,400/’ Melvin N. Johnson, president of
Tennessee State University, told Ms. Spellings, "1 want to make sure that we truly understand the plight
that our students that are attending our institutions really have."
Hundreds of academically qualified students are "purged" from historically black universities because of
financial need each year, and many of those who do complete their studies face burdensome levels of
loans, Mr. Johnson said.
Questions About Priorities
Some presidents drew specific connections to the war in Iraq, telling the secretary that the Bush
administration was spending money overseas that could be spent on colleges to help improve the
American economy, and warning that even returning soldiers werent being given enough money to
attend college.
The $450-billion spent so far on the war "would support 22 million scholarships at our institutions," said
Joe A. Lee, president of Alabama State University, who is also chairman of the board of the National
Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education.
At the same time, the United States faces an onslaught of defective medicines and other products from
foreign countries that are taking economic advantage of America’s failure to educate enough students
for the high-technology work force, Mr. Lee told Ms. Spellings.
"Something is seriously wrong with the way we are dealing with these matters," he said to applause
from attendees at the conference, which was organized by the Education Department and the White
House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Ms. Spellings, even if she cannot force change within the administration, could do more personally to

06/05/2008
Stm~ing Fast, With An Eye On The Long.Run (1~..Y~)~ Page 2 of 3
~age 110:4

help students understand their college financing options, said Michael L. Lomax, president and chief
executive of the United Negro College Fund.
"The country hasn’t learned from the mortgage lending crisis," Mr. Lomax said. "1 guess we’re just going
to wait until we have to learn from the education lending crisis, when even more Americans are forced
to default on loans that they never should have t~en out on terms that are inappropriate."
The continuing state and federal investigations into the student-loan industry have helped highlight
abuses, but have not helped students understand what they can do to protect themselves in the face of
aggressive lender tactics, he said.
"There’s an opportunity for you, Madame Secretary, to take the lead in helping this country begin to
understand what wise and judicious borrowing is all about when it comes to education," Mr. Lomax
said.
Other speakers criticized two new federal grant programs that award extra financial aid to some
students based on the quality of their high-school courses. Such policies, they said, further
disadvantage poor students.
Spellings Touts Accomplishments
And others asked the secretary when she would fulfill an ol-repeated promise to simplify the federal
application form for student aid.
Ms. Spellings said she was proud of the Bush a~ninistration’s actions to date, including the push for
the increase in the Pell Grant, and promised that more changes were coming in several areas.
The administration hopes more students ~ill become eligible for the Academic Competitiveness Grant
and Smart Grant programs as Congress increases funds available to high schools to improve their
curricula, Ms. Spellings said.
The two grant programs were established by Congress. in 2006 to provide additional aid to some
students eligible for federal Pell Grants. To qualify for Academic Competitiveness Grants, which are
given in the first two years of college, students must complete a "rigorous" program of study at the high-
school level, as defined by the Education Department, and must maintain a 3.0 grade-point average
while in college. Smart Grants are available to students in the third and fourth years of college who
have maintained a cumulative 3.0 grade-point average and who are pursuing majors in science, math,
and some foreign languages.
Ms. Spellings also defended the pace of efforts to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid,
or Fafsa, the standard application form that the federal and state governments use to determine
students’ eligibility for financial aid. Improving the application form is complex, involving changes in both
laws and regulations, the secretary said. "It’s not easily done," she said.
"Can we do more, should we do more?" Ms. Spellings said, referring to the overall task of helping more
students afford college. "You bet."
The increase in the Pell Grant, however, is "a great first step, a great down payment," Ms. Spellings
said.
Rebutting a Controversial Study
The historically black colleges are facing their own battle to prove their worth. A study last April by
Roland G. Fryer Jr., assistant professor of economics at Harvard University, and Michael Greenstone, a
professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggested that black students
fare better when attending traditional colleges.
The study, criticized by conference leaders, concluded that black graduates who attended historically
black colleges in the 1990s earned as much as 14 percent less than black graduates who studied at
other colleges. That’s a shitI from the 1970s, when graduates of historically black colleges enjoyed a
wage advantage of as much as 12 percent, the study found.
Conference leaders, at a session to rebut the Fryer-Greenstone study, said iN conclusions could be
misleading because of factors such as employers’ racist preferences for graduates of traditional
colleges, and black graduates working in the nonprofit ’sector.
A study issued in July by Bradford F. Mills Jr., a professor of agricutture and applied economics at
Virginia Tech, and Elton Mykerezi, a graduate of his department, also found Nat black men reaped no

06/05/2008
Starting Fast, With An Eye On The Long.Run Page 3 of 3

immediate financial benefit from attending a black college.

But over their lifetimes, their wages increased 1.4 percent to 1.6 percent faster per year than did the
pay of black men who had attended other colleges, Mills and Mykerezi said in a report on their study,
which involved black men who attended historically black colleges and universities in the late t970s
and early t980s.

06/05/2008
Stm-ting Fast, WithAn Eye On The Long.Run (1~ ~Y~).. Page 1 of 2
~age 1 -I ut3

From: Anderson, Christy

Sent: September 13, 2007 7:49 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble,
Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar,
Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil;
Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia;
Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: U.S. Must Work Harder, Education Secretary Says (rWOK)

U.S. Must Work Harder, Education Secretary Says (TWOK)

By April Marciszewski
Tulsa World (OK), September 13, 2007
The United States needs to advance its higher education system and educate more Americans for the
country to continue to compete globally, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said
Wednesday at the University of Tulsa.
"There’s no doubt that our system is the finest in the world .... but others are gaining ground," she
said.
Spellings, TU President Steadman Upham and other U.S. college presidents traveled to Asia last year
to form partnerships with colleges abroad, to encourage Asians to attend college in the U.S. and to
establish opportunities for U.S. stu- dents to study abroad. Upham invited Spellings to speak at TU’s
annual back-to-school convocation.
Spellings has advocated for holding higher eduction accountable and measuring student learning.
Colleges, including -ru, and some states are leadng that effort themselves, she said.
Students, including Spellings’ own 20-year-old daughter, too often choose which college to attend
based on feeling and not rational thought, she said.
The Education Department already gathers data on first-time, full-time, degree-seeking students who
have not transferred from another college -- in other
words, "traditional" college students.
But more and more college students do not fit tha~ mold, and less data is kept on them.
U.S. News and World Report magazine has, foryears, made college data available but recently has
been criticized by some colleges.
"If not that, what kind of information can we provide?" Spellings asked.
The department has requested $25 million to foster accountability by creating data systems and helping
colleges refine theirdata collection, she said.
Information gathered so far has revealed troubling signs, she said. The U.S. ranks eighth or ninth for
attainment of college education, and 17 percent of high school freshmen receive bacheloCs degrees
within 10 years.
"We have to pick up the pace if wo’re going to be the world’s innovator," she said.
College also must be made available to more low-income and minority students, who go to college and
graduate at much lower rates than others, Spellings said. She praised President Bush’s proposal to
raise the Pell Grant, which is given to students based on financial need, from about $4,300 to $5,400.
She called for simplifying college financial-aid forms and processes.
"Not very long ago, one could lead a very comfortable life without going to college," she said. Now, "a
college education is becoming essential."
Ninety percent of the fastest-growing jobs in the U.S. require education or training beyond high school,

06/05/2008
Stalting Fast, With An Eye On The Long,Rtm (1~ ~Y~ Page 2 of 2
~-’age ~ 1 u /

Spellings said. BLt tirst, she added, students must graduate from high school ready for college.

06/05/2008
Starting Fast, With An Eye On The Lon~z Run (I~. YT) Page 1 of 1
Page 1108

[Nonresponsi]
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 11,2007 8:01 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Floaters, Sarah; Gribble,
Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private - Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar,
Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil;
Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia;
Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Secretary Of Education To Speak At TU (UTCOK)

Secretary Of Education To SpeakAt TU (UTCOK)

University of Tulsa Collegian, September 11, 2007
U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings will give the address at the University of Tulsa’s
fall convocation ceremony on.
According to a press release published by TU on Aug. 23, Spellings will address TU during the
annual event to be held at 4 p.m., Sept. 12 in the Donald W. Reynolds Center.
Convocation is the first formal celebration to open the new academic year. All faculty, staff,
students and friends of the university are invited to attend.
Students who want to attend convocation will be granted an excused absence from class.
TU President Steadman Upham extended the invitation for Spellings to speak at TU’s
convocation alter the two officials participated in a 10-day educational mission to Asia organized
by Spellings. Upham was one of 12 university presidents selected to join in this historic visit.
Spellings, who was sworn in as the education secretary in 2005, is the first mother of school-
aged children to serve in that position.
Prior to her tenure as education secretary, Spellings served as assistant to the president for
domestic policy, where she helped create the No Child Left Behind Act and crafted policies on
education, immigration, health care, labor, transportation, justice, housing and other elements of
the President’s domestic agenda.
Previously, Spellings worked for six years as senior adviser to Governor George W. Bush with
responsibility for developing and implementing the governor’s education reforms and policies.
From the White House and the Statehouse to the school board and cctlege campus, Spellings
has been involved with education policy at every level.

06/05/2008
 Page 1109

lNonresponsiv
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 10, 2007 8:08 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private-
Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica;
Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele,
Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy
Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Literacy initiatives grouped in new discussion drat~ (Education Daily)

Literacy initiatives grouped in new discussion draft (Education Daily)

By Kds Kitto
Education Daily~ September 10, 2007
House Education and Labor Committee leaders gave special treatment to literacy in their newly released discussion drafts
for the remaining titles of NCLB, introducing a new program, strengthening old ones, and taking care of unfinished business
related to the politically contentious Reading First program.
-5tle X of the discussion draft, labeled "Literacy is Essential" in the committee’s dratt summary, lumps Reading First, Early
Reading First and Even Start, all early literacy programs housed in the current laws Title I, Part B, with the new Striving Readers,
an adolescent literacy program also widely considered an effective secondary education intervention strategy.
’We wanted to streamline Title I and combining the literacy programs into their own title was a reasonable step in that
direction," committee spokesman Aaron Albright said in an e-mail statement.
Education policy analysts praised the draft’s new title for what they called a long-awaited recognition of the importance of
a continuous, comprehensive approach to literacy.
’It makes sense," said International ReadNCLB ing Association Government Relations Director Rich Long, "and I think it
will make it easier to understand that literacy is not like taking a pill as a four-year old ... and you’re done."
The draft included careful language on conflicts of interest in the administration of Reading First. The language comes in
response to a drawn-out investigation of, among other things, Education Department contractors who may have had a vested
interest in promoting certain early literacy curricula while dispensing technical advice to states participating in the federal
program.
The draft language looks to have pulled from the Reading First Improvement Act, H.R. 1939, which Rep. Buck McKeon, R.-
Calif., introduced in April during the height of the congressional investigation. ED said it has already implemented many of the
conflict-of-interest safeguards outlined in the bill.
The flagship literacy program also seemed to have received a blessing from Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., who, in a
conference call with reporters last week, toned down the fiery language he once used to describe the controversy surrounding
Reading First.
rViller acknowledged that Reading First has achieved a certain level of success and recognized Education Secretary
Margaret Spellings’ efforts to tighten the program’s management.
The dratt did not take up the appropriations battle Reading First is currently facing. It left blank the program’s funding level,
which traditionally has stood at approximately $1 billion annually, but has suffered scandal-related cuts in this year’s yet-to-be-
approved appropriations process.
The dratt enhances Early Reading First, a preschool literacy program, by adding professional development and English-
language-learner components. It also preserves the Even Start family literacy program, which President Bush proposed 1o
eliminate in his 2008 budget request. If the draft language is passed, Even Start would receive new performance indicators and
undergo a longitudinal evaluation conducted by the Institute of Education Sciences.
The new member of the literacy family is Striving Readers, an adolescent literacy program already being piloted by ED but
introduced for the first time as a full program this Congress by Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky.
The addition of Striving Readers would correspond with the rising demands for mastery in literacy, Alliance for Excellent
Education Policy Associate Jeremy Ayers said.
’We would finally have a comprehensive, transparent and rigorous national reading policy," he said.
Page 1110
 Page 1 of 1
Page 1111

[NonresponsiI
From: Ditto, Trey
Sent: September 06, 2007 3:38 PM
To: Yudof’, Samara; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; ’Landers, Angela’; MacGuidwin, Katie;
Maddox, Lauren; Private - Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.;
Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy;
Talbert, Kent; Ten-ell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; ’Tracy Young’; Tucker, Sara MaNnez;
Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Tucker, Sara (Restricted)
Cc: Anderson, Chdsty
Subject: Spellings for Governor? (Eduwonk)

[Nonresponsive ]
http:/twww.ed uwo nk.com/2OO7/O9tgoverno r-ea rth-mother, html

"Fhursday, ,:September 06, 2007

Governor Earth Mother?

I’ve now he~d the gossip from enou~t people that it seems like there is something to these
rmnors about Secretmy of Education Mmgaret Spellings being interested in rtmning for
governor of Texas...

06/05/2008
 Pa~e 1112

Nonresponsiv,I .__
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 10, 2007 8:07 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private-
Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica;
Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele,
Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy
Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Teacher quality draft spotlights equity (Education Daily)

Teacher quality draft spotlights equity (Education Daily)

Language incorporates TEACH merit pay, changes to HQT standard
By Stephen Sawchuk
Education Daily, September 10, 2007
A reauthorization discussion draft of the remaining NCLB titles released Sept. 6 by the House Education and Labor
Committee would significantly alter the focus of the $3 billion Title II teacher quality formula grant program by making states’
funding contingent on whether states ensure high-poverty and high-minority schools have the same access to quality teachers as
other schools.
The draft serves as the second indication that buffering teacher equity will be one of House education leaders’ top goals for
the reauthorization. In the draft of Title I released in late August, House leaders proposed changes to comparability requirements
that also could cause states to reexamine teacher assignment policies.
The draft also authorizes a handful of newteacher and principal quality discretionary grants - including two supporting merit
pay systems- culled primarily from the widely endorsed Teacher Excellence for All Children Act legislation sponsored by House
education committee chairman George Miller, D-Calif.
Other draft language would alter the "highly qualified" teacher standard the law requires teachers of core academic subjects
to meet.
In all, the drafts indicate House leaders heeded civil rights organizations that urged lawmakers to more narrowly target
teacher quality funding.
The House’s reliance on TEACH language as the basis of Title II could cause Senate Democrats to follow suit. Senate
Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., sponsored the Senate version of
TEACH.
The draft significantly reenvisions the current $3 billion in NCLB teacher quality formula grant funding by tying it to NCLB’s
so-called equity requirement, which says states must ensure that low-income and minority students are not disproportionately
taught by out-of-field, unqualified or inexperienced teachers.
The Title II draft requires states and districts receiving formula funds to conduct needs assessments detailing not just these
disparities within schools, but also disparities in school percentages of first-, second- and third-year teachers and in schools’
teacher attrition rates.
Using the data, states and districts then would use Title II funds to meet "specific, measurable and quantifiable" annual
goals for reducing these disparities.
The langu.age would also significantly reduce ,district Title II spending on class-size reduction efforts.
Districts now spend nearly half of Title 11 formula funds on class-size reduction, an intervention backed by limited research
evidence. The draft would not only limit the percent of funds districts could use for class-size reduction, but require them to spend
it only in high-need K-3 classrooms to reduce the number of pupils to 18 or fewer.
A variety of new programs House education leaders drew almost exclusively from Miller’s own TEACH Act, first introduced
in 2005 and reintroduced this past May, to create several new discretionary grant programs.
They include a grant program for districts to create professional steps or "career ladders" within high-needs schools and
pay bonuses of up to $4,000 to teachers whose students make achievement gains. A separate merit-pay program would allow
teachers and principals rated as exemplary to earn over $10,000 in bonuses for teaching in high-need schools.
Under both programs, the teacher rating system would be based partly, but not exclusively, on growth in student
 Page 1113
achievement as measured by standardized tests. Though the merit-pay programs nod at value-added measures of teacher
effectiveness based on test scores, the draft does not require states or districts to measure teaches effectiveness, a major
recommendation of the Commission on NCLB.
Burning down the HOUSSE The dra~ of Title IX also allows teachers in rural schools some extra time to attain the HQT
standard, and permits high school science teachers to be considered highly qualified upon meeting their state certification
requirements. Recent reports show that states and districts continue to straggle to ~nd HQTs in those areas, and education
stakeholders have long cried for additional HQT flexibility.
Yet the dralt removes the High Objective Uniform State Standards of Evaluation as one route for veteran teachers to attain
the HQT standard- possibly because teacher quali~y organizations such as the National Council on Teacher Quality, as well as
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings herself, have argued HOUSSE set too low of a bar.
Officials for the Education Trust, who have lobbied for a heavier NCLB focus on equitable distribution of teachers, praised
the more focused program.
’1 think it’s almost a home run," said EdTrust Vice President of Governmental Affairs Amy Wilkins. "It says states have to
use real data to solve these problems with equity."
Yet others expressed ambivalence about the changes. Bruce Hunter, associate director of public policy for the American
Association of School Administrators, worded about the capacity of districts, especially those with fewer teachers and
administrators, to meet the new reporting and professional development requirements.
’The focus on improving teaching is exactly the right focus, but there are some things in here that I just think are too
prescriptive," Hunter said.
Most other education stakeholders, including officials from the national teachers’ unions, were still perusing the draft at
press time.
Though both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers endorsed the TEACH
legislation, they likely will oppose several of the proposed changes to Title II and the HQT standard.
In the past, the unions have advocated for the retention of HOUSSE, suppo[ted class-size reduction funding, and
expressed wariness of merit-pay programs.
 Page 1114

INonresponsi,
FrOiTl: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 10, 2007 7:55 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private-
Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica;
Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele,
Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy
Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: International Focus Benefits NU Students (LJSNE)

International Focus Benefits NU Students (LJSNE)

Lincoln Journal Star, September 8, 2007
University of Nebraska officials deserve public support for their efforts to provide NU students more opportunities to study
abroad and meet international students on Nebraska campuses.
Those sorts of experiences are immensely valuable in preparing college students for life and business in the 21s{ century.
NU President J.B. Milliken was one of the university presidents who, along with U.S. Education Secretary Margaret
Spellings, met with political and business leaders, educators and students recently during a swing through Latin America.
Spellings aptly described the importance of international education in a speech to students in Sao Paulo, Brazil:
"Computers, commerce and media link our worlds. But there is still no replacement for actually being there - experiencing a
different culture, making new friends and identifying new approaches to learning. I’m a firm believer in the value of these
experiences. In fact, I put my money where my mouth is .... ~ daughter is studying in Latin America this semester."
UNL has long had a substantial number of international students; graduates who lived in Selleck Quadrangle, where many
international students are housed, reminisce fondly about the experience of meeting students from around the globe.
The number of international students dropped at UNL and across the country, however, atter the terrorist attacks of 2001.
The visit by U.S. officials to Latin America is part of efforts to boost the number of international students.
The number of international students who come to learn in Nebraska is almost twice the number from Nebraska who go
abroad to study, according to figures compiled by the Institute of International Education.
In the 2005-06 school year, there were 3,716 foreign students in the state, the institute reported. There were 1,361
students from Nebraska colleges and universities enrolled abroad in 2004-05.
UNL Chancellor Harvey Perlman emphasized the importance of international education in his State of the University
address. "It gives our students a chance to experience what they’ll experience when they get o[~t there," he said. "Even small
companies have significant relationships with foreign countries."
As Milliken put it, studying abroad and forging international connections in college are no longer frills or luxuries.
"Increasingly, it’s being viewed as a critical part of the academic experience."
UNL is broadening its international offerings next month with the opening of the CorrE=cius Institute, which will host classes
in Chinese language and culture.
That’s a step in the right direction. The commitment of NU officials to provide additional opportunities for international experience
will make the university more valuable for students and all Nebraskans.
 Page 1115

Nonresponsive
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 10, 2007 7:54 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kdstine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private-
Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica;
Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele,
Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy
Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Calling No Child Left Behind A ’Journey’ Undermines Urgency (USAT)

Calling No Child Left Behind A’Journey’ Undermines Urgency (USAT)

USA Today, September 10, 2007
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings stated in a discussion about No Child Left Behind standards with USA TODAY’s
editorial board: "You can’t just say, ’You know what, we’re not going to graduate any kids in Texas this year from high school, not
any of them. No one in Houston will get a diploma this year." She was commenting on how she thinks the standards need time to
work ("NCLB is working, but it’s ’a journey’," The Forum, Aug. 30).
But should students who are illiterate and unemployable be allowed to graduate? What do those students who have not
been prepared to attend college or to hold a job in this global economy do to support themselves and their future families?
Spellings also calls the No Child Left Behind Act a "journey." To call it such does not inspire the urgency or intensity our
children need and deserve.
Most children have only one chance at getting an education so they can become the taxpaying, productive adults this
country needs. President Bush, Congress, Secretary Spellings and NCLB continue to leave the majority of children behind.
NCLB needs to be reauthorized but with clearly defined additions that require all schools and all teachers to be held accountable
for all students.
Marcie Lipsitt
rvtchigan Alliance for Special Education
Franklin, Mich.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is frighteningly out touch with what’s going on in our schools.
The No Child Left Behind Act, narrowly focused on academic achievement and unblinking in its remedies, has caused
panic and pain in schools. Administrators are cutting back on subjects in the arts, science and even P. E. to make room for more
reading, writing and arithmetic.
Academic skills are obviously important, and there’s no question that a troubling achievement gap exists in our schools.
Nonetheless, it is shortsighted to focus resources disproportionately on language arts and math at the expense of activities that
produce well-rounded children. The emotional and physical well-being of a child plays as great a role in lifelong happiness and
success as book learning does.
Until the Department of Education admits that NCLB is flawed and needs fixing, superintendents, school boards and
principals need to have the courage to focus their energies on strengthening the whole child - not just the tested child.
If they don’t, they risk turning o[~ kids who can read and write but cant imagine, create, run or have fun.
Robert J. Inlow
Charlottesville, Va.
I was glad to see USA TODAY take a stand on repairing the flaws in the No Child Left Behind Act, but the editorial missed
the heart of what defines "failing schools" ("Five ways to improve No Child Left Behind," Our View, Education debate, Friday).
As a retired supervisor who once was in charge of 32 elementary schools, I know too well the impossibility of achieving the
NCLB targets as projected.
Along with numerous district administrators, I have sat in many meetings that featured the infamous chart showing
Adequate Yearly Progress goals as a set of stairs leading to 100% proficiency. Not once did anyone in the room agree that these
were reasonable goals for all children to be on grade level by 2014.
Other unintended consequences of NCLB are the lack of attention given to social studies, science and the arts. Also, many
teachers are not allowed to take children out for recess because it takes too much time away from academic learning.
 Page 1116
As a result, we are growing a nation of obese children who know nothing about our history or about what makes the world
go round.
One must hope that after the experiences that districts across the nation have had with NCLB mandates, our politicians will
take the time to talk with their local school administrators and teachers and truly begin to understand the flaws in this legislation.
Its goals are lofty, but its means are ridiculous. Surely, we can do better.
Mara Jambor
Retired educator
Birmingham, Ala.
 Page 1117

Nonres onsive
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 10, 2007 7:54 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, 511; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private-
Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica;
Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele,
Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy
Young; Tucker, Sara MaRine.z; Williams, C~thia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Leaving No Child Behind (WP)

Leaving No Child Behind (WP)

The Washin~ September 10, 2007
With House hearings on the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act beginning today, The Post asked educators,
lawmakers and others for their views of the legislation and what might improve it.
Do you think it’s reasonable to expect your child to know how to read by the end of third grade? I do, and I cant think of a
single reason any parent would feel otherwise.
Thanks to No Child Left Behind, for the first time, families have a right to expect tha~ their children will be performing at or
above grade level -- by 2014. Again: that’s grade-level work or better. Not nuclear physics --just the basic, fundamental skills that
it takes to do all other schoolwork.
Since this act became law, nearly 500,000 more students have learned basic math skills. More than 500,000 others are
getting free tutoring that was never available before. And the parents of 50 million students have more information, more control
and more choices when it comes to their children’s education.
Can we do a better job of challenging kids with advanced math and science and more rigor? Can we do a better job of
getting kids and schools extra help to improve? Can we make accountability, assessment and measurement systems more
effective, reliable, appropriate and sophisticated?
Absolutely. But as we work to strengthen and renew NCLB, we must not make it so "flexible" that it loses its power entirely.
Thanks to this law, we’re shining a bright light on every child’s achievement. We don’t always like what we see. But instead of
obscuring what the law has uncovered, we must focus on the hard work ahead.
Margaret Spellings
U.S. Secretary of Education
From the start, the National Education Association supported the stated goals of No Child Left Behind: ensuring high
expectations for every child, closing achievement gaps and giving all students qualified teachers. We endorsed specific elements
in the law, including targeting funds to the neediest schools and students and disaggregating test data by subgroup. But as time
passed, it became clear that NCLB was falling short of its Iotty goals, and the law’s negative effects on students, educators and
schools began to emerge.
The NEA’s 3.2 million teachers, administrators and other educators fervently believe that every child has a right to attend a
great public school. To that end, we must change the requirements for testing and accountability to include multiple measures of
tracking student progress. Test results are valuable, but they should be used to help students who need help -- not punish those
who are already struggling.
The best way to ensure that no child is lett behind is to give each student individual attention. That can happen only when
classes are a manageable size.
Finally, we must do everything possible to place a highly qualitied teacher in every classroom by providing financial
incentives to teachers in the most difficult schools and expanding professional development opportunities.
Reg Weaver
President,
National Education Associalion
No federal education law has been more misunderstood than No Child Left Behind. But despite all the complaints, no
federal law has accomplished more for the poor and minority children historically shortchanged by our education system.
While we continue to press for closing the achievement gap and preparing all students for the real-world challenges of
 Page 1118
college and career, the federal lawmust maintain a laser-like focus on ensuring that all students are proficient in reading and
math. Congress should resist calls to add more measures to the current accountability system that would provide "extra credit"
for schools failing to meet the needs of their students in these two fundamental subject areas.
The "adequate yearly progress" standard was designed to be easily understood by parents, educators and policymakers.
The clarity of the accountability system shouldn’t be muddied by variables that let schools off the hook for poor performance in
reading and math, even for just one group of students. Instead, Congress should provide funding for the additional supports and
resources that research has identified as critical to academic success -- strong, effective teachers empowered by rich curricula
tied to high-quality assessments of student learning -- and target those resources to the schools that need the most help.
Kati Haycock
President, The Education Trust
No Child Lef[ Behind is a great slogan -- but a flawed program. More and more parents are finding this out. NCLB has
appropriately focused attention on the performance of all students, but it fails in two major areas.
First, NCLB fails to recognize that students for whom English is a second language must learn English before being held
accountable for proficiency in English. The law must change to focus first on learning the language. Only when students have
learned English should they be tested in reading, speaking and writing English fluently and for a variety of purposes.
The second shortcoming of this one-size-fits-all law is that it does nothing to challenge students for whom passing state
tests is easy. The pass rates for Fairfax County students range from 80 to 90 percent, and the more rigorous "pass advanced"
rates are often in the 50 percent range. But the No Child law forces us to focus on the Iowsst 10 to 20 percent of scores and
particularly on the 5 percent of students who are "on the bubble" of passing. While we definitely must continue to work with those
students, we need a new vision for education. We need to create aspirational standards, not just adequate standards
Jack Dale
Superintendent, Fairfax County Schools
I’m a product of the public schools, and for the past five years, I’ve been responsible for turning around the nation’s largest
school district. We’ve approached reform from a simple perspective: the child in the classroom. If we truly value our kids, we
need the next version of NCLB to adopt the same perspective. Here are three key steps Congress should take.
First, the current law allows states to dumb down proficiency levels and create illusions of progress. We need a uniform
measuring stick.
Second, the law measures school performance based on the number of students meeting a minimum proficiency standard.
But what about the rest? Are they improving? The law should be changed so that schools are evaluated on how all their students
are progressing, as New York City and others have already begun doing.
Third, the federal government should substantially increase funding to school districts, but only if districts adopt two critical
reforms: They should pay bonuses to the most effective teachers and principals, based on student improvement, and to those
serving in needy schools. Every other profession rewards excellence; why not in education? Working with labor unions, districts
can adopt appropriate safeguards to ensure that bonuses are distributed fairly.
And districts should be required to reform stifling tenure regulations. Tenure should be earned, not granted automatically,
and it should not mean lifetime job security if teachers cease being competent. Every student deserves an effective teacher, and
nothing is more important to raising student achievement.
~chael R. Bloomberg
Mayor of New York
No factor in a school matters more to the academic success of children than the quality of the teachers and principal. To
close the achievement gap, we must close the teacher-quality gap. Too often, it’s the least qualified and least experienced who
teach poor and minority children.
First, we must require that states and school districts distribute the best teachers equitably across schools. In the past, the
federal government has only paid lip service to equitable distribution.
More important, we need to support teachers to help them continuously grow in the profession and increase the supply of
excellent teachers in all schools. Last week, Congress took a step in this direction by approving funding for scholarships for
excellent undergraduate students who commit to teaching in high-need public schools.
We should also build career ladders that reward teachers for gaining new knowledge and for taking on leadership roles in
their schools. We should assist principals through instruction in management and the use of data to help their schools succeed.
And teachers and principals who excel deserve a raise. While respecting collective bargaining agreements, we should offer
performance pay to hardworking and talented teachers based on fair, proven and objective criteria. When school districts
collaborate with local teachers unions, performance pay systems work -- and children benefit.
If we don’t treat teachers as valued partners in our public schools, we’ll continue to face an unacceptable teacher shortage,
 Page 1119
and children will pay the price.
George Miller
The writer, a Democratic representative from California, is chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.
No Child Left Behind’s greatest strength is that it has institutionalized high expectations for every child in America. To claim
success, a school must prove that all of its children -- including its low-income, minority and special education students and those
who speak English as a second language -- are achieving at high levels. This shif~ in expectations is a vital first step toward
closing the achievement gap.
The law’s greatest weakness is that it focuses too much on teacher qualifications and not enough on teacher effectiveness.
Educators must ensure that every child in this nation has the opportunity to learn from an instructor who has proven skills, as
verified by student achievement data. I cannot claim to be a good teacher simply because I have a master’s in education, two
licenses and eight years of experience. I can claim to be a good teacher only if the data demonstrate that my students have
learned.
Jason Kamras
The writer, a member of D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee’s transition team and a former teacher in the D.C.
school system, was the 2005 national teacher of the year.
Justin is a special education student at another school district in my state. At the beginning of 10th grade, he wrote and
read at a fifth-grade level and was doing seventh-grade math. He took our state assessment in the spring. While an average
student completes the assessment in 3 1t2 hours, it took Justin 24 hours to finish. Understanding that he must pass the
assessment to graduate, Justin studied every night for the following day’s tests.
~hen asked how laws such as No Child Left Behind have changed his work, Justin’s teacher said, "1 definitely expect more
of my students. My standards are way higher." Apparently, Justin’s standards have risen as well. Upon completion of the
assessment, Justin was voted his school’s student of the year based on his work ethic, focus and commitment to excellence.
This is the crowning achievement of No Child Left Behind. As teachers, we are puiting our practices under the microscope.
We are expecting more from our students, and many are delivering.
Yet, unfortunately, when the results came back, Justin and his teachers learned that he had failed. He passed in reading
but was one point short in writing and t 0 points short in math. If Justin wants to graduate, he will have to take the test again next
year.
I fear that because Justin has never been successful in school, he may be so discouraged by this setback that he will give
up. It is possible that in an effort to expect more of Justin, we have taught him that hard work and amazing increases in
achievement are just not enough. Because, despite his great gains, Justin still sees himself as he always has: a failure.
Andrea Peterson
The writer, an elementary music specialist in the Granite Falls, Wash., school district, is the 2007 national teacher of the
year.
As the principal of a Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) public charter school in Oklahoma City, I think the greatest
impact of No Child Lef~ Behind has been to serve as a catalyst for innovation and excellence in public education. Before founding
KIPP Reach College Prep in 2002, I was principal of a chronically low-performing public school here. I felt stifled in the traditional
public school system. Regulations prevented me from extending the school day, week and year, and, often, from hiring the most
talented teachers.
Seeing my frustration, the Oklahoma City schools’ superintendent encouraged me to enter KIPP’s leadership training
program. As a KIPP leader, I was able to select quality teachers, design curriculum and extend the school day. Through hard
work, we are proving that demography is not destiny for underserved students. Our student body is 97 percent African American,
and 90 percent of our students are from low-income families. In 2006, 97 percent of our eighth-graders passed the state reading
test and 100 percent passed mathematics. Statewide, only 56 percent of African American eighth-graders passed reading and
53 percent passed mathematics.
We are proving that when principals are given the freedom to innovate and the necessary resources, we can meet the high
expectations set by NCLB.
Tracy McDaniel
The writer is a member of the KIPP national board of directors.
Education Report Highlights Schools’ Pr~ogiess
~age (~P~0
Page 1 of 14

[~
Nonresponsiv
From: Ditto, Trey
Sent: September 09, 2007 10:18 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Anderson, Chdsty; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri;
Cariello, Dennis; Cohn, Kristine; Colby, Chad; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah;
Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie;
Maddox, Lauren; Private - Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.;
Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy;
Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez;
Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara; Simon, Ray
Subject: WEEKEND NEWS SUMMARY 09.09.07

WEEKEND NEWS SUMMARY 09.09.07

SF Clnonicle on NCLB re-anth

Rob Bluey of Townhall.com: "Education Reform Goes Frosn Bad to Worse"
WaPo: Superintendent Seeks to Revamp ’No ClOd’ Act
Dallas Morning News’ Bill McKenzie: Has Bush been good for Texas?
New York Times on local school cheating

http://ww~v, s fgate.com/cgi-bin/arli cle.cgi ?file=/c/a/2OO7/Og/O9/IVINA5SOCNB.DTL

No ClOd Left Behind Act faces overhatfl, political donnybrook

In 2002, t~vo of Cengress’ liberal Democratic lions - Rep. George Miller of Mmlinez and
Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy - stood behind President Bush as he signed the No
Child Left Behind Act, a law they womised wotfld shine a bright light on the failures in
America’s public schools and kick-stm’t refoi~rs.

Five years later, Miller, no~v chai~nan of the House Education and Labor Committee, is still
a believer. But after traveling the cmtntry - listening to complaints ~om parents, teachers,
school administrators and governors about the law’s testing regi~ne and stiff sanctions - he
now a&nits it needs fixing.

"We’ve lemx~ed a lot, and we sholildn’t ignore that evidence," said Miller, who is leading the
overhatfl of the law in the House, wtfich struts this week. "What we’re t~:ying to do in this
reauthorization bill is to look for those changes to make tiffs a smartel; fairer, better law."

Reform is coming to No Child Left Behind, but the question is what ldnd. Teachers unions,
which bitterly oppose the law, are pushing to relmx its rigid testing rules and penalties.
Business groups, eager for better-educated workers, want to see the tongh accountability
measures prese~xed or expanded. Many states and local school ~lisl~icts are clmnofing for
more flexibility in implementing the law, which expires this yem’.

06/05/2008
Education Report Higtdights Schools’ PtRgress Page 2 of 14
~age (~e~ 1

Miller is seeking a middle gammd: He wants to keep the law’s requkement of annual tests in
reading and math for thh’d- to eighth-gradeL~ and 10th-graders, but add other measurements -
such as percentage of kids in college-prep classes - to help schools show they are ineeting the
law’s demands to make yearly progress in student achievement.

The president, who sees rile law as a crucial pm~ of his legacy, has dug in ltis heals. Bnsh’s
education secretmry, Margaret Spellings, a fellow Texan ~vho helped w~ite the law, warned
last ~veek that Congress was preparing to weaken it.

"We are on the ~{ght track, we need to stay the coar’se," Spdlings said. "We don’t need to
water tiffs law down or change directions now. It is a good and s~ong taw that is reasonable,
necessary and doable for ore" kids."

Education policy experts say the changes aren’t likely to be revolutionary. Miller and
KemLedy, whose Senate Education Commit~e will take up the law later this fall, still believe
the idea of setting high goals and demanding that schools achieve them is tile right approach.
But they now appear ready to revisit tile details of the law.

"This bill is not a maj or overhaul, its more of a correction," Jack Jennings, president of the
Center on Education Policy, said of the dralt bill that Miller and the panel’s top Republican,
Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon of Santa Clmita (Los Angeles Cmmty), released late last
month. "It is not an effoL* to throw standards-based refrain overboardIlls
.... trying to address
what have been percdved to be the ,naj or problems of the law."

For mmty teachers, the mere mention of the words "No Child Left Behind" draws SCO1TL
Many complain they now spend much ofthdr ~ne getting students ready for the tests. A
sm~cey by tile Cenl~r on Education Policy fotmd that 71 percent of the nation’s 15,000
schools had cut instruction time for other subjects - such as history, art and music - to focus
on reading and math.

"It nala’OWS the ctmicularn," said Joel Packer, a policy manager for the National Education
Assodation, the nation’s largest teachers union. "Particularly in reading, there is this
increasingly strict ctmiculum being imposed that teachers feel doesn’t treat them as
professionals and is taking creativity out of the classroom."

Polls show that the public is also growing wem3r of the rdiance on testing. A Phi Ddta
Kappa/Gallup poll in Jtme fomtd that 52 percent of public school parents felt there was too
much testing, up fiom 32 percent in 2002. katd 75 percent of public school parents said the
focus on testing was leading teachers to teach to tile test, not the subject matter.

Miller hopes to address the complaint by allowing states to use other factors to judge a

06/0512008
Education Report Highlights Schools’ Pr~ogless Page 3 of 14
t-’age (15P~ 2

school’s improvement: gradnation rates, rates of students taking Advanced Placement classes
and going to college, as well as results from statewide exams on histo~7, science, writing and
other topics. But math and reading scores would still dominate, accotmting for 85 percent of
a school’s index of yearly progress for elementat~y and middle schools and 75 percent for high
schools.

Critics have attacked Miller’s approach froln both sides. Teachers unions and advocates for
states and school boards say the proposal still relies too heavily on the two tests. But
Spellings and business groups wat~ that it could create a confusing new accountability
system for parents, which might allow some states or individual schools to fig the results.

"We’re concerned that it may pro,tide too many opportunities for schools to game the system
and obscure the fact that students are not progressing toward reading and doing math at grade
level," said Arthur Rothkopf, a senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Some parents and educators say the law is shortchanging gifted students: Schools are rated
based only on whether they get kids to "proficiency" in math and reading, but they get no
credit for getting kids beyond proficient.

"It’s not that teacha’s don’t wm~t to challenge those gifted kids, but there is so much pressure
on them to pay attention to the other ldds," said Susan Goodldn, president of the California
Learning Strategies Center, a Ventura-based group that works with parents.

Many schools object to being labeled as tmderperfonning because they missed the targets for
one subgroup - say, ifa small nmnber of Afiican A~nefican students failed to reach
proficiency in math - which triggers tough sanctions.

"If School A hits 80 percent of its tatgets and School B hits 20 percent of its targets, under
the cmrent taw they are both treated the same way," said Reginald Felton oftlie National
School Boards Association. "ThaWs not fah’."

Miller wants to ease the penalties on schools that nat~owly miss the targets, giving them more
fieedom to spend federal dollars to help those that missed the goal. But the adininistration
says it would let too many schools offthe hook and keep all students fiom getting free
tutoring promised under the original law.

The draft House bill also offers more flexibility in testing special needs students - giving
states up to two additional yem~ before English language leat-ners must take reading and math
tests in English, and allowing ~nore students with disabilities to take 1nodified tests. Spellings
warned that it could hinder the progress made by those groups.

There’s one key at’ea where the White House mtd Congress agree: expanding the use of

06/05/2008
Education Report Higtflights Schools’ Pl~ogress
t-’age (~P~3 Page 4 of 14

"growth models," a ne~v type of test that gauges how the stone group of students peffo~ns
over ti~ne, rather than measuring this year’s third-graders against last year’s third-grade class.
A dozen sh~tes are using the new measmements nnder a pilot progrmn with the Depm-trnent
of Education, m~d now more states would get the chance.

The o~iginal act was the product of a rare left-right consensus in Washington - a shared view
that strong accoar~tability was needed in the public schools - and passed by huge bipm~isan
majorities: 381-41 inthe House; 87-10 inthe Senate.

But the consensus may be cracking. A Republican bill in the House by Rep. Pete Hoekstra,
R-Mich., that would allow states to opt out of No Child Left Behind has more than 60 co-
sponsors. A similm" bill is being pushed in the Senate by Sen. Jhn DeMint, R-S.C.

On the fight, "there’s a sprit between the accountability hawks and those who see the law as a
substantial achievement of this administration and those who either have buyer’s r~norse -
who backed it in 2001 to support the president but now regret it - or those ~vho weren’t in
Congress and now see it as inconsistent with conservative traditions," said Frederick Hess, an
education expert at the Panerican Entel~prise Institute.

The split is even more evident in the Democratic Party. All the maj or presidential contenders
have trailed shal~ply against the act. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said at a recent debate
that he would scrap it. Sen. Baiack Obmna, D-Ill., told a group oftmion teachers in July,
"Don’t come tip with this law called No Child Left Behind and then leave the money behind."

The law is so closely identified with the Republican president and the teachers unions are
such a key voting bloc in early l~immy states that it has become an easy target - even to
senators such as Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who voted for it.

"While the children are getting good at filling in all those little bubbles, what exactly are they
really learning?" she asked delegates at a National Education Association meeting in New
Hampshire earlier this year.

The rising anti-No Child sen~nents in both parties may make it tough for Kennedy to co~al
the 60 votes needed to reautholize the law in a divided Senate. So far he’s divulged few
details about his plans - leaving the fight for now to the House.

Miller is ah’eady t~acing opposition fi’om one powerful player in his backyard - the Califo~a
Teachers Association. The teachers tmion plans to am~ounce Monday that it will rally its
340,000 members to urge Congl’ess to block Miller’s legislation.

"There hasn’t been any real refo~ ... it’s still one-size-fits-all testing," said David Sanchez,
the group’s l~’esident.

06/05/2008
 Edncation Report Highlights Schools’ Prog1~ss Page 5 of 14
Page (~P:;) 4

In the House, the fate of the law could rest in the hands of the 12 frestnnen who sit on
Miller’s committee, who did not vote for the law and heard intense criticism of it dttring theh"
campaigns. Miller said thafs part of why he’s pushing for changes.

"S olne people just want to extend the cmTent law - I don’t think there are the votes in
Congress to do that," he said. "People understand this law has to be made fairer, has to be
made ~nore flexible."

Education Reform Goes From Bad to Worse

By Robert Bluey
Sunday, September 9, 2007

No Child Left Behind has seen better days. Under attack from both the right and left,
President Bush’s signatm’e education achievement might not smwive if some members of
Congress get their way.

House Education and Labor Chaillllan Geolge Miller (D-Cali£) offered a 435-page
legislative diaft last month that rewrites several provisions attd gnts the few measures in the
law that limited-government conservatives support.

Speaker Nancy Pdosi (D-Cali£) wants to go one step ftu~her and renane the law to
something other than No Child Left Behind.

So not only does the Bush adininistration face the prospect of signifimnt policy changes, it
could also lose the marketing appeal of the law’s name.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, ~vho last week fought back against the proposed
chang&S_, might be better offwith the status quo than trys~g to reauthofize the law in a hostile
Congress. Her biggest gripe was Miller’s at~mpt to water down the penalties schools face for
failing to live up to the law’s testing reqttirements, but it’s just one of many differences that
need to be ad~hessed.

Mean~vhile, conservatives ~vho are see!dng to tdm government bm’eaneracy, end ineffective
programs and restore state and local control in education won’t find much to like in Miller’s
435-page draft. His other changes include new regnlatious, more programs and fewer options
for school choice. Miller has also made no attempt to fix No Child Left BeNnd’s s~nctm’al
probleins.

Changes to the school-choice provisions are particularly troublesome given the large mtmber
of congress~nen who suppoit private schools in theh" personal life. A report fioin The
Heritage Foundation last week revealed metnbers of Congress send their ldds to private
schools at a rate nearly fore times that of the general population.

Two notable examples are Sens. Hillmy Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Ted Ke~medy (D-Mass.). But
they’re not alone. More than 37 percent of House members and 45 percent of senators have
sent their children to private school. Meanwhile, 52 percent of Congressional Black Caucus
members and 38 percent of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus have had at least one child in
private school.

06/05/2008
 Education Report Highlights Schools’ Pr~ogi~ss Page 6 of 14
b’age (~P~5

Despite those sm~isingly high nmnbers, Miller’s proposed changes to No Child Left Behind
gut its school-choice provisions. It see~ns some members of Congress--who are paid
$165,200 per year~t~ave no problem personally Nlcing advantage of school choice, but they
are willing to reduce the school-clioice options for those without financial means to afford it
on their own.

As Democrats push for these changes, conservatives have taken the opposite approacli. Led
by Sens. Jotm Cornyn (R-Texas) and Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-
Mich.), a group of Republicans are purstfing legislation kmown as A-PLUS_. Their bill
attempts to b~ing greater transparency to No Child Left Behind and reduce the additional 6.7
million hours that school officials are spending to comply with the law.

"No Child Left Behind originally sought to return some education policy-making authority to
the states, but in its cmTent form the le~slation is a massive spending bill filled with federal
mandates that increase the presence of federal bureaucrats in our classrooms," Rep. Tim
Walberg (R-Mich.), a co-sponsor of the A-PLUS Act; said last week on the House floor.

It’s too bad Spellings was so quick to reject the conservatives’ ideas earlier this yem. While
their proposal might not have been exactly what she wanted, it would be a significant
improvement over the big-govemm ent solutions that Miller hopes to pass into law.

At this point, no conse~-cafive cotfld support what Miller has proposed. If liberals are serious
about the changes they want to make, it’s only a matter of time before the Bush
administration realizes it won’t get anything good frmn this Congress on education policy.
The status quo just might be a better option.

Robert B. Bluey is d#’ector of the Center forMedia & Public Policy at The Heritage
Foundation and maintains a blog at RobertBlueF.com

Superintendent Seeks to Revamp ’No Child’ Act

Halaiek Calls Law’Quagmire of Rules’

By Michael Alison Chandler

Washington Post Staff Wliter
Sunday, September 9, 2007; LZ01

Loudoun Cotmtg School Supe~Sntendent Edgar B. Halrick III assailed the federal
govemmenffs No Child Left Behind law last week at a meeting of business leaders and state
lawmakers.

The 16-year head of the 53,000-pupil school system has been a vocal opponent of federal
requirements that English-language learners take the same reacting tests as their native-
speaking peers. His criticisms of the law were broader last week, as he told the audience that
he is working with superintendents locally and nationally to overhaul the entire program,
which is slated for reauthorization this fall in Congress.

The law has become "a quagmire of rules and regulations that don’t make sense," he said
Wednesday morning at an annual education-focused mee~tg of the Loudoun Chamber of
Co~nmerce, at the school adininistrafion bttilding in Ashbt~aa.

06/05/2008
Education Report Highlights Schools’ tS~og~ss Page 7 of 14
~age t5P~6

Hat~ick noted that, for the first thne, a Loudoun elementat7 school faced federal sanctions
fltis yea for failing to meet all its test-score tingets two years in a row. The school system
~vas required to pelmit parents to transfer their children, an option that more than 30 fmnilies
took, he said.
Hal~ek said it is counterintuitive and eount~al~roductive to have students go elsewhere before
intervening with support and selvices at a school that has fallen short of benchmarks.

"We have to change the whole notion ofpunistmlent and recognize improve~nent," he said.

Under No Child Left Behind, each school has to ~neet test-score targets for as many as 29
subgroups of students, which are based on such factors as race, ethnicity, disability and
economic status.

Taldng into accotmt all the subgroups, schods and subjects areas being tested, the Loudoun
school system met federal benchinarks in all but 49 of 1,914 categories. Neveitheless, 14
schools and the di~ict as a whole were considered to have fallen sho~t of the testing
standards.

"To me, that ~neans we should be getting more than a passing giade," Hatfick said, "not being
labeled as ’not maldng adequate yearly progress.’ "

In the spiing, HaNck and a few other ViINNa supelintendents met with federal lawmakers
and U.S. Education Depm~nent officials, including Secretary Margaret Spellings, to urge
them to allow English-language lemxters to take alternative tests. His efforts were
tmsuccessfiil.

Now he is advocating for much broader changes. He helped craft a proposal by the American
Association ofS chool Administrators, a professional association with 13,000 me~nbers, for a
revamping of No Child Left Behind. He said in an interview last ~veek that he plans to meet
witli me~nbers of Congress in the coming months to discuss the group’s agenda.

He said the law should be changed so that the federal gove~nnent takes a supporting role,
rather than a leading one, in deteixnining how students and teachers m’e assessed. He also
mahitained that pmfitive measm’es should be replaced by supportive ones.

In his return-ks Wednesday, Hatrick said the federal gover~m~ent does not provide enough
money to school systems to justify so many mandates. The fedelal shme of Loudoun’s
operating budget of nearly $700 million is about 1.6 percent.

He also said the school system needs to stress creativity over test-taking sldlls if students are
to succeed in the changing global and innox~afion-based economy.

"We don’t want public education to become a 13-year course in how to take a test," he said.
"I want the testing called for by No Child Leg Behind to become a reflection of how a
progressive ctmicuhm~ is being taught."

Has Bush been good for Texas?

While he has reaffirmed our old cowboy stereotype, he’s also thi’own caution to the wind,
pohiting the way to a new ldnd of Lone Star state, says WILLIAM McKENZIE

06/05/2008
Education Report Higtflights Schools’ thxgless (~A~P.)_, Page 8 of 14
Page 1 lZ~

12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, September 9, 2007

Whether George W. Bush has been good for Texas is a fair question to raise no~v that the
state’s most prominent politician since LBJ has played most of his cm’ds. Baning another
terrorist attack or, God forbid, war with Irarg we have enottgh data to evaluate the president
mid his effect on a state that oozes out of every pore of his body.

My simple conclusion is, Mr. Bush has been bad for Texas when it comes to perpetuating the
old stereotypes. His swagger, stubbornness and Stetsons press our old frontier image fight
into the face ofinany people around file cotmtt3r and world who hate all that rawhide stuff.
ffs woful enough people out that I doubt any Texan will make it onto a national ticket for a
generation. (Kay Bailey Hutchison and Rick Pen3r probably hate to hem" that, but the odds me
against the senator or governor getting on the GOP ticket next yem’.)

If we stopped there, we’d be lef~ with the cartoonish Bush. However, if you look depeer, you
see that Mr. Bush has given voice to a diverse, mtflficuitural, brain-driven Texas. As ,vith
inost things in this presidency, it will take a long while before many people - including,
perhaps, many Texans - can appreciate how he has embodied this latest version of our state.
But when historians start poking around, they will see that his e~nphasis on education and
immigration was as progressive as LBJ’s push for civil rights and a greater society.

Lel~s stair, though, with the Old Texas.

The Old Texas

I guess we shored have known it was going to be a bumpy ride the freezing day President-
elect Bush left Midland for Washington in Janum3r 2001. The local boy was on his way to the
Big Show and ready to play Texan, with Iris cowboy hat tightly planted arotmd his em~. It
reminded me of how I used to wear boots when I lived in Washington in the 1980s just to
remind me where I was fi’om - and to show others who might get a glimpse of them.

The o~fly thing tmusual about the Bush hat is that most of the folks there and arotmd Texas
had probably never seen their governor wearing a cowboy hat. I never had, and I had covered
Mr. Bush pretty closely. He was never a Yankee-in-disguise, but nor was he yore Clayfie
Willimns-style cowboy pol.

But he was going to D.C., hat planted fmnly on his head. Since then, we’ve had mnple doses
of Lonesome Dove postming, right down to the "bling ’era on" lines about insurgents in haq
and "dead or alive" remarks about Osama bin Laden. A Texan living in France at the time
told me the French just tlipped out over lines like that.
Even before 9/11, when he ~vas balking at Europeans maldng a fuss over global wanning at
the 2001 G-8 smnmit, Europe was beginning to box tiffs guy in as a little J.R., equal parts oil
man and cowboy and all rawhide.

Magazines and cmtoonists by the bushel have played on the image. And Tex,’ms have mn up
against it themselves.

A fiiend told me about two Texans he katows ~vho tom" Europe each summer with theft" little
band. The musicians now have to bob and weave their way through audiences once the crowd

06/05/2008
Education Report Highlights Schools’ Progress Page 9 of 14
t-’age tA~P~ 8

finds out they are fi’om Texas. They are anytlfing but Bush-o-philes, yet Emopeans see them
as such - and that’s not good for business.

Tlie oifly ones to benefit frown reaction to all firings Texan may be the Dixie Chicks, whose
anti-Bush cowgirl shtick plays well outside the state. For the rest of Texas, the Bush
presidency may have unleashed a whole new round of insecurities. Texans spent much of the
last half of the 20th centre7 showing the rest of the world they have opera houses, five-star
restaurants and fine museums. Eight years of George W. Bush inthe White House may have
wiped all that out.

The Ne~v Texas

Ironically, though, Mr. Bush has shown the rest of the world that Texas is not the monolithic
cultm’e so ~nany assume it to be. He’s done that largely by Nlking about America being a
welcoming society for immigrants.

Month after month, the president has taken unbelievable grief from his party about his views
on immigration. But the resistance has never stopped the Texan from talldng about kids en
the other side of the border looking at the U.S. as a land of opportunity. Or saying he wants
Anglo !dds learning Spanish along with Latino kids leartgng English. Or describing the way
the U.S. and Mexico are linked at the hip. Or reminding Republicans that they should reach
out to Hispanics.

Part of this, I’m sm’e, stems from living here and seeing ~vhat was going on around trim, just
as LBJ pushed for equal rights because he remembered the Lath~o and black kids he knew
back in the Hill Country. Mr. Bush could see the demographic shift going on in Texas, and he
didn’t want his party or state to ignore it.

Part of his passion for a welcoming society also stems from his tmdel~tanding of economics.
As a businessman and governor, he saw the commerce going back and forth. He read all the
numbers about trade between Texas and Mexico. And he ki~ew we hurt ourselves by tmNng
a blind eye to Mexico and the positive role in, migrants play in America.

This ties in directly, by the way, to his relentless push for better schools. As governor, Ivh-.
Bush spent much of his fnst three years in Austin rewriting the laws Nat govern schools and
l~3ring to find a better way to fired can~puses. He took that passion to Washington, where he
made better schools the centerpiece of his domestic legacy. The No Child Left Behind Act,
which he passed with Ted Kennedy, is about making sme all kids are ready for an economy
that will leave them behind if they don’t have ready skills.

The passion for education goes beyond i~nmigration, of cottrse. You just have to look at all
the computer campuses and high-rise offices in subm’ban Texas to see that the fiitm’e of
Texas rests with having people who know how to solve problems and ttfink about the next
generation of tectmologies, medicines and tlie like.

When the president’s talking about education, he’s talking about lllose office parks, just as
he’s talking about the ones around the subm’bs of cities like Denver, Washington and Boston.
Brains drive indush3r there, and without good schools, employers will go looking overseas
for creative workers.

At fltis point, it is dear that Texas has suffered frown the Bush years. But as in LBJ’s case,

06/05/2008
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t-’age 1 ] ZJ

where it took years to get past Vielxmm and the yahoo image, we need some dislance on Mr.
Bush, too. Tlien, we will see inore dearly how his fol~vard-looking stances on education mid
immigration were good for the nation - and the state.

William McKenzie is a Dallas Mot~ing News editorial columnist. His e-mail address is
wmckenzie@dallasnews, corn.
Interest grows in tutor program
School officials expect to "max tile nmnbers" this year as more parents take advantage oftlie
fi’ee se~adce.
By JEFFREY S. SOLOCHEK, Times Staff Writer
Published September 9, 2007

HUDSON - When Heather Schaeffer heard slie Coltld get free tutoring for her children, slie
didn’t thinl~ twice.

"I said, ’Thank you, God.’ Because I didn’t read until junior high. My father had to get a
second job so I could go to Sylvan," Schaeffer said Wednesday night, as she attended a
tutoring provider Fair at Nol-~hwest Elementary. "I just raced right over."

Last year, Schaeffer had no problems getting her son, Sylvester, ,and daugliter, Cnetehe~g into
the federally funded progrmn, a component of the No Child Left Behind Act. In Pasco
County, as nationally, just a small percentage of the children eligible for services actually
took advantage.

Tiffs year, file nmnber of digible students has grown along with the genelxlly favorable word
of mouth. Schaeffer WOlaies that her kids won’t get access to the se~adces that the federal
government promises to low-income children who attend schools that don’t make adequate
yearly academic progress for three or more years.

"My kids need exlra help," she said. "Sometimes, teachers give home~vork but don’t explain
it, and the kids don’t bother to ask ....For me to go and teach it, well, I have a cosmetology
degree, not a teaching degree."

Her concerns are not without merit.

Pasco has about $2.4-million to put into No Child Left Behind choice options, including
tutoring. With a state-imposed cap of$1,199per stltdent, officials esthnate they can provide
tutoring to about 1,500 childi’en. Another 100 or so have taken a choice voucher to another
school.

"We know we }lave almost 6,000 students who are eligible" at 15 schools, up from 11 ayear
ago, said Lydia Ray, who oversees the tutoring progrmn for the district "We lcnow we’re
going to max the nmnbel~."

The district already has made plans to parcel out the available seats in that event. If the
nmnber of applicants sul~passes the mnnber of seats by the Sept. 14 deadline, Ray said, the
district will give ilrst priority to students who scored Level 1 or 2 on the most recent FCAT
exRm.

"We’re going to put all the students in the computer system and not assign them until we have

06/05/2008
Education Report Highlights Schools’ Pr~ogmss Page 11 of 14
Fage

a ctuance to see ho~v many have registered," Ray said.

The district has taken additional steps to ensure that some of the problems that plagued the
tutoring system last year do not recur. One of the biggest issues was making sttre that kids
who sign up actually get tutored.

Last JanumN, according to district records, about 780 ctfildren were getting tutoring. Pmother
t 00 had yet to be served.

One of the reasons: Tutoring companies signed up students before hiring tutors and then
didn’t follow through.

This year, the district is not assigning students to the companies tmfil they have provided
proof that the tutols are hired. The tutors also must have clean backgrotmd reports filed with
the dislxict ahead of time.

As ,an extra test of their reliability, the district is requiling tutors to ati~nd each school’s
provider fair. Ifa company cannot send a representative when parents are coming to register
or ask questions, Ray explained, its commilsnent to serving students is not strong enough.

That’s as it should be, said Jack Brown, an orea supelwisor for Club Z, a Tampa-based
tutoring firm.

"If you have infi’as~x~cture and you’re invested in the community, you shouldn’t have a
problem," Brown said. "I like the rifles. They really benefit the small business owner and the
local guys who are really trying to make a difference in the commuuity."

Why tile contractors?

Club Z, like many of the other providers, uses local teachers to do the tutoring. Several
educators have ~vondered why the federal govelmnent is ftmneling money through the private
firms, rather than just giving the money to school districts who ah’eady kiae the teachers and
might provide the selvices more cheaply.

When Pasco was looking at offering tutoring on its own, it planned to charge $20 an hour.
The private compauies charge anywhere from $40 to $90 per hottr. And they’re not required
to hire degreed educators.

U.S. Rep. George Miller, the California Den~ocrat ~vho helped el’aft No Child Left Behind,
recently told a group of Tampa education leaders that he considered that pal~ of the system a
"seam." He is proposing that districts be allowed to use a portion of their tutoring and choice
money to otter after-school programs rm~ by the schools.

In the meantime, though, teachers continue to flock to the tutoring program.

"I wondered why this has to be done, having independent co~npmfies come in to do what
educators do all day long, and then get hired to do this," said Darlene Lyman, a teacher who
oversaw the tutoring progI’am at Pasco Elementary and now helps A+ Tutor U. at fottr
schools. "But then I gave itup and decided to do this."

In her role at Pasco Hementm7, Lyman said, she saw some compmfies ttnive while others

06/05/2008
Education Report HiDhlights Schools’ 15"o~gless Page 12 of 14
t-’age (~P;1

failed to meet student needs. She said the new rules helped drive out lhe lesser providers,
leaving the better ones to sei-ve the kids.

"I have so inany teachms in my school that war~t to tutor no,v, because of the success ~ve hM
last year," Lyman said.

Parents catching on

Parents are more interested in this second year, too.

Kim Wellman said she was surprised last year ~vhen her boys, Logan m~d Hunter, ~vere
mnong the small handful attending tutoring sessions at Nolthwest Elementmy.

"I thought it was great," Wellman said. "I tl~nk they lemTmd a lot."

It was just a matter of time, she figured, before others would catch on. She would have
preferred the program stay small, so her kids get more one-to-one attention. But if they don’t
get in fltis time, Wellman said, she’s okay with that, because they improved so much last
year.

Nolthwest plindpal Tracy Crraziaplene said she’s done all she could - earlier notice, detailed
packets and so on - to get more kids involved. Looking aroar~d the provider fair, she liked
what she saw.

"Last year at our open house, we had three oi four eo~npanies that came. Right now we have
13 meeting with (parents) and talldng about tutoling," Gaaziaplene said. "I’m hoping a lot of
parents come and take advantage of it."

Jeffrey X Solochek can be reached at solochek@,sptimes.com or (813) 909-4614. For more

education news, visit the Gradebook at b logs. tampabay, cotrdschools.

Tutoring available

Low-income families who send their childa’en to Title I schools that have not made adequate
yearly academic progress for three or more years can choose to em’oll theh" kids in a different
school or to sigal them up for free tutming.

The state allocates $1,199 per student, and l%sco schools have about $2.4-million for the
program, meaning about 1,500 children can recdve the services. About 6,000 are eligible.
Enrollment continues tlnough Sept. 14.

The pat±ieipating dementary schools are: Cox, Pasco, Marlowe, Hudson, Gulfside, Scttrader,
Lacoochee, Northwest, West Zephyatfills, Chasco, Moon Lake, Shady Hills, Smnay, Richey
and Locke.

Schools Under Scrutiny Over Cheating

By FORD FESSENDEN

AT a time when the pressure to do well on standardized tests in public schools creates

06/05/2008
Education Report Highlights Schools’ Profess Page 13 of 14
age t5P;2

incentives to cheat, states are just begim~ing to look for the patterns that betray it.

While there is nothing new about cheating, in the last year state officials say teachers or
adminisla’ators on Long Island and in New Jersey and Westchester have hied to improve their
schools’ standings using methods that were ultimately easy to detect. But no one was looking
systematically.

New Jersey has since begun flagging big changes in scores at individual schools, and New
York is consideiing such a measm’e. But unlike some othei states, neither New York, New
Jersey nor Connecticut looks systeinafically at individual tests for the kinds of patterns that
nltimately confiuned the cheating in Yonkers and Uniondale.

In Cmnden, a large improvement in scores at two schools in 2005 -- one school’s foul~h-
grade ~nath test scores rocketed fi’om near file bottom to the veiN top in the state in one year
-- went ulmoticed by the state until The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on the matter last
yea. The state ev~ttually said file scores resulted from °’adult interference."

In Yonkers, erasttres on last year’s state-mandated English examination that changed the
same wrong ans~vers on test after test at foul" elementary schools were found only after an
anonymous whistleblower pointed them ont to the State Department of Education.

And in Uniondale on Long Island, someone altered an entire coltmm of answers on hm~dreds
of math tests in 2006, substituting right answers for wrong ones. The state discovered a
pattern to the substitutions ~vhile looking at how well the district was doing in specific
subject areas, but the cheating, state officials said, had been going on for some tim e; the
investigation showed a similar pattei:n in 2005.

No one has been dlarged in any of the cheating cases. But they have provoked some changes
in how test results are exmnined and may lead to more.

After the revelations in Camden, Ne~v Jersey instituted a simple screening of test restflts that
wottld flag any school whose score changed beyond what was statistically likely. New York
authorities are co,tsideling some kind ofscreeifing.
None of the states take advantage of compnl~rs to look for patterns of changes of the sort that
~nade the Yonkers and Uniondale cheating easy to prove once the stal~ was alerted to them.

°~ne question is: Is what happened in Yonlc~ers and U~fiondale very isolated, or is it indeed
more prolific than we think it might be?" said Roger B. Tilles, of the New York State Board
of Regents. "We don’t know, because we don’t have the resomces to detect it."

Thomas M. Haladyna, a professor emeritus at AIizona State University who has conducted
numerous studies on cheating, said, "Anyone with halfa brain could cleverly cheat and never
get caught, but teachers and adminislaators know tile state and the districts have no
oversight."

The testing mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind law creates consequences,
including the closing of schools and the reassigning of teachers and administrators, when its
standards are not met. Because the groups that suffer consequences are also charged with test
secarity, Dr. Haladyna said he thought cheating was °’epidemic."

06/05/2008
Education Report Highlights Schools’ tS"~ogress Page 14 of 14
t-’age (~P;3

But state and local officials say that they believe cheating is rare. ~’Malevolent behavior is a
small subset," said Jay Doolan, assistant connnissioner of the New Jersey Department of
Education.

In Connecticut, William Congero, the director of student assessment, agreed. "We’re

ce]q:tinly aware of the kinds of things that can happen," he said, "but we believe the test
examiners are honest and don’t take part in this."

In New York, the number of complaints of cheating by teachers has increased, to 37 in the
2005-6 school year fi’om 22 in 2004-5. But state officials point to the nmnber of cases that
were verified, 12, which is down fi’om 16 inthe previous year, and say they see no cause for

"We’re not going to deny we’ve seen some actions fi’oIn bad actols in the field," said David
M. Abrams, the assistant commissioner for standards, assessment and reporting for the New
York State Depaltment of Education. But, he said, "We don’t believe chealktg is
widespread."

In Uniondale, a Nassau Board of Cooperative Educational S etwices analyst who was

exarnhting performance on each question on state exams to find wealmesses in iustmction
fotmd tl~e cheating pattern: very high scores by all students on the last few questions of math
tests, but mediocre scores on the earlier ones.
The pattern existed on five (lifferent tests --two regents exmninations, a middle school test
and two grade school tests. Once lined up question by question, the pattern was obvious and
corresponded on some tests to the last cohann of answers, which had been systeinatically
changed.

Mr. Tilles has began pressuring the New York Ne~v Yorkpm~nent of Education to screen all
schools for such patterns, but Mr. Abrams said the depaliment had not decided ~vhat to do.
"We are looking at ways to apply large-scale statistical analyses," he said.

New Jersey has begtm screening tests using a simple mathematical equation that measttres
the change in scores at a school from year to yem’. Some districts were asked to explain
sudden changes, but none are suspected of cheating, said Mr. Doolan, the assistant
commissioner.

Some states have taken fitrther measm’es. California and Ohio automatically screen all tests
for suspicious erasures.

’°The states shotfldbe doing this simply becanse they have the technology to do it," said
Robe~t Tobias, director of the Center for Research on Teaching and Learning at New York
University and a fo~ner head of testing for New York City schools. ’’With the high-speed
computers and the advanced psychomelxics, one can actually do this Fairly quicHy and
identify places where there appear to be anomalies.’"

06/05/2008
 Page 1134

~Nonresponsiv
From: Ditto, Trey
Sent: September 08, 2007 11:28 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello,
Dennis; Cohn, Kristine; Colby, Chad; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private-
Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica;
Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Case)/; Scheessele,
Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy
Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, C~thia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara; Simon, Ray
Subject: WEEKEND NEWS SUMMARY 09.08.07

WEEKEND NEWS SUMI4ARY 09.08.07

AP, New York Times, and Forbes.com on HR2669 CQ on Democrats promising more education
legislation Kodiak Daily Mirror (AK) saying NCLB should have a cookie-cutter approach WaPo
on Catholic schools possibly becoming charters

Bill Boosting Student Aid Is Approved

Associated Press?Saturday, September 8, 2007; A03 Congress approved legislation yesterday
that cuts more than $20 billion in goverrrment subsidies to institutions that make student
loans, and uses most of that money to pay for increased financial aid for college
students.
The bill would increase the m~xim~n Pell grant, which goes to the poorest college
students, from $4,310 a year to $5,400 a year by 2012.
It also would cut interest rates on federally backed student loans to poor and middle-
class students from 6.8 percent to 9.4 percent over the next four years.
President Bush has indicated he will sign the bill, despite previous objections to some of
its provisions.
The House voted 292 to 97 for the student aid bill after the Senate approved it 79 to 12.
All the la~mlakers who voted against the bill were Republicans. The administration had
criticized the student loan interest-rate cut and a new loan-forgiveness program.
The boost in financial aid to college students was one of half a dozen domestic priorities
Democrats set when they took control of Congress this year. Two others -- an increase in
the minimum wage, and mandatory air and sea cargo inspections -- have become law, and a
third, ethics reform, is awaiting Bush’s signature.
"This is an exciting day for parents and students who struggle to put together the
finmncial means to pay for college," said George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House
education committee.
Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (Calif.), the ranking Republican on the colmmittee, said, "What
once was a campaign promise has become a trap that will ensnare either students or
taxpayers." He warned that students will go back to paying the higher rate in four years
or taxpayers will have to foot the bill for the cut to continue.
Banking industry officials have objected to the roughly $20 billion cut in subsidies to
lenders, saying they might have to reduce services provided to borrowers because of the
legislation.
The loan-forgiveness progr~ml in the bill benefits college grad~mtes who work for i0 years
in public service professions, such as teaching or nursing.
"Lenders will no doubt continue to complain that the cuts in this bill are too deep, but
the reality is that our bill restores the k~lance to this grossly unfair student loan
system by directing funds to the students, not to the banks," said Edward M. Kennedy (D-
~ss.), the chairman of the Senate education co~mnittee.
Congress Passes Overhaul of Student Aid Programs By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO WASHINGTON, Sept. 7
-- Congress gave finml approval to a broad overhaul of federal student loan programs
Friday, sharply cutting subsidies to lenders and increasing grants to needy students.
In quick succession, the Senate and the Hot~e approved the cl~nges, allowing Democrats to
say they had made good on one of their campaign promises last year, to ease the strain of
rising college costs. In the Senate, the bill passed 79 to 12, reflecting broad bipartisan
support, while the House approved it 292 to 97 .
The federal education secretary, Margaret Spellings, said she was recommending that
President Bush sign the bill because it "answered the president’s call to significantly
 Page 1135
increase funding" for Pell grants for low-income students. The administration had issued a
veto threat against an earlier House version of the legislation.
Republicans in the House expressed disappointment at the administration’s change of
course, arguing that the cuts in lender subsidies went too far.
The finml bill, hammered out this week in a House-Senate conference colmnittee, alters many
of the gro~]d rules for financing higher education, offering forgiveness on student loans
to graduates who work for l0 years or more in public service professions like teaching,
firefighting and the police, and limiting monthly pa~nents on federally backed loans to 15
percent of the borrower’s discretionary income.
It also raises the maximum Pell grant, the basic federal grant for middle- and low-income
students, to $5,400 from the current $4,310 over the next five years. To pay for the
changes, the bill reduces federal subsidies to lenders by roughly $20 billion over the
same period.
Democrats likened the legislation to the G.I. Bill that sent millions of veterans to
vocational training and college after World War II. "Today we’ll need a similar bold new
commitment to enable the current generation of Americans to rise to the global challenges
we face, " said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the
education committee. "Today we’ll help millions of students achieve the American dream."
Representative George Miller, Democrat of California and chairman of the House education
conmlittee, said that last year, Republicans took nearly $12 billion from federal student
aid programs. "We took $11.39 billion and put it back into Pell grants," Mr. Miller said.
"Thmt’s the difference that an election makes."
Campaign promises aside, the changes reflect the steep and sudden decline in the fortunes
of the $85 billion student loan industry after years of generous subsidies and support in
Congress. Investigations by Congress and the New York attorney general revealed a series
of potential conflicts of interest as lenders had provided free travel, gifts and
financial incentives to colleges and college officials in the hope they would steer
student borrowers their way.
Lenders, which had campaigned hard against the subsidy cuts, warned that the reductions
would compromise the federal loan program, forcing some of them out of business and
reducing competition and, inevitably, services to students.
Kevin Bruns, executive director of America’s Student Loan Providers, said the legislation
"’punishes the industry," while Joe Belew, president of the Consumer Bankers Association,
said it would "come to be viewed as irresponsible legislation that undermined rather than
expanded college opportunity."
Mr. Kennedy dismissed the complaints, saying, "The reality is that our bill restores the
balance to this grossly unfair student loan system by directing funds to the students, not
to the banks."
House Republicans, some of whom had received generous campaign contributions from lenders
in the past, derided parts of the legislation--particularly the forgiveness of loans for
certain professions -- as a form of socialism.
Representative John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio and a former chairman of the education
committee, predicted that the subsidy reductions "will cripple the private sector loan
program," which he credited with bringing "lots of ir~novation" to students and parents.
Representative Howard P. McKeon of California, the ranking Republican on the House
education committee, said the law created new entitlement programs, like forgiveness of
student loans, that would ultimately drive up taxes. "This legislation does nothing at all
to reduce the cost of college," Mr. McKeon said.
But advocates for students said lenders had little credibility in the public mind.
"It’s an industry where we’ve seen exceptional and enormous profits at the expense of
taxpayers," said Luke Swarthout, a specialist in higher education at the U.S. Public
Interest Research Group. "I don’t know how we can treat banks as credible arbiters of what
appropriate subsidies should be."
With the law, Congress is reducing federal subsidies to lenders by roughly $20 billion and
gradtmlly halving the interest rate on need-based student loans over the next four years.
Some $11.4 billion of that money will go toward increasing Pell grants.
For the first time, the government will now auction off the right to offer federally
backed educational loans to parents state by state, instead of setting the rate from
Washington. The two lowest bidders in each state will win the right to make st~sidized
college loans to parents.
Forbes.tom ?Legislation Watch?Education Grants?Brian Wingfield, 09.07.07, 6:40 PM ET ?
htt~://~w~z.f~rbes.c~m/2~7/~9/~7/educati~n-c~ngress-student-~ans-biz-be~tway-cx bw
0907education_print.html ?Washington, D.C. - Members of Congress have given themselves and
their aides a nice back-to-school present: forgiveness of federal student loan debt.
One of the provisions of a ma~or education bill passed Friday would forgive the balance on
Federal Direct Loans for public service employees who have made at least 10 years worth of
 Page 1136
payments on those loans. The bill defines these workers as people with full-time ~obs in a
variety of fields including law enforcement, the military, public health, teaching and, of
course, the government.
The bill, known as the College Cost Reduction Act, is designed to provide $20 billion in
student aid to borrowers by reducing government subsidies to lenders. The money saved will
be used primarily for student grants and scholarships, including a $1090 increase in
individual Pell Grants for needy students by 2013. It also reduces interest rates on many
federal Stafford loans by 50% by 2011, and it includes $500 million in aid for
predominantly minority colleges. President Bush is expected to sign the legislation into
law soon.
"Our loan forgiveness program will allow students to follow their hearts and dreams into
professions they love, rather than choosing jobs on the basis of their student loan
burden," says Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who chairs the senate education con~ittee. "All of
us will benefit as a result."
Maybe. But the loan forgiveness provision raises eyebrows, and not just because it would
directly benefit people who work on Capitol Hill. It’s also a tasty treat for loyal
political donors such as the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees
(AFSCME) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)--the largest organizations
representing public service workers.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog group that tracks political
fundraising, AFSCME has given nearly $38.7 million to politicians since 1989--more than
any other group in the country. SEIU was the ninth biggest donor during the same period.
Both groups raise more than 90% of their funds for Democrats. Among their top recipients
are members of the House and Senate education committees, including Rep. Phil Hare, D-
Ill., Rep. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., Sen. Sherrod Broom, D-
Ohio, and Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.
SEIU spokeswoman Stephanie Mueller says the ~]ion was not actively involved with lawmakers
in crafting the legislation. AFSCME officials could not be reached for comment Friday.
The $85 billion student lending industry has taken a serious PR hit since an investigation
earlier this year by New York Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo, discovered that financial
aid officials at some universities had accepted gifts from lenders, presumably in exchange
for steering students toward their loans. In response, the nation’s largest private
lenders, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Sallie Mae and Citibank, pledged that
they would not pay colleges to list them as "preferred lenders" for unsuspecting students.
But critics of the bill passed Friday are concerned that it will qtmsh the lending
industry by steering colleges in the direction of Direct Loans administered by the
Department of Education instead of federally guaranteed loans, which account for about 80%
federal strident loans.
~erica’s Student Loan Providers (ASLP), a group that represents loan providers under the
federally guaranteed program, estimates that the bill will cut funding for guaranteed
loans by about 80%, forcing borrowers into Direct Loans, which typically have slightly
higher interest rates.
"The more we go towards direct lending, the more bureaucratic the program will become,"
says ASLP Executive Director Kevin Bruns.
Despite Bush’s initial opposition to the bill, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings
recommended that he not veto the measure because it increases funding for Pell Grants.
Nonetheless, an Education Department spoke~{oman, Samara Yudof, says Congress "kept some
troubling provisions and budget gi~icks ... that will require close monitoring."
A statement by the White House in July suggested that lawmakers were not honest with
lenders because the interest rate cut in the bill would revert to the current rate of 6.8%
after five years. In addition, the a~ninistration said it was "concerned that the bill’s
loan forgiveness provisions are a costly and inefficient way to encourage students with
debt to pursue specific professions."
As for the Capitol Hill handout, Rachel Racusen, a spokeswoman for the Mouse Committee on
Education and Labor, says it’s a non-issue.
"’Given their income levels, it is likely that members of Congress would have paid off
their loans before the end of that ten-year period," she says.

Democrats Promise to Put More Education Legislation in the Pipeline By Libby George, CQ
Staff Democrats promised more education legislation would be coming soon after they scored
a major victory by clearing a bill that world make sweeping changes to federal student aid
programs.
The House cleared a conference report on the student aid legislation (HR 2669) on Sept. 7
by a vote of 292-97. The Senate had adopted the conference report just hours earlier,
79-12.
"We im~de a decision that we wanted a new generation of investment in education," said
George Miller, D-Calif., sponsor of the House version of the bill. "That’s what this
 Page 1137
Congress has been about."
The victory is huge for Democrats, who made addressing college costs a ca~lpaign promise,
and hmve long wanted to scale back the subsidies paid to private lenders.
"That’s the difference that an election makes," Miller said. "’That’s the difference that a
year makes."
Republicans reeled from the Bush administration’s support of the bil!, calling it a
disaster that will "cripple" the federal aid system and drive up college costs. Democrats
pounced on the victory to promise more action this year on bills to reauthorize the Higher
Education Act (PL 105-44), expand tax benefits for higher education and more stringently
regulate private student loan providers.
"We need to do more for education," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming, the ranking Republican on the Health, Education, Labor and
Pensions panel, also demanded quick action on a Higher Education Act reauthorization --
the primary law governing colleges, ~liversities and federal financial aid -- calling the
newly adopted conference report "a Band-Ai~’ on a broken system.
"We ca~ot leave out the [reauthorization] or we wil! close the door on our students,"
Enzi said Sept. 7.
The Senate reauthorization bill (S 1642), passed July 24, includes a slew of provisions
important to Republicans, including language that would bar lenders from giving schools
financial aid funds or other perks in exchange for loan volume and direct the Education
secretary to examine ways to contain costs and track pricing trends. The Senate bill also
would alert schools that the government will watch tuition increases.
Miller, the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said the Senate plan will
be a "very important blueprint" for his measure, but offered few specifics beyond that.
Howard P. "Buck" McKeon of California, the ranking Republican on the Education and Labor
panel, is likely to push for a similar tuition-tracking measure, which was stripped from
the !oan bill during conference.
Miller said he plans to get the bill through the House before the end of the year. Miller
also will be shepherding the reauthorization of the 2001 education law (PL 107-110)known
as No Child Left Behind, which he plans to mark up this month.
Senate Finance Chairman Hax Baucus, D-Mont., also used the fanfare over the cleared
student aid bill to preview portions of an education tax package that he plans to t~veil
in October.
Baucus, who has been working on the package for months, said it will streamline higher
education tax credits to make them easier to use, increase the amount of tuition that
students and families can deduct from their taxes and create more tax incentives for
college savings plans.
"Education is the foundation of our country’s global competitiveness, and there’s more
that Congress can do to help all /unericans succeed," Bancus said.

School officials discredit cookie-cutter approach to education Article published on

Friday, Septen~er 7th, 2007 By SCOTT CHIRSTIANSEN Mirror Writer Thursday morning a group
of about 30 adults filed into the concrete-floored remodeled garage bay that serves as
Jane Eisemann’s classroom at Kodiak High School and sat in rows of chairs behind students
at shop-worn tables typical of a vocational classroom.
The classroom is a jumbled but organized mix of maritime paraphernalia, tools and texts. A
survival poncho hangs on a wall near posters of the five species of salmon found in Alaska
waters. Three display boards with ex~nples of dozens of knots hang on an opposite wall.
The teenagers were beginning a lesson on tracking pollution in watersheds.
The adults -- about 35 board directors of the National School Boards Association (NSBA),
mostly elected members of Lower 48 school boards -- were about to see an unusual progr~n
in Kodiak’s educational system.
Eisem~nn told the visiting school officials how the marine science program was supported
locally even during her school district’s leanest years. The program has its own boat, the
fishing vessel K-Hi-C, a former salmon seiner built in 1967, currently owned by the Kodiak
Isla~ Borough School District.
The boat is used during sruml~er by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. That agency
became involved, Eisemann said, because "something magic happened" during a year when
borough officials considered selling the K-Hi-C.
"Now we have this collaboration with a local agency that is maritime-centered," Eisemann
said. "Three of our students installed a brand-new engine in that boat last year."
There is an unspoken truth the adults in the room are fully aware of: The act of
installing a boat engine will never be recorded when Kodiak High School reports test
scores under the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, telling the world
that the school ~de Alaska’s adeqt~te yearly progress standard last school year.
The NSBA board directors are in Kodiak this week for a business meeting and retreat hosted
 Page 1138
by current NSBA president Norman Wooten, who has served 17 years on the Kodiak Island
Borough Board of Education.
Wooten wanted to show his colleagues highlights of his school district’s progr~s. The
tour comes just as the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor is
set to begin discussion on legislation to reauthorize NCLB. The law applies test-taking
req~irements nationwide and for report cards to the public meant to measure school
performance.
The current law employs a too simple, cookie-cutter approach, NSBA members say. That
message remains consistent whether you ask a school board melJoer from Kodiak, or someone
from a Lower 48 suburban district.
School officials across the country want to be held accountable, Earl Rickman, a board
me~er from Motet Clemens, Mich., said, but test scores alone fail to describe a school.
"It is a snapshot in time," Rickman said, "It fails to recognize tl~t we all come from a
variety of backgrounds."
Rick~n has served on his locally elested board for 23 years.
"I’m for accountability. There is not a school board member in the country who is not for
accountability," he said.
Nationally, school districts collect only 8 or 9 percent of their overall budget directly
from the federal government, NSBA director of government relations Michael Resnick said.
But refusing the money would expose their home state to cuts in federal education spending
at the state level. It would also expose the local boards to political criticism, Resnick
said, because no one wants to be accused of dodging accountability.
Resnick advocates for NSBA positions on Capitol Hill. He said NSBA officials are set to
testify Monday in the House Education Co~ittee hearings. Through Wooten, NSBA has an
association with Alaska Pep. Don Young, who introduced the NSBA-supported version of the
new NCLB last year.
Resnick said the AYP process "is too punitive,’" requiring in some cases that districts
offer students bus rides to an out-of-neighborhood school if their local school is not
making AYP.
Clearly that won’t work in rural Alaska, and it is a bad solution for ~mny rural districts
Outside as well.
By categorizing students and tracking scores of different groups, AYP measurements can
tell a district where to focus efforts, Resnck said, "’But that does not mean a school is
failing."
A new measurement, adequate yearly growth, or AYG, which uses the same tests and is meant
to better chart individual student progress, is one of the items the NSBA wants approved.
Alaska is one of nine states currently testing the AYG model.
The current NCLB, Resnick said, "takes a one-size-fits-all approach to identify problems
and takes a one-size-fits-all approach to applying solutions. It is a Washington formula,
which has worked wel! in some areas and has not worked at all in other areas."
Young’s bill will be joined by many versions of NCLB re-authorization introduced in the
coming months. It points out problems with NCLB, particularly as it relates to rural
schools, Resnick said.
Wooten, who admits to wearing a tuxedo when he is on Capitol Hill, instead wore a collared
work shirt and drove a courtesy van for his NSBA guests to a reception Kodiak. He said the
coming NCLB debate isn’t really about local control versus federal control, but is about
giving school boards room to put their co~n~unity’s stamp on their schools.
"The most important thing a school board can do is be the co~ection between the local
colmmunity and the school system. We need to reflect the values and desires of the
co~]ity," Wooten said. "By reflecting, I mean that we do that by passing budgets and
implement policies."
NCLB is providing a useful measuring stick but there is plenty it cannot do, Wooten said.
"The NSBA supports !ocal control, we think that is where education issues are best
decided," he said.
"NCLB doesn’t support a marine science progr~ll in Kodiak -- and what an important thing
for Kodiak."
Mirror writer Scott Christiansen can be reached via e-mail at
schristiansen@kodiakdailln~lirror.com.
8 D.C. Catholic Schools Eyed for Charters Turning Over Operation to Secular Entity
Proposed to Avert Closure By Theola Labbe and Jacqueline L. Salmon?Washington Post Staff
Writers?Saturday, September 8, 2007; A01

Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl is proposing to convert eight of the District’s 28 Catholic

schools into secular charter schools, saying the archdiocese can no longer afford to keep
them open.
 Page 1139
Wuerl said his reco~unendation to strip the schools of their core religious identity and
turn them over to a nonsectarian entity to be run as charter schools is the only way to
avoid closing them and would continue the education of thousands of low-income city
children without interruption.
The converted charter schools -- elementary schools in some of the city’s poorest
neigtiborhoods -- would receive operating and facilities funds from the District. They
would remain in their buildings and pay rent to the parishes.
National education experts say the proposal could be a solution for other urban Catholic
school systems arottnd the country that have struggled with declining enrollment and rising
operating costs.
The archdiocese sent letters home with students yesterday explaining the proposal, which
would take effect as soon as fall 2008 and affect 1,400 current students. Starting next
week, individual schools will hold information sessions to solicit parent and coma~unity
feedback. Wuerl is expected to make a final decision next month.
"It’s a heartache to know that we wouldn’t have these schools any longer," Wuerl said in
an interview this week. "But the sadness is sweetened by the fact that these students
would continue to have an education."
But some parents and parishioners reacted angrily, saying Wuert’s proposal would gut high-
c[t~ality education for black children. The majority of the students in the schools that
would be affected are black and not Catholic. The archdiocese subsidizes a large portion
of their tuition.
"The fact that they are even considering doing this is not only ~lacceptable, it’s
outrageous," said Kathrlrn S. Allen, who sits on the parish council of St. Augustine
Catholic Church in Northwest Washington. St. Augustine is on the list of schools to be
converted, but the Rev. Patrick Smith has told the archdiocese that he intends to try to
continue operating it as a parish-supported school.
A learning enviro~nent suffused with religion is a key part of Catholic schools, which are
known for strict discipline and a rigorous curriculum that also promotes morality.
Although most students in such schools are not Catholic, they learn about the seven
sacraments and the lives of saints, attend prayer together and are taught compassion for
others.
Under a charter model, archdiocese officials said, the schools would still have strong
values, but the schools’ n~es would change and specific religious references would be
stripped from the currisulr~.
The plan, which has been vetted by two church bodies and floated to Mayor Adrian M. Fenty
(D) and city charter leaders, would require the District to increase its budget for
charter schools. The city’s 57 charter schools, representing about 22,000 students, are
scheduled to receive $320 million from the city this year. The mayor and Chancellor
Michelte A. Rhee are looking for additional funds for public school improvements.
Victor Reinoso, deputy mayor for education, said that now the diocesan proposal is a
possibility, "we will take it into consideration as we plan future budgets."
The move by Wuerl to consider the charter route stems from a decade of financial losses at
12 inner-city schools known as the Center City Consortitml. The consortium was set up after
a 1995 archdiocese study reco~u~ended closing or consolidating several city schools.
Then-Cardinal James A. Hickey insisted they remain open, so the archdiocese formed the
consortirml as a way for the schools to save on administrative costs and pool fundraising
resources. Although they have improved academically, they have continued to lose money
despite $60 ~llion in diocesan and private donations.
Of these 12 consortitml schools, eight would be converted to charters managed by a single
secular entity selected by the archdiocese. The four others would remain Catholic.
The recommendation ca~e after a year of study by a coI@nittee of 40 parents, teachers and
other archdiocese officials that considered a school’s enrollment, the ntm~er of students
who were Catholic, progected deficits and other factors.
Wuerl, who has been in Washington for 14 months, previously served as bishop of
Pittsburgh, where he gained a reputation as a tough-minded a@ninistrator -- closing nearly
a third of the diocese’s 320 parishes and eliminating a $2 million deficit -- and an
education innovator. He sought funding from the business co~mlunity to set up an endo~ent
for needy schools, raised tuition and opened regional grade schools to replace s~ller
elementary schools.
Soon after he arrived in the District in June 2006, Wuerl said he heard from Catholic
education officials that the inner-city schools were no longer financially viable. Part of
the reason was that many poor families were choosing charter schools, which are free.
"One by one, f~nilies left to go to charters . . and it was a kind of steady drifting
away," said Monsignor Charles Pope, pastor of Holy Comforter-St. Cyprian Roman Catholic
Church in Southeast Washington, whose parish school, which dates to the 1920s, would be
converted to a charter.
But Pope said it is a better alternative than shutting down. "At least we’ll be able to
6
 Page 1140
serve children in some capacity in our neighborhoods."
Thomas A. Nidm, chairman of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, said he has spoken to
Wuerl about the proposal and described the seven-me~er appointed board as "open to the
possibility" of the conversion schools.
Turning religious schools into secular charter schools can be difficult. In Chicago,
public schools chief Arne Dtulcan asked an independent Catholic school to open a charter
school several years ago. The Catholic school San Migmel has opened two secular charters.
"There are church-state issues," Dumcan said. "But if you’re really trying to innovate and
think outside the box, they are absolutely surmoumtable."
The Archdiocese of Washington’s struggle with shrinking enrollment is not umique. More
than three-quarters of Catholic dioceses in the country have bad flat or falling
enrollment in elementary schools for the past seven years, according to a study last year
by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgeto~cn University.
The decline has accelerated in recent years because of several factors: smaller Catholic
families, urban Catholics’ moving to the suburbs, weakening attachment of Catholic
families to a Catholic education -- and, more recently, the Catholic clergy sex-abuse
scandal. As a result of the drop, the study found, hundreds of Catholic schools in such
cities as Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago have closed.
Many suburban dioceses, such as that in Arlington, which includes all of Northern
Virginia, have largely escaped this trattma. There, school enrollment has swelled 25
percent. The diocese has opened eight elementary schools because of rapid growth in the
area’s outer suburbs and rising numbers of Hispanic Catholic immigrants in the closer-in
suburbs.
At dismissal yesterday afternoon, girls in plaid ~umpers and boys in crisp white polo
shirts and blue shorts streamed out of Immaculate Conception in Northwest Washington,
which is scheduled to be converted. Cabdriver Fayera Sobokssa’s lips stretched thin as he
contemplated the idea of his ll-year-old daughter, Sana, attending a secular school.
"That’s why I brought her here," Sobokssa said as other parents nearby nodded in
agre~lent. "I would be much happier if they keep it."
 Pa~e 1141

Nonresponsiv, . .............................
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 07, 2007 11:26 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private-
Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica;
Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele,
Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy
Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Will It Soon Be Governor Spellings?

Will It Soon Be Governor Spellings?

September 06, 2007 05:35 PM ET I Bedard,

<http://ww~.usnews.com/Topics/tag/Author/p/paul bedard/index.html> Paul I Permanent
<http://ww~.usnews.c~m/b~gs/washingt~n-whisper~/2~7/9/6/wi~-it-s~n-be-g~vern~r-
spellings.html> Link

If you think the presidential race takes too long, consider what’s going on in Texas
<http://w~.chron. com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/robison/4312408.html> . Three years before
the next governor’s race, potential candidates are already dropping hints of getting in.
The latest: Education <http://~.whitehouse.gov/gover~nent/spellings-bio.html> Secretary
Margaret Spellings. She’s been toying with the idea ever since suggesting that she didn’t
plan to stay in the administration until its last day, Jan. 20, 2009. And now a blog that
follows education--Eduwonk <http://m~.eduwonk. com/2OO7/O9/governor-earth-mother.html> --
has pushed that r~nor out onto the Internet.

It’s the talk in the Ed Department, where few aides are scra1~bling to shoot it down. She’d
be a formidable candidate: Bush loves her, she’s youthful and likable, and she’s a major
proponent of education programs from kindergarten to college. Of course, there are other
political titans looking at ruffling, including Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison
<http://hutchison. senate.gov/> .

And don’t forget that popular Gov. Rick Perry <http://m~z. rickperry, org/> , already in his
second term, can run again.
 Page 1142

Nonresponsiv l__._._ .............

From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 07, 2007 11:21 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private-
Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica;
Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele,
Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy
Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, C~nthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: FW: Will It Soon Be Governor Spellings?

...... Original Message .....

From: Ditto, Trey
Sent: Friday, September 07, 2007 10:32 AM
To: Anderson, Christy
Subject: Fw: Will It Soon Be Governor Spellings?

Can you please send this around?

Trey Ditto
Deputy Press Secretary
U.S. Department of Education
office - 202-205-3807

..... Original Message ......

From: Joe Turman <jturman@sbpublicaffairs.com>
To: Ditto, Trey
Sent: Fri Sep 07 09:45:05 2007
Subject: Will It Soon Be Governor Spellings?

Will It Soon Be Governor Spellings?

Septea~er 06, 2007 05:35 PM ET I Bedard,

<http://ww~.usnews.com/Topics/tag/Author/p/paul bedard/index.html> Paul i Permanent
<http://www.usnews.c~m/b~gs/washingt~n-whisper~/2~7/9/6/wi~it-s~n-be-g~vern~r-
spellings.html> Link

If you think the presidential race takes too long, consider what’s going on in Texas
<http://~,r~.chron. com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/robison/4312408.html> Three years before
the next governor’s race, potential candidates are already dropping hints of getting in.
The latest: Education <http://~.whitehouse.gov/government/spellings-bio.html> Secretary
Margaret Spellings. She’s been toying with the idea ever since suggesting that she didn’t
plan to stay in the a~ninistration until its last day, Jan. 20, 2009. And now a blog that
follows education--Eduwonk <http://m~w. eduwonk, com/2OO7/O9/governor-earth-mother.html> ~
has pushed that run,or out onto the Internet.

It’s the talk in the Ed Department, where few aides are scra1~ling to shoot it do~n. She’d
be a formidable candidate: Bush loves her, she’s youthful and likable, and she’s a major
proponent of education progr~ns from kindergarten to college. Of course, there are other
political titans looking at running, including Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison
<http://hutchison. senate.gov/>

~ld don’t forget that popular Gov. Rick Perry <http://w~z. rickperry, org/> , already in his
 Page 1143
secor~ term, can run again.
 Page 1144

Nonresponsi
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 06, 2007 8:23 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private-
Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica;
Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele,
Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy
Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, C~thia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Spellings demands no change to ’core’ of law (Education Daily)

Spellings demands no change to ’core’ of law (Education Daily)

By Sarah D. Sparks
Education Daily, September 6, 2007
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings praised House leaders for their work to reauthorize NCLB but exhorted the nation’s
business leaders to fight any proposal that would relax accountability for schools in reading and math.
At a summit on NCLB sponsored by the Business Coalition for Student Achievement, Spellings followed House Education
and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., and ranking Member Buck McKeon, R-Calif., who last week released a
mammoth "discussion draft" of revisions to several portions of the law.
rvtller said he and the committee’s staffworked closely with the Education Department to create the draft, but Spellings
sharply critiqued several portions, including different assessments for English learners, multiple measures for adequate yearly
progress, and differentiated consequences for schools with only a few subgroups struggling.
Spellings said she agreed with many of the draft proposals and suggested some differences could be "drafting issues."
’There’s a lot of grist for the mill," she said. Yet, ’~/ou can read a specific section, like growth models, and say, ’This looks
OK - it’s mostly our language,’ but if you add that on top of the section on multiple measures and on top of the confidence
intervals and on top of the section on N-sizes, you can get to a different conclusion. I’m sorry about that."
r~ller appeared a bit taken aback to Spellings’ critiques; he pressed in his own earlier address that "none of this requires a
retreat from accountability .... In the reauthorization, it is our intent and purpose to hold steadfast to those principles and not yield
on them."
Spellings obliquely critiqued the proposal for less severe sanctions for schools that miss AYP by only one or two student
groups. By the time a school misses AYP in even one student group, she countered, it has had to go beyond measuring
flexibility such as the minimum subgroup size, the term of a calendar year, and the 2 percent flexibility to test special education
students with modified assessments.
’To move from reasonable accommodations to big loopholes would be a big mistake, especially now," Spellings said.
According to ED statistics, 10,800 of the nation’s 90,000 schools need improvement under NCLB, and 2,300 are being
restructured for chronically failing to meet AYP.
’That doesn’t strike me as a wildly out-of-whack number that we can’t focus intensive intervention" on the struggling
schools, she said. ’1 tend to think we need differentiated consequences at the lower end. We do not have vigorous enough,
robust enough interventions and strategies for those chronically underperforming schools"
By contrast, Spellings argued that the draft’s proposal to limit mandatory supplemental education to chronically
underperforming schools and groups of students who missed AYP would restrict the number of students with access to tutoring.
Moreover, she said, extending the number of years in which limited-English-proficient students could be tested in their
native language ’~vould let them go from third grade to ninth grade having never been tested in English. That’s unacceptable."
McKeon agreed. "This is a long process, and there’s still a lot of work to be done," he said. ’1 think the more openness, the
more we get the public to buy into this, the better chance we have of getting it passed."
Spellings refused to guess at the timeline for reauthorization. ’1 learned seven years ago when I came to Washington not to
try to handicap the Congress’s work pace," she said, but added that she hoped the law would be reauthorized before the end of
the year.
 Page 1145

~l~.onresponsi
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 06, 2007 8:10 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private-
Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica;
Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele,
Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy
Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: U-46 Says No Child Law Is A Work In Progress (CDH)

U-46 Says No Child Law Is A Work In Progress (CDH)

Chica.qo Daily Herald, September 6, 2007
It’s not perfect, but it’s working.
That’s the mantra of U.S. Department of Education officials as they push for reauthorization of the federal No Child Left
Behind Act.
And it’s the same refrain heard Wednesday as a top official in the department’s regional office spoke with parents, staff and
community members in Elgin Area School Distdct U-46.
"No Child Left Behind is not a perfect law," regional representative Todd Zoellick said of the federal legislation, designed to
have all students reading and doing math at or above grade level by 2014. "However, No Child Left Behind is a good lawthat
has been made better.
"We have test scores dsing and achievement gaps narrowing," Zoellick said. "And that’s what we set out to do."
In U-46, all but one of the district’s 40 elementary schools met state standards this year as defined by the No Child Left
Behind Act.
However, three of eight district middle schools, and all Me high schools, failed to meet state standards, according to U-46
data.
As part of the law’s reauthodzation, Zoellick said, department officials want to funnel more money to under-performing high
schools.
Officials also hope to offer tutoring services a year earlier for schools that fail to meet the standards, he said.
"No Child Left Behind has helped generate some progress," Zoellick said. "But deafly there is still much work to be done."
Wednesday’s forum in U-46 followed a back-to-school speech eadier in the day by U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret
Spellings.
The forum was one of the first in the nation, outside of Washington, D.C., to focus on reauthodzation of the No Child Left
Behind Act.
"We see U-46 community really as a microcosm of America," Zoellick said. "This is a community that faces a vast range of
educational challenges every day."
While much of Wednesday’s forum was spent touting the No Child Leit Behind Act, participants also were given an
opportunity to point out what they see as deficiencies in the legislation.
For instance, one person asked whether lawmakers would place more emphasis on gibed education -- which has taken a
back seat as districts use up resources to meet minimum standards of the No Child Le~t Behind Act.
Gifted education may receive more consideration in the &=ture, Zoellick said, but for now the goal is simply to get all
students up to speed.
"Our federal dollars go first and foremost.., to help our neediest students," he said.
 Page 1146

Nonresponsive
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 06, 2007 8:08 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private-
Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica;
Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele,
Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy
Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Secretary Spellings Speech Clips (7)

Spellings Criticizes Education Reforms (AP)

By Nancy Zuckerbrod, Ap Education Writer
AP, September 6, 2007
A congressional proposal to make No Child Lett Behind more flexible would riddle the five-year-old education law with
loopholes, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said Wednesday.
"We must refuse to make any changes that would make us less accountable for educating every child to grade-level
standards in reading and math," she said in a speech to business leaders.
The 2002 law, which is nowup for renewal, requires annual testing in grades three through eight in math and reading.
Schools that miss yearly goals face consequences, .such as having to pay for tutoring or replace principals.
The House proposal, being circulated by senior Democrats and Republicans on the education committee, would allow
schools to get credit for tests in subjects other than math and reading.
Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., said that would give educators a fuller picture of how students are doing.
Spellings said that would water down the law. She sent Miller a letter Wednesday outlining her concerns.
A provision that would allowchildren with limited English skills to take tests in their native language for five years - up from
three - is also running into opposition from the Bush administration.
And another point of concern, Spellings said, is a plan that could increase the number of special education students taking
tests that are easier than the regular exams.
~ller countered that parents and educators have been clamoring for such changes to the law since it was passed five
years ago.
"We’ve learned a lot in those five years, and this is an attempt to be smarter, fairer and better at what we’re doing," Miller
said.
The congressional proposal also distinguishes between schools that fail to meet annual goals by a little from those that fail
by a lot. Spellings said she generally likes that but said the House bill would reduce the likelihood struggling students in the lower
priority schools would get tutoring - something she opposes.
The administration and congressional lawmakers agree on one key change. They want schools to measure the
performance of individual students over time rather than comparing the scores of students in a certain grade to students in that
grade the year before.

On the Net:
House NCLB draft legislation:
http:tledworkforce.house.god

Spellings Opposes No Child Changes (WT)

By Amy Fagan
The Washington Times, September 6, 2007
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings yesterday said she won’t support changes that weaken accountability for schools
under the No Child Lett Behind law.
"We need to stay the course," Mrs. Spellings said of the 2002 law, which is up for renewal this year. "We dont need to
water this law down or change direction now."
Her remarks officially kicked offwhat are shaping up to be vigorous negotiations over how much to change the law, touted
 Page 1147
by President Bush as one of his signature accomplishments.
NCLB requires states to test and track students annually in reading and math and holds schools accountable if they fail to
make adequate yearly progress. Educators have criticized it for being far too inflexible.
’qhere’s a very clear perception in this country that this law isn’t fair or flexible," said Rep. George Miller, California
Democrat and chairman of the House education committee. "We want to make what we think are important and positive
changes."
Mrs. Spellings expressed concern about a draf~ proposal Mr. Miller is circulating along with Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon
of California, the ranking Republican on the committee. Mr. Miller said the proposal would make "significant improvements" to
NCLB. The education secretary, however, says the act only needs "perfecting tweaks."
The dralt would retain the law’s requirement that students reach proficiency in reading and math by 2014. But it would allow
states to use other factors to determine adequate yearly progress, such as graduation rates, the percentage of students
completing college-preparatory courses and test scores in other subjects.
"We think this gives a more accurate view of students, schools and teachers," Mr. ~ller said.
Mrs. Spellings said that setup means reading and math scores ’~vould no longer be accurate reflections" of student ability in
those areas.
She also criticized the proposal’s new system of handling schools that dont make adequate yearly progress, which she
said would treat those schools that barely miss the mark more harshly than those who miss it by a large margin.
Mrs. Spellings said she fears that means "a low-performing school might never be held accountable for real change."
And she said it’s "unacceptable" to allow students learning English to be tested in their native language for up to five years,
with the possibility of an additional two-year waiver. The draf~ includes such a provision.
Teachers unions, advocacy groups, policy-makers and the business community are all weighing in.
"Some feel it doesn’t go far enough; some feel it goes too far," Mr. McKeon said of the draft, which he hasn’t officially
endorsed. "I’m hopeful that we’re going to come out with a great product."
Mr. Miller and Mr. McKeon are expected to reveal more proposed changes to the law today. The panel will hold a hearing
on the topic Monday, and Mr. Miller intends to send legislation to the House floor before the end of the month.
Meanwhile, some argued yesterday the law should be scrapped completely.
Rep. Scott Garrett, New Jersey Republican, has cratted a bill that would let states opt out of NCLB. More than 30
Republicans have signed on, while more than 60 have signed on to a similar Republican bill.
"NCLB ... has taken authority away from the local level, where it should be," Mr. Garrett said yesterday at an event at the
libertarian Cato Institute. "That’s my goal - return authority where it belongs."

Secretary Of Education Criticizes Proposal (NYT)

By Diana Jean Schemo
The NewYork Times, September 6, 2007
WASHINGTON, Sept. 5- Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on Wednesday criticized a Congressional proposal to
so~en provisions of President’s Bush signature education law, saying it would severely weaken the federal effort to raise
achievement among poor and minority children.
In a speech before a business group and at a news conference, Ms. Spellings said that a series of proposals in draf~
legislation circulated by Democrats and Republicans on the House education commiitee, taken together, would allow states to
remove children from testing regimes and tutoring services, and would make it too difficu~ for parents to know whether students
and schools are making progress.
’It’s just too darn confusing," Ms. Spellings said of the dra~ bill. %o make it more complex, less transparent, more
obfuscated I think would be a huge mistake, particularly when we’re on the ran, we’re on the move."
The No Child Lef~ Behind Law, passed in 2002, requires schools to report annual test scores in reading and math for all
children in grades three to eight, broken down by race, ethnicity and other factors. The law requires all students to reach
proficiency in reading and math by 2014, and singles out schools that fail to make sufficient progress toward that goal for
progressively more severe penalties.
Ms. Spellings weighed in as the House and Senate prepare to push the law to renewal this month. The House drat~ would
preserve the goal of bringing students to proficiency by 2014 but would broaden the ways schools could demonstrate student
progress.
Rather than relying solely on reading and math scores, schools could include tests in other subjects, attendance and
graduation rates. It would also distinguish between schools that broadly fail to meet annual goals and those that fall slightly short.
Ms. Spellings complained that proposals to change various provisions of the law "could be a significant retreat from
 Page 1148
accountability."
Passing no bill at all this year, she added, would be preferable to passing one that dilutes the law’s power because the
current version stays in force until Congress passes a new law.
Still, Ms. Spellings, who has been campaigning all year for the law’s renewal, avoided attacking the draft directly in her
formal talk before an audience of business leaders and education advocates, and did so only in response to questions from
reporters afterward. She also sent a letter detailing her criticisms to Congressional leaders.
In the letter she also criticized a provision of the draft, sought by states with large immigrant populations, that would allow
schools to test non-English speakers in their native language for up to ~ve years, instead of the current three, q-hat’s simply too
long," she wrote, ’this would allow a third-grade student to reach the tenth grade before ever being tested in English."
Speaking to the same group minutes before the education secretary, Representative George Miller, the California
Demo~at who is chairman of the education committee, said that he remained "strongly committed" to the principles of No Child
Le~: Behind, but he said that the law needed more flexibility.
Representative Howard P. IVlcKeon of California, the ranking Republican on the education committee, said he and other
Republicans shared many of the secretary’s concerns, qhings that weaken accountability and make the bill less than what it is
right now, I don’t think we’re interested in supporting," Mr. tvlcKeon said.
The education committee will hold hearings on the draft in the coming weeks and is trying for the full House to vote on a bill
by month’s end.
The Senate is also planning to release a bill updating No Child Left Behind this month.

’No Child’ Loopholes Decried (WP)

By Jay Mathews, Washington Post Staff Writer
The Washin.qton Post, September 6, 2007
Spellings Opposes Proposal to Ease Penalties
Should suburban schools that barely miss federal learning targets be allowed to escape penalties, while inner-city schools
that never even hit the dart board are required to give free tutoring and let students transfer to better schools?
That question is at the heart of an emerging argument in Washington over howto improve the federal No Child Left Behind
Act. Influential House Democrats and Republicans have circulated a dratt proposal that would take many schools offthe hook if
they raise achievement for most students but miss the mark for a few.
Yesterday, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings pushed back hard against that approach. "To move from reasonable
accommodations to big loopholes would be a huge mistake," she said.
In a speech to the Business Coalition for Student Achievement, which supports the federal law, Spellings said she is willing
to consider proposals to allow states to use more than just annual tests in reading and math to rate schools and to treat
differently schools that fall only slightly short of targets. But she said she is not willing to bend if the changes mean struggling
students won’t get the extra help they need.
Under current law, which requires reading and math tests in grades three through eight and once in high school, schools
must show annual progress for all groups of students toward a goal of 100 percent proficiency by 2014. This year, 68 Faiffax
County schools missed at least some target scores, falling short of adequate progress, more than double the county’s previous
total.
The law also has shined a spotlight on schools that have missed targets in other jurisdictions, including the District and
Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. Schools that miss targets year atter year and receive certain federal education funds
face progressively steeper sanctions.
Spellings’ speech was the Bush administration’s sharpest response to efforts in Congress to placate many schools, often
those in nice neighborhoods with powerful parents who think the federal targets are too hard on their children.
"I’m counting on you to stand up against policies that say some kids just cant learn or that some kids count more than
others or that if some kids are improving, its okay to let others fall behind," Spellings told members of the coalition of business,
education, community and civil rights groups.
The targets of her remarks ~re sitting placidly 10 feet to her left: Reps. George Miller (D-Calif.) and Howard P. "Buck"
McKeon (R-Calif.), who had circulated the proposals. The Democratic chairman and senior Republican on the House education
committee indicated afterward that her remarks were part of a long conversation. They had earlier thanked Spellings for her
helping seek improvements, and she called them "mighty warriors" in the fight for better schools.
At the moment, the debate seems to be about exactly how many children would be affected by the suggested changes.
Spellings said her staff had calculated that sparing more schools the tutoring and transfer requirements would mean "roughly
250,000 fewer children will get tutoring." She said the change would result in a 75 percent reduction in the number of Utah
 Page 114~
schools and a one-third reduction of Texas schools subject to the tutoring and transfer requirements.
IViller said that he did not accept those numbers and that he would have to investigate the matter further. He has scheduled
hearings on changes in the law this month and called for a final version to be passed by the House before October.

Renewal Of’No Child Left Behind’ Seen As Urgent (RTD)

By Gil Klein, Media General News Service
Richmond Times-Dispatch, September 6, 2007
WASHINGTON - Education Secretary Margaret Spellings urged renewal of the controversial No Child Lef~ Behind law
today, saying, "We’ve come too far to turn back the clock or turn our backs on tens of millions of students."
Of the 90,000 schools in the country, she said, 10,800 have been declared "in need of improvement" under the law, and
2,300 are so bad that they need to be restructured.
’q-hat doesnt strike me as an unreasonable number," she said.
The five-year-old law, which extended federal influence into every classroom in the nation, will come up first in ~he House.
Rep. George Miller, chairman of the Education and Workforce Committee, aims to get a revived law approved by the end of the
month.
Speaking before Spellings to a business coalition, the California Democrat noted an "urgency" in passing the law this year,
and said he has listened to parents and teachers about the changes it needs.
Many educators complain that the law, which aims to have all students at grade level in math and reading by 20t 4, is
unrealistic and underfunded. They say it puts too much emphasis on testing and unjustifiably punishes schools that can’t meet its
goals.
Spellings insisted the law is reasonable.
"We’re talking about grade-level work," she said, "not nuclear physics."

No Child Left Behind Act In Phase Two (DTxn)

By Sarah Wilson
The Daily Texan, September 6, 2007
Secretary of Education urges reauthorization of act sparking local, national argument
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings urged the congressional reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act during a
Washington, D.C. speech Wednesday, reigniting local and national debate over the law.
In her speech, Spellings said the 2001 act helps underprivileged students, minorities and students with mental disabilities
by providing free tutoring and increasing testing standards in public schools across the country. However, critics claim the law
burdens schools in low-income areas by tying heavy standardized testing requirements to federal funding.
"Since this act became law, nearly 500,000 more students have learned to do basic math; 500,000 others are getting free
tutoring that was never before available," Spellings said.
Jessica Manning, reading specialist at the University of Texas Elementary School in East Austin, said the school adheres to
the law’s Reading First initiative, which aims to help every child read by the third grade. The reading program involves frequent
reading assessments to determine which children are struggling to read at grade level and then provides research-based reading
instruction, Manning said.
Though UT Elementary has a large number of students from low-income homes, it recently received "exemplary" status
with more than 93 percent of third- and fourth-grade students earning passing scores on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge
and Skills, orTAKS, test, Manning said.
Yet some educators say that for straggling students, the No Child Le~ Behind-required TAKS test often creates difficult
benchmarks.
Babs Miller, special education department chair at Travis High School in South Austin, said the TAKS test holds mentally
disabled students accountable for information they have never had to learn before, such as in the science and social studies
portions of the test.
~ller said the No Child Le~ Behind Act requires students with a 55 IQ to pass the same standardized tests to graduate that
Advanced Placement students must pass.
"1 believe in teachers and students being held accountable, but it needs to be realistic accountability. They keep raising the
bar," she said.
Spellings said she would not lower the bar if the law passes again, but recognizes the concerns of educators like Miller.
"We must refuse to make any changes that would make us less accountable for educating every child to grade-level
standards in reading and math," Spellings said. "[But] my department is already partnering with more than half of the states to
make the law more flexible and workable."
 Page 1150

Utah Continues To Draw Fire From Feds Over NCLB (KCPW)

By Julie Rose
KCPW-Radio Salt Lake City, Utah, September 6, 2007
The top education official in the nation continues to use Utah’s public school system as evidence that No Child Lef~ Behind
is necessary. In a speech yesterday, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings suggested that Utah officials oppose No Child
Lett Behind because it judges the state’s public schools too harshly. Associate State Superintendent Brenda Hales bristles:
"Every state has a unique population and unique challenges," says Hales. "That’s where you get in to trouble - when you
have big government trying to dictate how states should perform. It almost becomes a ’Big Brother’ situation."
~ah education officials and lawmakers have been vocal in their disdain for federal education mandates found in No Child
Let~ Behind. Secretary Spellings yesterday said states need to embrace the goals of the law rather than making excuses for why
it wont work. Hales says the basic goal of improving student performance is worthy. But ~ah officials take issue with the federal
government claiming it knows best:
"We’ve always felt like No Child Lef~ Behind’s goals are meaningful and essential, but how we meet them should be
decided on a state level," says Hales.
Low-income and minority students in Utah continue to lag in basic skills, but Hales says the state is working to address the
gap. Federal officials have denied many of Utah’s requests for flexibility in how it qualifies teachers and handles school testing.
~ah Congressman Rob Bishop has vowed to fight rea~horization and revisions of No Child Lef~ Behind set for debate
next year.
 Page 1151

INonrespons, ....................
From: Yudof, Samara
Sent: September 06, 2007 7:47 AM
To: Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn, Kristine; Colby, Chad;
Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones,
Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, t~tie; Maddox, Lauren; Private-
Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica;
Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele,
Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy
Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, C~thia; Young, Tracy; Tucker, Sara (Restricted)
Cc" Anderson, Christy
Subject: ’No Child’ Loopholes Decried, Spellings Opposes Proposal to Ease Penalties (WP)

Washington Post

’No Child’ Loopholes Decried

Spellings Opposes Proposal to Ease Penalties

By Jay Mathews, Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, September 6, 2007; AI0

Should suburban schools that barely miss federal learning targets be allowed to escape
penalties, while inner-city schools that never even hit the dart board are required to
give free tutoring and let students transfer to better schools?
That question is at the heart of an emerging argtmlent in Washington over how to improve
the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Influential House Democrats and Republicans have
circulated a draft proposal that would take ~mny schools off the hook if they raise
achievement for most students but miss the mark for a few.

Yesterday, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings pushed back hard against that approach.
"To move from reasonable accommodations to big loopholes would be a huge mistake," she
said.

In a speech to the Business Coalition for Student Achievement, which supports the federal
law, Spellings said she is willing to consider proposals to allow states to use more than
~ust annual tests in reading and math to rate schools and to treat differently schools
that fall only slightly short of targets. But she said she is not willing to bend if the
changes mean struggling students won’t get the extra help they need.

Under current law, which requires reading and 1~th tests in grades three through eight and
once in high school, schools must show annual progress for all groups of students toward a
goal of I00 percent proficiency by 2014. This year, 68 Fairfax County schools missed at
least some target scores, falling short of adequate progress, more than double the
county’s previous total.

The law also has shined a spotlight on schools tl~t have missed targets in other
9urisdictions, including the District and Montgomery and Prince. George’s counties. Schools
that miss targets year after year and receive certain federal education funds fase
progressively steeper sanctions.

Spellings’ speech was the Bush adn~inistration’s sharpest response to efforts in Congress
to placate many schools, often those in nice neiglJoorhoods with powerful parents who think
the federal targets are too hard on their children.

"I’m counting on you to stand up against policies that say some kids ~ust can’t learn or
that some kids count more than others or that if some kids are improving, its okay to let
others fall behind," Spellings told members of the coalition of business, education,
co~mn~lity and civil rights groups.
 Page 1152
The targets of her remarks were sitting placidly 10 feet to her left: Reps. George Miller
(D-Calif.) and Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (R-Calif.), who had circulated the proposals. The
Democratic shmirman and senior Republican on the House education committee indicated
afterward that her remarks were part of a long conversation. They had earlier thanked
Spellings for her helping seek improvements, and she called them "mighty warriors" in the
fight for better schools.

At the moment, the debate seems to be about exactly how nmny children would be affected by
the suggested changes. Spellings said her staff had calculated that sparing more schools
the tutoring and transfer requirements would mean "roughly 250,000 fewer children will get
tutoring." She said the change would result in a 75 percent reduction in the number of
Utah schools and a one-third reduction of Texas schools sL~ject to the tutoring and
transfer requirements.

Miller said that he did not accept those nm~bers and that he would have to investigate the
nmtter further. He has scheduled hearings on changes in the law this month and called for
a firml version to be passed by the House before October.
 Page 1153

N°nresp°nsive 1 H_ ____
From: Yudof, Sama(a
Sent: September 06, 2007 7:43 AM
To: Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn, Kristine; Colby, Chad;
Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones,
Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private-
Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica;
Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele,
Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, tiara; Tracy
Young; Tucker, Sara Mar~inez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Tucker, Sara (Restricted)
Anderson, Christy
Subject: Secretary of Education Criticizes Proposal (NYT)

The New York Times

September 6, 2007

Secretary of Education Criticizes Proposal

By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 -- Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on Wednesday criticized a

Congressional proposal to soften provisions of President’s Bush signature education law,
saying it would severely weaken the federal effort to raise achievement among poor and
minority children.

In a speech before a business group and at a news conference, Ms. Spellings said that a
series of proposals in draft legislation circulated by Democrats and Republicans on the
House education colmnittee, taken together, would allow states to remove children from
testing regimes and tutoring services, and would make it too difficult for parents to know
whether students and schools are making progress.

"It’s just too darn confusing," Ms. Spellings said of the draft bill. "To make it more
complex, less transparent, more obfuscated I think would be a huge mistake, particularly
when we’ re on the run, we’re on the move."

The No Child Left Behind Law, passed in 2002, rec~tires schools to report annual test
scores in reading and math for all children in grades three to eight, broken down by race,
ethnicity and other factors. The law requires all students to reach proficiency in reading
and m~th by 2014, and singles out schools that fail to make sufficient progress toward
that goal for progressively more severe penalties.

Ms. Spellings weighed in as the House and Senate prepare to push the law to renewal this
month. The House draft would preserve the goal of bringing students to proficiency by 2014
but would broaden the ways schools could d~~onstrate student progress.

Rather than relying solely on reading and math scores, schools could include tests in
other subjects, attendance and graduation rates. It would also distinguish between schools
that broadly fail to meet annual goals and those that fall slightly short.

Ms. Spellings complained that proposals to change various provisions of the law "could be
a significant retreat from accountability."
Passing no bill at all this year, she added, would be preferable to passing one tl~t
dilutes the law’s power because the current version stays in force until Congress passes
new law.
Still, Hs. Spellings, who has been c~npaigning all year for the law’s renewal, avoided
attacking the draft directly in her formal talk before an audience of business leaders and
education advocates, and did so only in response to questions from reporters afterward.
She also sent a letter detailing her criticisms to Congressional leaders.
 Page 1154
In the letter she also criticized a provision of the draft, sought by states with large
i~m~igrant populations, that would allow schools to test non-English speakers in their
native language for up to five years, instead of the current three. "That’s simply too
long," she wrote, "this would allow a third-grade student to reach the tenth grade before
ever being tested in English."

Speaking to the same group minutes before the education secretary, Representative George
Miller, the California Democrat who is chairman of the education co~m~ittee, said that he
remained "strongly committed" to the principles of No Child Left Behind, but he said that
the law needed more flexibility.

Representative Howard P. McKeon of California, the ranking Republican on the education

committee, said he and other Republicans sh~red many of the secretary’s concerns. "Things
that weaken accountability and make the bill less than what it is right now, I don’t think
we’re interested in supporting," Mr. McKeon said.

The education corLm~ittee will hold hearings on the draft in the coming weeks and is trying
for the full House to vote on a bill by month’s end.

The Senate is also planning to release a bill updating No Child Left Behind this month.
 Page 1155

L
N,~onresponsi
From: Yudof, Samara
Sent: September 05, 2007 6:32 PM
To: Private- Spellings, Margaret; Dunn, David; Kuzmich, Holly; Briggs, Kerri; Maddox, Lauren;
Beaton, Meredith; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn, Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Evers, Bill;
Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; MacGuidwin, Katie; McGrath,
John; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth;
Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Anderson, Christy; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera,
Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Aud, Susan; Toomey, Liam; ’Tracy Young’;
Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, C~thia; Young, Tracy; Dunckel, Denise
Subject: Education secretary criticizes proposed changes to No Child law (AP)

Associated Press
Educalion secretary criticizes proposed changes to No ChBd law
NANCY ZUCKERBROD, AP E~lucafion Writer
Wed September 5, 2007 17:25 EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) _ A congressional proposal to make No Child Left Behind more flexible would riddle the
five-year-old education law with loopholes, Education Secretary Margaret SNllings said Wednesday.
"’We must refuse to make any changes that would make us less accountable for educating every child to grade-
level standards in reading and math," she said in a speech to business leaders.
The 2002 law, which is now up for renewal, requires annual testing in ga’ades three thiough eight in math and
reading. Schools that miss yearly goals face consequences, such as having to pay for tutoring or replace
principals.
The House proposal, being circulated by senior Democrats and Republicans on the education committee, would
allow schools to get credit for tests in subjects other than math and reading.
Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Cali£, said that would give educators a fuller picture of how students
are doing.
Spellings said that would water down the law. She sent Miller a letter Wednesday outlining her concerns.
A provision that would allow children with limited English skills to take tests in their native tanguage for five
years _ up fi’om thiee _ is also 1atoning into opposition fiom the Bush administration.
And another point of concern, Spellings said, is a plan that could increase the number of special education
students taking tests that are easier than the reg~ar exams.
Miller countered that parents and educators have been clamoring for such changes to the law since it was passed
five years ago.
"’We’ve learned a lot in those five years, and this is an attempt to be s,nm~er, fairer and better at what we’re
doing," Miller said.
The congressional proposal also distinguishes between schools that fail to meet mmual goals by a little from
those that fail by a lot. Spellings said she generally likes that but said the House bill would reduce the likelihood
straggling students in the lower priority schools would get tutoring _ something she opposes.
The adminisla’ation and congressional lamnakers agree on one key change. They want schools to measure the
1
 Page 1156
performance of individual students over time rather than compm~ng the scores of students in a certain grade to
students in that grade the year before.
 Page 1157

INonresponsive’
From: Yudof, Samara
Sent: September 05, 2007 6:25 PM
To: Private- Spellings, Margaret; Dunn, David; Kuzmich, Ho~ly; Briggs, Kerri; Maddox, Lauren;
Beaton, Meredith; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn, Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Evers, Bill;
Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; MacGuidwin, Katie; McGrath,
John; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth;
Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Anderson, Christy; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera,
Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Aud, Susan; Toomey, Liam; ’Tracy Young’;
Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, C~thia; Young, Tracy
Subject: "No Child’ Changes Can’t Reduce Accountability, Spellings Says (Bloomberg)

’No Child’ Changes Can’t Reduce Accountability, Spellings Says

By William McQuillen
Sept. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Any changes to the No Child Left Behind education law in the U.S. shouldn’t reduce
reliance on use of math and English tests that measm’e students’ sldlls and help hold schools accountable, said
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.
Spellings said she agreed with critics that the program could be made more flexible, by marldng student
progress and providing more tutoring. The official doesn’t want any changes fl~at reduce the "unvarnished
information on how students are doing," Spellings said today in Washington.
President George W. Bush signed the legislation in J~uary 2002, fulfilling a carnpaign pledge to increase
accountability in schools. Lawmakers are debating changes to the law as they seek to alleviate concerns that
teachers spend too much time focused on the tests.
"We must refuse to make any changes that would make us less accountable for educating every child to grade-
level standards in reading and math," Spellings said before the Business Coalition for Student Achievement.
"Those are the gateway subjects for all other learning."
U.S. lawmakers last week released a working draft of possible changes to the law, such as excluding results for
some non-native speakers of English and allowing states to develop assessments of progress.
Schools would be judged partly on graduation rates and college ertrollment, according to a proposal on the
House education committee’s Web site.
To contact the reporter on this story: Willian~ McQuillen in Washington at bmcquillen~bloomberg.net
<mailto:bmcqttillen@bloomberg.net>.
Last Updated: September 5, 2007 I~16 EDT
 Page 1158

Nonresponsiv, _ ...............................~o,
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 05, 2007 8:10 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug;
Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey;
Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey,
Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, C~thia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Holes Found In U.S. Rules On Teachers (EDWEEK)

Holes Found In U.S. Rules On Teachers (EDWEEK)

By Debra Viadero
Educat!on Week, September 5, 2007
’Highly qualified’ definitions differ broadly across states.
New reports looking at how the teacher-quality provisions of the No Child Lett Behind Act are playing out in the nation’s
classrooms suggest that, while compliance with the 5½-year-old federal law is widespread, problems and inequities persist and,
in the end, labeling a teacher "highly qualified" is no guarantee of effectiveness.
’1 think the high compliance rate suggests there were states that set the bar low and, in a way, grandfathered in a lot of
teachers," said Kerstin Carlson Lefloch, a primary author of "Teacher Quality Under NCLB: Interim Report," a large-scale study
released last week by the U.S. Department of Education. ’q-o get to the real story, you have to look below the surface, and that’s
where we’re still seeing variation and still seeing inequities."
Under the wide-ranging federal law, which is up for congressional reauthorization, states had until the end of this past
school year to ensure that they were staffing 100 percent of their core academic classes with highly qualified teachers. Such
teachers are defined as those who have a bachelor’s degree, are fully certified, and can show mastery of the subjects they teach,
either by completing coursework, passing state subject-matter tests, or meeting some other state-set criteria.
By the close of the 2005-06 year, no state had hit the 100 percent mark, according to the Education Department’s latest
tally of state reports, which came out in July. On average, states reported that highly qualified teachers were teaching 92 percent
of the classes that the law targets that year.
In a July 23 letter to chief state school officers, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said the department would
continue its policy of not penalizing states that fell short of 100 percent as long as they were making "good faith" efforts to follow
the law.
The studies trickling out nowfind relatively high compliance rates in schools and districts, as well as in states. Though
based on surveys from the 2004-05 school year, Ms. LeFIoch’s report suggests that 90 percent of teachers met their states’
"highly qualified" definition, whether they knew it or not. Nearly a quarter of the teachers did not know their status under the law.
Conducted for the department by the Washington-based American Institutes for Research and the RAND Corp. of Santa
Monica, Calif., that report drew on surveys of nearly 13,000 teachers, special educators, paraprofessionals, and administrators in
300 districts across the country.
Another survey, this one taken over the 2006-07 school year and published Aug. 22 by the Center on Education Policy,
found 83 percent of 342 districts reporting that they either were already in full compliance with the law or they expected to be by
summer vacation. ("NCLB ’Highly Qualified’ Rules for Teachers Seen as Ineffective," Aug. 29, 2007.)
The Washington-based research and advocacy group also turned up spottier levels of compliance at the state level,
though. Officials in 17 of the 50 states polled said they expected to reach their federal teacher-quality targets by this past June-a
lower level than states’ official reports to the federal government would suggest.
Standards Vary
States were still having some problems, though, in developing the data systems they needed to accurately determine
teachers’ job qualifications and report to parents when their children were being taught by teachers who fall short of that mark,
according to the CEP and the AIR-RAND reports.
Also, despite the seemingly widespread attempts to follow the law, the two reports and the Education Department’s figures
found that highly qualified teachers were harder to find in some categories and settings than in others. Chief among those areas
 Page 1159
are special education and instruction of English-language learners; secondary school mathematics and sciences classes; and
middle schools, rural schools, and schools with high percentages of children from low-income families and minority students.
Some districts, in fact, faced a double whammy in that regard, researchers said. Inthe AIR/RAND study, for example,
researchers said the percentage of high-minority districts that struggled to attract and retain highly qualified applicants was nearly
double that of districts with low-minority enrollments. And a higher proporl:ion of those disadvantaged districts were offering
financial incentives and alternative-certification options to attract teachers to their schools-sometimes in competition with other
schools and districts in similar strdts, the AIR-RAND study notes.
That study also found, however, that state policies for determining what counts as highly qualified vary widely from state to
state. For instance, although all bu~ two states had tests of teachers’ content knowledge in place three years alter the passage of
the NCLB law, the minimum passing scores spanned a wide range. On the Praxis II teacher test in middle school mathematics,
for example, the cutoff ranged from 139 of a maximum score of 200 in South Dakota to 163 in Virginia.
The researchers also found that 47 states had adopted an option t~nder the law-known as the High Objective Uniform State
Standard of Evaluation, or HOUSSE provision-that allows them to set their own criteria for determining whether teachers already
on the job met the highly qualified standard. The standards differ from state to state in the degree to which teachers get credit for
their years on the job vs. credit for measures aimed more directly at assessing their knowledge and practical skills.
One result of that state-to-state variation: "Highly qualified" often meant something different in schools where a high
percentage of students were poor than it did in better-off schools.
In the former group, the report found, "highly qualified teachers" tended to be less experienced and less likely to have a
degree in the subjects they taught than such teachers in more affluent schools.
’The AIR-RAND report very clearly shows that the federal government has given very poor direction and a variety of mixed
signals to states on a whole range of highly qualified teacher provisions," said Barnett Berry, the president of the Center for
Teaching Quality, a research and advocacy group based in Hillsborough, N.C. Rural schools, in particular, needed more
resources to attract skilled teachers and boost the subject-matter expertise of existing teachers, he added.
Wrong Criteria?
But Robert C. Pianta, the dean of the education school at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, said the variation the
researchers found might also suggest that federal policymakers are measuring teacher quality the wrong way.
’If almost everybody is already meeting those standards, and we’re still not seeing large achievement gains, then that
should give us pause as to whether or not we’re using the right metrics," Mr. Pianta said in an interview.
For a study published in March in the journal Science, Mr. Pianta and his research partners conducted detailed
observations of 5th grade teachers in 20 states. They found that teachers who were labeled "highly qualified" were no more likely
than colleagues without that designation to use effective teaching practices. ("Study Casts Doubt on Value of ’Highly Qualified’
Status," April 4, 2007.)
Mr. Pianta favors rating teachers on the extent to which they use education practices proven to be scientifically sound as a
measure of their highly qualified status.
In the CEP’s surveys of the administrators in charge of implementing ’NCLB’s teacher-quality provisions in 50 states and
349 districts, those officials called the highly-qualified-teacher definition’s focus on content knowledge "too narrow" for accurately
identifying good teachers.
"Some of them say whether teachers like kids and can improve the skills of diverse students also are important," explained
Jack Jennings, C EP’s president and chief executive officer. "But that’s hard to measure."
Other critics, most notably the Commission on No Child Lelt Behind, a bipartisan panel formed by the Washington-based
Aspen Institute to make recommendations for improving the law, would use analyses of student gains on state tests to determine
teachers’ highly qualified status.
No study has yet determined whether students learn more from teachers deemed to be "highly qualified" under the current
law. In the C EP report, most administrators expressed skepticism that the law had led to student-achievement gains in their
schools.
’That’s the big question out there," said the AIR’s Ms. LeFIoch, and one that neither the AIR-RAND nor the CEP study was
designed to address.
That AIR-RAND study also found that, while neady all teachers took part over the 2004-05 school year in the kind of
content-focused professional development in reading and mathematics that the federal law promotes, only one-filth of them had
received 24 hours or more of training-the equivalent of a one-week in-service program. Instead, most teachers’ training had
totaled six hours or fewer for that year.
The new studies are timely, coming as congressional leaders begin to float ideas for revising the NCLB law. A draf~
reauthorization plan released last week by House education committee leaders put forth no major proposals for improving the
 Page 1160
teacher-quality provisions, but U.S. Rep. George Miller, the California Democrat who chairs that committee, said such plans are
forthcoming.
Coverage of education research is supported in part by a grant f]’om the Spencer Foundation.
Vol. 27, Issue 02, Pages 1,12
 Page 1161

Nonresponsi
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 04, 2007 8:04 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug;
Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey;
Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey,
Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Democrats Try To Soften Bush’s Education Law (NYT)

Democrats Try To Soften Bush’s Education Law (NYT)

By Sam Dillon
The NewYork Times,, September 1, 2007
As Congress returns next week, leading Democrats are struggling for the formula that can attract bipartisan support to
extend the life of President Bush’s education law, No Child Left Behind. In doing so, they are proposing to ease the pressure on
suburban schools.
A draft proposal being floated by Representative George Miller, chairman of the House education committee, would soften
many of the law,s accountability provisions while maintaining its overall strategic goal: to bring every student to proficiency by
2014 by requiring states to administer standardized tests and to punish schools where scores do not rise.
The changes, circulated this week by Mr. Miller, a California Democrat, and the committee’s ranking Republican, address
the most persistent complaints against the law, by suburban districts, by middle-class parents, by states with large immigrant
populations and by teachers unions who are crucial to Democrats’ 2008 electoral fortunes.
For the suburbs, for example, Mr. Miller’s draft would draw a distinction between schools failing across the board and those
where only some student groups failed to meet annual testing goals. It would give a nod to teachers’ concerns by allowing states
to consider not just annual math and reading scores in deciding whether a school passes muster but other measures, including
tests in history, science and civics; graduation rates; and Advanced Placement tests.
And for states with many immigrants, it would allow students not fluent in English to be tested in their native language for
live years.
But in a sign of the difficult political calculus in extending a measure that has opponents on both the right and the left, for
every supporter of the proposed changes there has emerged an opponent. Eady reactions to the draft proposals suggest serious
challenges are ahead in cobbling together a bipartisan coalition.
Amy Wilkins, vice president of the Education Trust, a rights group, said the draft’s authors were succumbing to pressure
from ’k~ell-financed and ill-informed defenders of the status quo."
’The heart of the law has been hollowed out," said Ms. Wilkins, who helped draft the original in 2001.
~chael J. Petrilli, a former Department of Education official who is a vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation,
has nicknamed the education committee’s draft ’qhe Suburban Schools Relief Act of 2007" because he says it is intended to
appease the middle class.
Samara Yudof, a spokeswoman for the education secretary, Margaret Spellings, said, "We have serious concerns that the
draft creates loopholes in accountability measures, provides fewer options for parents, increases complexity and provides less
transparency."
’~Ne will not support measures that water down the accountability provisions," Ms. Yudof added.
On the other hand, Edward J McEIroy, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said, "]his draft encourages a
serious discussion of reauthorization."
The National Education Association, the other national teachers union, which has been implacably critical of the law, said it
would withhold comment on the draft until it finished polling its local delegates.
The House education committee posted the proposals on its Web site this week. Among the most important changes in the
draft are those to the law,s accountability system, in which states judge whether schools have made "adequate yearly progress"
and can avoid sanctions.
The draft would allow states to look beyond annual test scores and says bluntly that broader criteria "may increase the
 Page 1162
number of schools that make adequate yearly progress."
Another change would distinguish schools where only one or two student groups fail to meet annual testing goals from
those where three or more groups fall short. The latter would face more rigorous sanctions; students at the former would no
longer be eligible to transfer to higher-performing schools.
That change would be popular in many suburbs, where thousands of schools with sterling local reputations have faced
federal sanctions because of one or two low-performing groups, but it has already drawn opposition from the tutoring industry
and the Bush administration.
The draft bill would loosen the rules governing the testing of students with limited English, which have provoked disputes
between federal officials and educators in some states, by allowing states to test students in their native language for five years,
instead of the laws three years.
’You can see where they’ve tried to satisfy education groups like the teachers unions and the school boards," said Bruce
Hunter, a lobbyist for the American Association of School Administrators.
Both Mr. Miller and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Senate education
committee, have promised to draw up bills in September to rework the law. President Bush has repeatedly described the law as
a major reform of American education. It passed in 2001 with overwhelming bipartisan support, but last November, dozens of
Democrats who campaigned on promises to change the law were elected, and this year, there have already been significant
Republican defections.
A bill allowing states to opt out of testing requirements without losing federal money, introduced this year by Representative
Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan, has attracted 50 conservative Republican co-sponsors, including the minority whip, Roy
Blunt of Missouri.
Several groups have complained about the complexity of the draft proposals. The measures of schools’ academic
progress, for instance, would be combined with the math and reading scores under a formula that has left even Department of
Education officials puzzled.
’~/e just don’t understand howthat would work," said Susan Traiman, director of education and work force policy at the
Business Roundtable, a coalition of companies closely involved in passing the original law.
 Page 1163

lNonresponsi.
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 04, 2007 8:03 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox,
Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug;
Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey;
Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey,
Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Alaska Clips (5)

Education Secretary Visits Shishmaref, Norne And Anchorage On Eve Of NCLB Reauthorization
(APRN AK)
By Paul Korchin
Alaska Public Radio Networ_k August 30, 2007
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings wrapped up her tour of Alaska today with visits to schools in Nome and
Anchorage. Yesterday, she was in Bethel and Shishmaref. Spellings is in the state to promote the reauthorization of the No Child
Lett Behind Act, which many Alaska schools have found difficult to achieve.

Sec. Spellings Gets Lesson In Rural Teaching Challenges (KTUU)

By Steve MacDonald
KTUU-TV Anchoraqe, Alaska, August 30, 2007
ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- It’s been show and tell time for Alaska’s political leaders and educators over the last week.
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has been touring the state’s schools, and seeing firsthand the challenges
rural teaching pose for educators.
Spellings has also heard about changes educators here would like to see in the federal No Child Lett Behind Act.
At the invitation of Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Sen. Ted Stevens, Spellings toured schools in Bethel, Shishmaref, Nome and
Anchorage.
IVk=rkowski and others hope the tour will result in some relief for Alaska schools.
It was a whirlwind tour for Spellings, hitting three villages and a big city in a little more than a day.
One stop brought the education secretary to Kilbuck Elementary School in Bethel to hear a lesson in Yupik. Folks here
hope Spellings take a lesson back to Washington, D.C.: teaching is a little different out in the Last Frontier.
’q-he strength of the indigenous culture out here as well as the conditions in our villages - most people cant imagine people
not having running water any more - and so I think it does make a difference for her to come out here and to see what education
means to people here," Bethel High School Principal Janelle Vanasse said.
The message educators and Murkowski want to send Washington is the need for changes to the President’s No Child Lett
Behind Act.
One change they’re hoping for is the requirement that all teachers be highly qualified for each of the core subjects they
teach.
That doesnt work well in some villages.
"Where our schools are extremely small and we have one or two teachers, it’s very difficult to make sure that they’re all
highly qualified in every content area," Lower Kuskokwim School District Superintendent Bill Ferguson explained.
The secretary agrees that No Child Lett Behind does need updating.
"We knowwe need to perfect and tweak and make the law better. No one is asking for the law’as is’ to be reauthorized. Of
course we need to improve it," Spellings acknowledged.
And while No Child Lelt Behind is about raising standards for core classes like reading, writing and math, this trip is a
lesson in geography for the nation’s highest educator.
"We’ve got some challenges when it comes to educating all of our kids. It’s because of our geography," Murkowski said.
That lesson was not lost on the education secretary.
"Until you see how vast, how rural, how remote these places are, I think you really don’t have a full understanding. What
 Pa~e 11~4
you can read in a briefing paper and what you can see in real life sometimes is different," Spellings said.
It’s a lesson teachers and students here hope Congress and the President will pick up on.
No Child Lett Behind is due for reauthorization soon. Murkowski sits on the education committee, which will have a major
say on possible changes.
Each year students are tested to determine their school’s adequate yearly progress in core subjects like math and English.
If a school doesn’t meet the standard, it’s considered failing and Bethel school administrators say it’s difficult for their
elementary schools to meet that standard because their kids from kindergarten through third grade are taught in Yupik, an
immersion program and the region’s native language.
The aim is to preserve the language for future generations. The problem is testing to determine adequate yeady progress is
done in English, putting young Bethel students at a disadvantage. Instead of failing, educators in Bethel are hoping to get credit
for at least showing yearly progress.
Contact Steve MacDonald at stevem@ktuu.com
The Subject Is Schools (AP)
By JEANNE’I-FE J. LEE
AP, September 1, 2007
Alaska’s rural districts face challenges not noted in federal law
SHI SHMARE F -- Craig Probst, school principal in the village of Wales, populati on 135, is an academic jack-of-all-trades.
The one school in the Inupiat Eskimo hunting and fishing community has 35 students of all ages and just four teachers. So
Probst teaches reading, writing, math and social studies, fi.~ll time.
"We are generalists," said Probst, who has worked in schools throughout rural Alaska for 17 years. "We have to cover all
the subject areas."
But when it comes to statistics, their flexibility isn’t paying off. The federal No Child Lett Behind Act docked points f~om the
WatestKingikmiut School last year because most classes are taught by teachers who do not have each of the required
components under the law to be considered "highly qualified: a bachelor’s degree, a state license and proven competency in that
subject.
The school, and dozens of others across rural Alaska, falls far below the national average in the number of classes taught
by teachers considered "highly qualified" under the law, which sets stdct performance guidelines for students and teachers.
But that and other provisions affecting rural schools could change if No Child Lett Behind is renewed as scheduled this
year, according to the Education Department.
~th tiny schools scattered across unimaginably vast swaths of roadless country, Alaska, perhaps better than any state,
highlights the flaws of President Bush’s heavily contested education law as applied to rural areas. Schools face sanctions, such
as a state or private management takeover, if they don"[ make progress over a certain time period.
Like most of the country, teachers and administrators throughout rural Alaska are demanding changes before Congress
votes on reauthorizing the law.
"One size doesnt fit all," said Roger Sampson, president of the Education Commission of the States, a nonparlJsan policy
analysis nonprofit based in Denver. "Every state will tell you how it doesn’t work for them because they’re unique, and they are.
But nobody is looking at the challenges Alaska has because of its sheer remoteness and size."
Sampson, who served as Alaska’s education commissioner for the past four years, said the problems faced by rural
schools include:
¯ The methods of calculating test scores and graduation rates in small schools, where even a handful of absent students
can mean the school fails to show adequate yearly progress as defined by the law.
¯ Hiring teachers and teacher aides who are highly qualified in the subjects they teach. Alaska has about 500 schools, and
100 have three or fewer teachers who are responsible for an array of classes.
° Offering students the option to transfer elsewhere if a school is identified as "in need of improvement."
Students in the Bering Strait village of Shishmaref live 450 miles from the only major road system in the state. The eastern
coast of Russia is closer than the regional hub community of Nome, a 125-mile plane ride to the south. The closest villages are
about 50 miles away and can only be reached by plane or snowmobile.
"Unless they’re going to move and leave their families and communities behind, there’s no where for them to go," said
Angle Alston, who teaches history to seventh through 12th grade in the Inupiat Eskimo community of 615 people. "The
notification that your school is failing is pointless in that respect, as far as transferring goes."
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, have joined other members of Congress in calling for
changes to the law.
 Page 1165
Murkowski, a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, was one of several lawmakers to
introduce bills this year proposing changes to the act. She said her vote to renew No Child Left Behind will depend on whether it
accommodates the challenges faced by rural schools.
Among other things, the bill would require rural teachers to prove expertise in one academic subject rather than the four or
five they may be responsible for teaching. It would also allow underperforming districts to offer tutoring or distance-learning
classes instead of moving students to other schools and would change the testing requirements for indigenous language
immersion programs, such as Native Hawaiian or Yup’ik Eskimo.
Young introduced a bill containing similar changes in the House.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who visited schools in Bethel, Nome, Shishmaref and Anchorage this week, said
Alaska has done well under the law, pointing to federal data that shows 326 of the state’s schools, or 65 percent, made adequate
yearly progress in the 2006 school year, compared to 62 percent the year before.
But she also acknowledged the special circumstances found in the state and said the administration "wants to make sure
(the law)is workable in all sorts of settings."
In Wales, 37 percent of the core academic classes are taught by highly qualified teachers according to No Child Le~
Behind. The national average is nearly 91 percent.
Under the law, Probst is not considered highly qualified in math, but he teaches it anyway because there’s no one else to
do it.
"1 might not be qualified to teach pre-calculus, but I can teach the lower grades fractions and multiplication and I do," said
Probst, who is highly qualified in language arts.
"We believe the data and testing are extremely important, but it all boils down to the transfer of knowledge between student
and teacher, and whether that connection is taking place."

Alaska Highlights Weaknesses Of No Child Left Behind Act (AP)

AP, September 3, 2007
The federal No Child Left Behind Act is up for renewal in the coming months and teachers and administrators at schools all
over rural Alaska are looking for changes. Education officials say the five-year old act doesn’t take into consideration the
difficulties faced by Alaska’s tiny schools, which are scattered across unimaginably vast swaths of roadless country.
Roger Sampson is president of the Education Commission of the States, a nonpartisan policy analysis nonprof~ based in
Denver. He says Alaska, perhaps better than any state, highlights the flaws of President Bush’s heavily contested education law
as applied to rural areas.
Sampson also served as Alaska’s education commissioner for the past four years. He says problems with the law include
the methods of calculating test scores for such small numbers of students and requiring teachers to hold degrees in every core
subject they teach. And many schools identified as "in need of improvement," simply aren’t able to help students transfer
elsewhere, as the law requires, because the distances between schools are so great.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who visited schools in Bethel, Nome, Shishmaref and Anchorage this week,
acknowledged the special circumstances found in the state and says the Bush administration "wants to make sure (the law) is
workable in all sorts of settings."
Aside from the issue of rural schools, No Child Lett Behind has been widely criticized for a variety of reasons. It is
considered the cornerstone of President Bush’s domestic policy.

No Photographer Left Behind (KTUU)

By Scott Jensen
KTUU-TV Anchora~ August 31, 2007
My brain hurts. No pain no gain, right? I hope it’s true. I just returned from that whirlwind tour with US Secretary of
Education Margaret Spellings and our Senators Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski. Traveling to Bethel, Shishmaref and Nome the
junket’s primary purpose was to tout the reauthorization of Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation. I’m a little ashamed to admit
that before the trip I didn’t know much about it. But I learned! Now I’d bet I could even carry off a half-way intelligent conversation
on the topic.
There was only one seat left on the plane for a television photographer. Nothing at all for a reporter. So guess who got to
ask questions? I don’~ usually work alone. But it’s great for my development as a journalist. Therefore I do value the
opportunities. And for it to happen on such an important story certainly stretched me. You who consistently read this blog know I
first consider myself an observer. But yes, the questioner part is absolutely vital for us to be well-rounded journalists; I just
typically leave that to my better halves. When I did get my chances to visit with the Senators and the Secretary I tried very hard
to formulate insightful questions beforehand and then articulate them on cue. My usual, "Hey what’s happening here?" just
3
 Page 1166
wasn’t going to fly.
During the entire tour l received literally four minutes of which I spent one-on-one time with the Secretary. (That wasn’t
heady enough for me to compose my thoughts. But I don’t think I made a total fool out of myself.) Those beltway folks sure know
how to run a tight ship. Efficiency is the name of their game. In some cases they had the schedule detailed down to he minute.
It’s a different animal altogether out there in Washington. It’s so fast paced. So much pressure. So many motivated people. So I
tried to join in.
I had about a half an hour to shoot a story focusing on the erosion that’s gradually eliminating the village of Shishmaref
from Alaska’s coast. Senator Stevens made a point to visit the seawall being reconstructed there. Actually as I think about it, that
was quite a moment to witness. Shishmaref doesn’t get such high profile visitors very often. And of course Senator Stevens is in
the primary position to funnel federal funds that staves off the Chukchi Sea. I think that story is airing on Monday. (It’s not going
to be beautiful, but I hope interesting. In the interview I had with the Senator, he admits that some of our current climate change
is being caused by man.)
DC came to Alaska this week. I don’t think I’d want to live and work in that environment permanently but it’s definitely
captured my intrigue. To be stretched daily is a choice we all have. But I can safely say that functioning in that kind of place
would give anyone a leg up. It’s the foundation on which the No Child Left Behind legislation is built. No wonder they want to
make it better.
Contact Scott Jensen at sjensen@ktuu.com
 Page 1 of 1
Page 1167

INonresponsiI
From: Ruberg, Casey
Sent: August 28, 2007 7:57 AM
To: Cariello, Dennis; Aud, Susan; TracyYoung; Halaska, Terrell; Dunn, David; Terrell,
Julie; Rosenfelt, Phil; Pitts, Elizabeth; Tucker, Sara Martinez; MacGuidwin, Katie;
Wurman, Ze’ev; Ruberg, Casey; McGrath, John; Kuzmich, Holly; Scheessele, Marc;
Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Flowers, Sarah; Young, Tracy; Williams, Cynthia; Mesecar, Doug;
Jones, Diane; Toomey, Liam; Tada, Wendy; Cohn, Kristine; Reich, Heidi; Landers,
Angela; Talbert, Kent; Colby, Chad; Bdggs, Kerri; Private - Spellings, Margaret; Neale,
Rebecca; Morffi, Jessica; Evers, Bill; Ditto, Trey; Maddox, Lauren; Beaton, Meredith;
Anderson, Christy; Yudof, Samara; Gribble, Emily
Subject: Education Secretary To Visit Bering Strait Schools This Week (AP)

Education Secretary To Visit Bering Strait Schools This Week (AP)

AP, August 28, 2007
DILLINGHAM, Alaska (AP) - The Bering Strait school district is hosting Secretary of Education
Margaret Spellings this week.
She will be accompanied by Senators Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski.
The group will head to Shishmaref Wednesday with the goal of visiting a remote rural school.
Many of the Bering Strait schools started class last week and the rest will open this week.
The Bering Straits School district covers 80,000 square miles including a remote school site on Little
Diomede.

06/05/2008
 Page 1 of 3
Page 1168

Nonresponsi]
From: Ruberg, Casey
Sent: August 30, 2007 8:26 AM
To: Cariello, Dennis; Aud, Susan; TracyYoung; Halaska, Terrell; Dunn, David; Terrell,
Julie; Rosenfelt, Phil; Pitts, Elizabeth; Tucker, Sara Martinez; MacGuidwin, Katie;
Wurman, Ze’ev; Ruberg, Casey; McGrath, John; Kuzmich, Holly; Scheessele, Marc;
Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Flowers, Sarah; Young, Tracy; Williams, Cynthia; Mesecar, Doug;
Jones, Diane; Toomey, Liam; Tada, Wendy; Cohn, Kdstine; Reich, Heidi; Landers,
Angela; Talbert, Kent; Colby, Chad; Briggs, Kerri; Private - Spellings, Margaret; Neale,
Rebecca; Morffi, Jessica; Evers, Bill; Ditto, Trey; Maddox, Lauren; Beaton, Meredith;
Anderson, Christy; Yudof, Samara; Gribble, Emily
Subject: NCLB IsWorking, But It’s ’A Journey’ (USAT)

NCLB Is Working, But It’s ’A Journey’ (USAT)

USA Today, August 30, 2007
The No Child Left Behind education law is about to undergo the most intense congressional scrutiny
since its passage in 2002, as lawmakers ~ill consider whether to renew it. The most prominent
domestic achievement of the Bush presidency has been criticized for being heavy-handed and
underfunded, and for ultimately ddving standards lower. Though the law requires all students to be
"proficient" by 2014, proficiency is measured by 50 different state standards, and some states game the
system to produce "bette¢’ scores. Even so, the law has produced dividends. Independent studies have
shown that students are performing better, and perhaps most significantly, minority students have seen
gains. Congress will be working on a short timeline over the next few weeks, as the law is set to expire
at the end of September. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings discussed the law with USA
TODAY’s editorial board. Her comments were edted for length and clarity.
Question: NCLB has elicited frequent criticism from school administrators armnd the country. What are
you hearing, and what is the best way to ease these concerns?
Answer:. We’re shining a bright spotlight on under-achievement in this country, and it makes a lot of
grownups uncomfortable. No doubt about it. But that’s the point. And, you know, the law is really very
simple on its face. Test every kid every year. Disaggregate the data. Get them on grade level by 2014.
Q: Many educators viewthe testing regimen req~red in the law as onerous md responsible for creating
a teach-to-the-test world. Are these criticisms fair?
A: We passed the best law we could five years ago. We had about half the states doing annual
assessments, and everybody else was doing a snapshot -- third-graders, eighth-graders, 1 lth-graders.
We didn,t know very much. There’s no way to chart progress over time when you’re measuring third-
graders, eighth-graders and 1 lth-graders. We can now do a growth model (that compares kids year to
year). Everybody’s whining about too much testing, but let’s have more testing.
Q: With those five years of experience, what do you see as the primary problems of the law and the
areas that could be improved?
A: We have about 90,000 schools in this country; 70% are making the NCLB requirements. But 2,300
out of 90,000 are chronically underperforming. I mean, that doesnt seem like an unbelievably high
amount to me, knowing that half our minority kids are getting out of high school on time. This is about
finding the right balance and peeling the onion and telling states, "You need to do this work in
exchange for federal dollars."
Q: You mentioned the 2,300 chronically underperforming schools that have gone five years without
meeting the NCLB standards. Yet it seems that all they’re doing is swapping an assistant principal in
and out or shifting the curriculum a bit. Meanwhile, the states are throwing up their hands and saying,
"We don’t have the money to fix this," and daring the reds to come in and do something. So in the end,
nothing happens, right?

06/05/2008
 Page 1169 Page 2 of 3

A: That’s one of the big issues in NCLB reauthorization. For those schools, right nowthe menu and the
statute of what constitutes restructuring -- real restructuring -- is hugely anemic. It says charter, re-
establish, anything else you feel like. So the accountability trajectory in NCLB actually gets less robust
than more robust. The things that happen in the early years are more vigorous than the anemic options
later, which is why we need to change it.
Q: So what should change?
A: We need more intensity around these chronic underachievers. The president believes that ought to
be real school choice, tutoring, charter schools .... I mean, serious, serious intervention. So more
intensive resources, not only for those schools, but also for those schools at risk of drifting that way.
Q: One radical fix hasn’t been tried: cross-district transfers. Should the reauthorization include this as a
way of helping these trapped kids?
A: I think that would be certainly allowable under the president’s concept. But the budget also includes
parochial schools and other sorts of educational offerings. We must give states more vigorous tools to
confront the chronic underperformers.
Q: Can a school district be required to take a child who is seeking a transfer?
A: These are decisions that would be made locally. But we’re going to say, OK, real school
restructuring has to happen. This is the menu. And these are some resources
Q: Will the reauthorization consider newways to measure school performance?
A: This law can be made a lot worse, and I’m not interested in that. I hear people say, "Let’s have a lot
of measures, let’s use teacher grades, let’s use somebody’s opinion, let’s use a parent survey, let’s
whatever," and so on No. That is not valid, reliable, comparable accountabilty. Do you let your
employees rate themselves for their performance reviews? Can we make this law better? Can we
improve it to the good of minority and poor kids? Yes, we can. But it can also be watered down, and we
cannot have that.
Q: The reauthorization effort is occurring in the middle of the 2008 presidential election campaign. That
can be a political high-wire act. How are you handling this?
A: The politics of education are fascinating because the civil rights community and the unions m both
core Democrat constituencies -- find themselves at odds with one another (over NCLB). The good
news is we got a very strong statute on the books right now. And if we can improve it, we’re for it.
They’re for it.
Q: Why not push the date back if nobody really believes all the kids will be at grade level by 2014?
A: I reject that. There’s plenty of flex and give in his law. I am not willing to say that all of the kids who
are left as a part of the accountability system, that they cannot read on grade level. We’re not asking
people to be rocket scientists. We’re asking the schools to have our children read on grade level. I
mean, what do you want for your own kids?
Q: If students are allowed to transfer from a non-performing school to a high-performing school, often
the only children who benefit are the ones with highly motivated parents. As a result, arent we merely
skimming the cream away from poorly performing schools?
A: The parents have every right to seek a high-quality educational option for their kid, irrespective of
whether highly motivated, low motivated, rich, poor, whatever. So that’s what they’ve done; that’s what
the law says they can do. Every kid on a campus, whether they’re a failing kid or just a regular kid in a
failing school, has that option. Fine and dandy. That’s their prerogative. But as far as the creaming
issue, I don’t think the intensity to improve that school is likely very acute, and that’s the point of No
Child Lett Behind. That’s why we need $500 million to intervene and get resources for those schools. I
mean, this is a walk-and-chew-gum deal. We ou~t to improve those schools. But I don’t think the three
or four kids who were on grade level and lef~ the school pose a huge impediment for improvement at
the school.
Q: What’s your response to folks who say that NCLB is confusing the standards movement and
ultimately giving educators less useful information than they had before?
A: I reject that. We had the ostrich approach five years ago. We didn’t know anything. And I guess we
thought we were complacently happy about howit was going. BUt now we knowthat yes, some people

06/05/2008
 Page 1170 Page 3 of 3

are gaming the system. Anyway, no, I don’t think it has set the standards movement back. I think the
transparency has moved it forward. The very idea that we can even have this conversation is huge
progress.
Q: Btt is the federal government simply winking at the low standards that states are using and saying,
"It’s OK with us"?
A: People in those states are smart and well-motivated, and they’re going to act on them in due course. I
believe that. But you can’t just say, "You know what, we’re not going to graduate any kids in Texas this year
from high school, not any of them. No one in Houston will get a diploma this year because we’re not
suddenly going to have national high standards." You have to bring the system along and move it forward
over time. And that’s something that state officials calibrate. But they’re paying the bills. And you know,
we’ve got some powerful tools on the transparency side that I think are having a good effect. But this is a
journey.

06/05/2008
 Page 1171 Page 1 of 8

NonresponsivI
From: Ruberg, Casey
Sent: September 01,2007 10:58 AM
Cariello, Dennis; Aud, Susan; TracyYoung; Skandera, Hanna; Halaska, Terrell; Dunn,
David; Terrell, Julie; Rosenfelt, Phil; Pitts, Elizabeth; Tucker, Sara Martinez;
MacGuidwin, Katie; Ruberg, Casey; McGrath, John; Kuzmich, Holly; Scheessele, Marc;
Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Flowers, Sarah; Young, Tracy; Williams, Cynthia; Mesecar, Doug;
Jones, Diane; Toomey, Liam; Tada, Wendy; Cohn, Kristine; Reich, Heidi; Landers,
Angela; Talbert, Kent; Colby, Chad; Bdggs, Kerd; Private - Spellings, Margaret; Neale,
Rebecca; Morffi, Jessica; Evers, Bill; Ditto, Trey; Maddox, Lauren; Beaton, Meredith;
Anderson, Christy; Yudof, Samara; Gribble, Emily
Subject: Weekend News Summary 9.01.07

Weekend News Snmmary 9.01.07

Nexv York Times- Democrats Try to Soften Bush’s Education Law
Bloomberg News- Firm Is Issued Subpoena in Inqui~y on Stndent Loans
Washington Post- Rose-Colored Views of an All-Black School
Washington Post- Tales from the classroom updated for the testing era

Democrats Try to Soften Bush’s Education Law

September 1, 2007
By SAM DILLON

As Congress retulanS next week, leading Democrats are stn]gghng for the folanula that can
attract bipartismi support to extend the life of 15esident Bush’s education law, No Child Left
Behind. In doing so, they are proposing to ease the pressure on suburl:en schools.

A &~tff proposal being floated by Representative George Miller, chairman of the House
education committee, would soften many of the law’s accountability provisions wtfile
maintaining its ovaall strategic goal: to biing eve~3r student to proficiency by 2014 by
requhing states to administer standardized tests and to punish schools where scores do not

The changes, circulated this week by Mr. Miller, a California Democrat, mid the committee’s
rmddng Republican, address the most persistent complaints against the law, by submban
disl]-icts, by middle-class parents, by states with large immigrant popttlations and by teachers
rations who m’e crucial to Democrats’ 2008 electoral fol~mes.

For the submbs, for example, Mr. Miller’s &aft would draw a distinction between schools
failing across die bomd and those where only some student groups failed to meet annual
testing goals. It would give a nod to teachers’ concerns by allowing states to consider not just
mmual math and reading scores in deciding ~vhether a school passes muster but other
measmes, including tests in histo17, science and civics; graduation rates; and Advanced
Place~nent tests.

For states with many immigrants, it would allo~v students not fluent in English to be tested in
their native language for five years.

But hi a sign of the difficult political calculus in extending a measme that has opponents on
both the light andthe left, for every supporler of the proposed changes there has emerged

06/05/2008
 Page 2 of 8
Page 1172

opponent..

Amy Wilkins, vice president of the Education Trust, a rights group, said the authors were
succmnbing to pwssme fi’om %veil-financed and ill-infolaned defeuders ofttm status quo."

"q"ne heart of the lmv has been hollowed oul;" said Ms. Wilkins, who helped drag the
original in 2001.

Michael J. Pelailli, a framer Deparanent of Education official who is a vice president at the
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, has nicknamed the education committee’s draft ’°Fhe
Subttrban Schools Relief Act of 2007" because he says it is intended to appease the middle
class.

Samara Yudof, a spokeswoman for rile education secretary, Margaret Spdlings, said, "We
have serious concerns that the draft creates loopholes in accountability measures, provides
fewer options for parents, increases complexity and provides less transparency."
"We will not support measures that water down the accountability provisions," Ms. Yudof
added.

On the other hand, Edward J. McElroy, president of the American Federation of Teachers_,
said, ’°This draft encoreages a serious discussion ofreauthofization.’"

The National Education Association, the other natimml teachers Lmion, wtfich has been
i,nplacably critical of the la~v, said it would withhold comment on the drag until it finished
polling its local ddegates.

TILe House education committee posted the proposals on its Web site this week. Among the
most finportant changes in the draft are those to the law’s accountability system, in which
states judge whether schools have made "adequate yearly progress" and can avoid sanctions.

The draft would allow states to look beyond ammal test scores and says bhmfly that broader
criteria ’Shay increase the nmnber of schools that inake adequate yearly progress."

Another change would distinguish schools where only one or two student groups fail to meet
aunualtesting goals from those where ttn’ee or more groups fall short. TILe latter would face
more rigorous sanctions; students at file former would no longer be eligible to transfer to
higher-performing schools.

That change would be popular in many suburbs, where thousands of schools with sterling
local reputations have faced federal sanctious because of one or two low-performing groups,
but it has already drawn opposition fiom the tuto~Lg industry and the Bush administration.

The draft bill would loosen the ~Nes governing the testing of students with limited English,
which have provoked disputes between federal offidals and educators in some states, by
allowing states to ~est students in their native lmtguage for five years, instead of the law’s
three years.

"You can see ~vhere they’ve tried to satisfy education groups like the teachers tmions and the
school boards," said Bruce Hunter, a lobbyist for the An~efiean Assodafion of School
Admhtistmtors.

06/05/2008
 Page 1173 Page 3 of 8

Both Mr. Miller and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and chafiman
of the Senate education committee, have promised to draw up bills in September to rework
the law. President Bush has repeatedly described the law as a maj or refo1~n of A~nerican
education. It passed in 2001 with over~vhelming bipartisan support, but last November,
dozens of Democrats who campaigned on promises to change the la~v were elected, and this
yea’, there have already been sig~tificant Republican defections.

A bill allowing states to opt out of testing reqnireanents without losing federal money,
in~oduced tiffs year by Representative Peter Hoeksh’a, Republican of Michigan, has attracted
50 consercative Republican co-sponsors, including the minority whip, Representative Roy
Blunt of Missomi.

Several groups have complained about the complexity of the draft proposals. The measures
of schools’ academic progress, for instance, would be combined withthe math and reading
scores under a formula that has left even Depmt~nent of Education officials puzzled.

Firm Is Issued Subpoena in Inquiry on Student Loans

By BLOOMBERG NEWS
September 1, 2007

The New York attorney general Andrew M. Cuomo has subpoenaed the First Marblehead
C%)oration as part of his investigation of the student-loan industU in the United States.

The company, based in Boston and the third-largest sectu{fizer of student loans, received a
subpoena on Aug. 22, according to a statement yesterday on its Web site.

The subpoena reflects Mr. Cuomo’s seven-month investigation of the $85-billion-a-year

industry. The investigation has led to the firing of financial aid officiaIs at Colttmbia
Universi _ty in Ne~v York and the University of Texas at Austin.

Mr. Cuomo has looked at 12 lenders and more than 24 colleges and universities for co~fflicts
of interests and preferential treatment in exchange for giPts, sto& options and payments.

"We provide outsourcing solutions for lend~s," a First Marblehead spokeswo~nan, Janice D.
Walker, said in a telephone interview. °°He’s already reached out to lenders, so it’s not
tmexpected that he would reach out to us."

While the company does not lend directly to students, it often has contact with thegn though
partnerships with lenders.

"We ~vork with schools, but it’s on behalf of lenders to help operate programs that serve
student bo~xowels," Ms. Walker said. She declined to specify what Ivh’. Cuomo asked for.

Jeffrey B. Le~er, a spokesmm~ for Mr. Cuo,no, did not immediately retu~a a call for
comment.

Mr. Cuomo and Congressional committees are looking into a practice in which loan
companies provide payments to universities or perks to school officers in exchm~ge for being
designated as °~prefened" lenders.

Since it was founded in 1991, First Mmblehead has helped lenders finance 1.4 million loans

06/05/2008
 Page 4 of 8
Page 1174

to more than 850,000 students, according to a company statement.

The company reported revenue of $880.7 million in the year that ended June 30 and net
income of $371.3 million.

Rose-Colored Views of an All-Black School

By Brioat Gilmore
Sunday, September 2, 2007; B02
Last week, students from Washington’s Paul Laurence Dunbar High School headed back to a
school that hasn’t changed in inore than a centmy, at least in one way: Nearly all its students
are black.

According to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, this can be a good thh~g. In June,
when the court issued a rttling forbidding school districts to use race-specific plans to
diversify schools, Thomas pointed to Dunbar as proof that African American students can
excel in radally isolated environments. "In the period 1918-1923," he wrote, Dunbar was a
"pro~ninent example" o f an "exemplary black sehool."

I’m not sure which is more surprising: to find Thomas on the same page as black separatists --
a pm-t of the black commustity he’s usually at odds with -- or to see the lone black justice
praising an elite club that probably wouldn’t have had him as a member. For even in its glory
days as a single-race school of high acttievers, Dunbar ~vasn’t free from discrimination. It ~vas
simply discrimination of a different kind.

The late Howard Shorter ~vas one proud Dtmbar graduate, and he loved to tell stories about
the grand old days ofblackWashington, ~vhen folks &ove big cars along U Street, dressed to
the nines, called shots, made big deals -- all on their own tm’f.

"Integration mined everything," he would often gntmble to me when ~ve worked together at a
public interest law fil~n i~t the late 1990s.

But Shorter, like Tho~nas, was invoking the Dtmbar High of yesteryear, the storied and
celebrated tfigh school my m other graduated fi’om in the 1940s, the sdtool that produced
countess African American lmninaties dining the awful days of Jim Crow.

This was the near-mythical place depicted inthe docmnentmy "Dttke Ellington’s
Washington," a school where blacks outscored their white counterparts on standardized tests.
In 1900, when it was known as rite M Street High School -- the nmne changed to Dunbar in
t916 -- African Ameaicans frown other parts of the East Coast moved to Washington so their
children could attend the school. Ellington himself noted in his autobiography that "the proud
Negroes of Wastfington" protested school integration plans because they didn’t want ~vhite
students to b~ing them do~vn.

Dunbar graduates often went on to earn degrees from Ivy League colleges. Several made
history. Ct~arles R. Drew, ~vho graduated in 1922, pioneered advances in the use of blood
plasma. Benjamin O. Davis St. attended Dtmbar in the 1890s and became the first black
A1Tny general; Sterling A. Brown, who g~tduated in 1918, ~vent on to a career as a noted poet
and English pa-ofessor. Anna J. Cooper, a leading fe~ninist scholar, was a principal of the high
school, and the celebrated Harem Renaissance novelist Jessie Redmon Fanset taught there.
The school also boasted a faculty full of teachers with doctorates.

06/05/2008
 Page 5 of 8
Page 1175

When I told my mother about Thomas’s mention of Dunbar in the Jtm~ decision, she, too,
recalled a place she called "om’s" and a time ~vhen there ~vas a sense of commmfity
everywhere, when yot~r teachers walked to school beside you because they lived in the same
segregated neighborhood where yore" school, yore" doctor and eveliything else was located.
My m other also says it never dawned on her that black students would integrate with whites
in theh schools because they were receiving a great education at Dunbm; which "was all they
kIIe’vv."

But as the award-winning poet Thomas Sayers Ellis, who graduated from Dunbar in 1982,
noted, even if there were opportunities for blacks at his alma mater, it didn’t mean that
everyone was welcome. "The halls were then and are still today fitll of photographs of
graduating classes full oflight-sldnned blacks," he said.

The black elite of the period enforced a well-kno~vn color caste system, according to Audrey
Elisa Ken, anthor of"The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rmnor and the Case of
Black Washington DC."

Keiz quotes former Dunbar students as describing light-skinned blacks as "privileged." "Tile
social experience of the ’fairest’ of Dunbar students was inarked by theh" ability to ’pass’ [for
white] in and arotmd Washington D.C. after school," she wiites.

That put black saivers who happened to have darker sldn at a distinct disadvantage. Had he
been around in those days, that category would have included Thomas.
This is especially ironic because, according to "Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of
Clarence Thomas," Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletchefs recent biography of Thomas,
color divisions within the black community have tormented the justice for ~nost of his life.
Perceived slights by the light-skinned black elite in his home town helped chive his
opposition to affmnative action, which he considers something of a spoils syste~n for this
group.

All the romantic reveiie about rite good old days comes to a crashing halt when you bring it
back to Dtmbar’s cttn’ent challenges. While the old Dunbar was an exception to the rule,
today’s school looks mucli ~nore like the educational reality in the rest of black America.
About 98 percent of its students are black. It has a well-regarded pre-engineering progra~n,
and last year, its students craned $1.5 million in college scholarships. But the school still
faces tough obstacles. Sliglifly more than half its students co~ne from low-income families.
Just 29 percent scc~ed as proficient or better in reading; in math, the figttre was 27 percent.
The last school ye~ saw 27 violent incidents on the school grotmds.

"Dunbar has everything," said Joseph Mttrray, who taught at the high school for 20 years
before retiring in 2003. "High achievers, average students and some students who don’t want
to do anything." It also has its share of social proNems outside its doors, including one he
noticed a lot over the years: dings.

This is the reality of education for black chil&en in the 21st centttry: high levels of
achievement, dubious statistics and social problems never faced before. And then there’s the
constant: segregation. In the end, the sliame of it all is that the debate about black childien
and education is still a racial issue, more than 50 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of
Education ruling.

06/05/2008
 Page 1176 Page 6 of 8

Thomas is correct: Afiican American children can perform well in racially isolated
environments. They have done so before Brown and after Brown. Bnt what does the Dunbar
example mean today, when higlaly qualified black faculty and black middle-class students
have so many other options?

It is great for us to bask in the glory of the past. But Thomas and others in the black
community who like to romanticize that pa~ must tal<e a long hard look at all of Dunbar’s
lengthy record -- not just the sunny parts. Only then can we ask ottrselves ~vhether policies
that tolerate extreme segregation do black chil&en any good.

Tales from the classroom updated for the testing era.

Revie~ved by Ben Wildavsky
Sunday, September 2, 2007; BW 11
As Washington policymakers work to reauthorize the landmark No Child Left Behind Act,
controversy abounds: Has the law fostered excessive test prep? Squeezed out science m~d
social studies? Shortchanged gifted kids? Not sm~prisingly, authors have been putting flesh
and bones on these edu-issues, taking a venerable gem’e -- the book-length tale fi’om the
classroom trenches -- and updating it in assorted forms for the age ofaccotmtability.

TESTED One American School Struggles to Make the GradeBy LindaPerlstein Hotry
Holt. 302 pp. $25
In Tested, the most an~bitious of these new volmnes, Linda Perlstein, a former Washington
Post education reporter, got what she calls an "all-access pass" to Tyler Heights Elementm3~
School in Annapolis, Md. Despite all the usual challenges -- many of the school’s low-
income black and Latino kids have huge academic deficits and face tough home lives -- the
school’s hard-driving principal has succeeded in improving restdts on the slate exam, the
Maryland School Assessment, so much so that Tyler Heights has been hailed as a turnarom~d
success story.

Peflstein’s nanative is much bleaker, however. Deploying the fine fly-on-the-wall reporting
sldlls that ~nade her previous book, Not Much Just Chillin’, so uncannily evocative of the
lives of middle school kids, she opens a window into a school that has beco~ne over-the-top
test obsessed. Along the way, she weaves in extensive discussions of federal education
policy, pushing readers to the conclusion that the standards and accountability movement in
general -- and No Child Left Behind in particular -- have gone badly awry.

Peflstein paints a sobelJ~g portt’ait of Tyler Heights. Students slog through a rigidly scripted
cmriculnm and spend an inordinate mnount of time practicing the pmagraph-length
"BCRs" (for "brief constructed response") that are used to answer questions on the Maryland
state test. Science and social studies are given short shiift: Cool experiments, field trips and
just about all activities "seen as irrelevant" to the state exam are backloaded to the end of the
school year.

To her credit, Perlstein acknowledges that systematically tracldng student test resttlts has
so~ne advantages: "Flotmdering children who once might have been allowed to flop
undetected fiom grade to grade were pulled aside daily for special attention." But her over,’~
assesmnent is so rdentlessly dire that one wonders whether her case study is t~ady
representative -- and, if it is, how she thinks an effective accountability syste~n might be set
up. Conld it be that the problem is not the tests but the inappropriate, even absm’d, ways in
which schools are responding to thegn? It is sad to read of the impoverished education these
impoverished children are receiving. But allhough Perlstein doesn’t seek them out, there me
plenty of contrasting exan~ples (some of which are described in Kmin Chenoweth’s recently

06/05/2008
 Page 7 of 8
Page 1177

published It’s Being Done: Academic Success in UneaT)ected Schools) that show children
need not be taught this way to get great resntts.

LETTERS TO A YOUNG TEACHERBy Jonathan Kozol Crown. 288pp. $19.95

IfPerlstein’s case study is extreme, thorough critiques like hers at least must be taken
seriously by anybody trying to make sense of today’s education debales. Not so with Letters
to a Yo~o~g Teacher, fiom Jonathan Kozol. Forty years after Kozol published Death at an
EarlyAge, his arresting account of teaching at an inner-city school in Boston, the prolific
author has become the patron saint of educational progressives. His latest book, filled with
new material mid ~nany retrospective vignettes from his earlier works, takes the fol~n of a
series of missives to "Francesca," the pseudonym of a beginning first-grade teacher in an
ltrban elementm7 school.

Kozol may be a white Harvard grad who is now past 70, but he takes pains to let readers
know that he is still down with the people. For one thing, he has many personal friends inthe
hood. Also, he believes teachers shotfld not be "se~ants of the global corporations or drill
sergeants for the state." Nattu~lly, he opposes school vouchers, along with charter schools
and, of course, No Child Left Behind. What is Kozol for? Above all rise, tmleashing
children’s natm’al creativity and playfulness. He also wants innea-city teachers to become
activists, beming wilness to social injustice without wolrying overmuch about, say, teaching
grammar.

Kozol is surely right to declare on the very first page that teaching is -- perhaps he should
have said can be-- "a beautiful profession." But his bumper-sticker rant of a book ("childhood
does not exist to serve the 1rational economy," he francs) combines kids-say-the-damedest-
things sentimentality with so many rabid and ad hominem attacks on his ideological foes that
it quickly becomes tiresome. Kozol seems really to believe that efforts to ensttre that students
can read and do math, using uniform standards, measured by tests that can be compmed ffo~n
classroom to classroom and school to school, me evidence of corpo~tte repression. Sure,
those efforts aren’t always well conceived or thoughtfully implemented. But, at least in
p~Sneiple, couldn’t the ability to be academically self-suflident instead be viewed as a path to
personal liberation?

THE GREAT EXPECTATIONS SCHOOL A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard

JungleBy Dan Brown Arcada 267pp. $2S.9S
Mercifully, the sanctimony quotient is considerably lower in Dan Brown’s compelling dim3r
of his year as a newbie teaching a troublesome class of timer-city fourth graders. With
introspection and good hmnor, Bro~vn tells he lively and often appalling story ofho~v an
NYU film school !p’ad comes face to face with a group of students from a dirt:poor Bro~tx
neigl~borhood who are intensely needy, shockingly ignorant and quick to assault one another.

Part of a crop of unconventional recruits brought into the public school system tl~ough the
New York City Teaching Fellows l~ogram, Brown has his share of small breakthrouglrs with
individual kids, but 1nany, many disalgpointments. He recounts not o~dy ttis ceaseless
struggles to maintain order, but also the ditty little secrets of the education bm’eancracy. He
faces pressure notto ~nake special ed refe~xals, for inslmace, even when kids desperately need
extra help, and he is advised by a colleague to "teach them so~netlfing they already lcnow" to
create Potemkin-village classroom observations.

Like Kozol and Perlstein, Brown is not a fan of s~andardized testing. But tellingly, aftcr
describing how the officious school bureaucrats who are his main villains question the
effectiveness of his teaching, he makes a point of letting readers know that his kids did better

06/05/2008
 Page 8 of 8
Page 1178

than altnost any other class on... the state test. Ultimately, the greatest strength of his book
is its vivid depiction of just how hard N’st-year teaching is -- and its implicit lesson that
ttrban schools urgently need to ate’act and ret,-tin ~nore thoughtfitl and dedicated people such
as Brown. It is disappointing, ifunderstmtdable, that Brown gives up on his dysfanctional
school -- "I fought the Bronx, and the Bronx won" -- but heartening to read that he is
studying to be a high school English teacher.

A CLASS APART Prodigies, Pressure, and Passion Inside One of America’s Best High
SchoolsBy Alec Klein Simon & Schuster. 323 pp. $25
A completely different side of the New York City. school system is on display inA Class
Apart, Post reporter Alec Klein’s mttttropological account of a se~nester in the life of his alma
mater, Mard~attan’s Stuyvesant High School. A celebrated public school where admission is
by a competitive city-wide exam, Stuyvesant e~nbodies Amelica’s promise of meritocracy as
do few other institutions: Klein affectionately calls the school "a fierce anachronism" aim ed
at "fostering an aristocracy of talent." By shadowing a handful of students and administrators,
he memorably catalogues the daily dramas of the small town that is high school, with details
unique to academic hothouses like Slaty. Thea’e is inte~tse l~essure, to be sttre, but also the
exuberance ofaccemplishrnent. And loopy hmnor: Apparently kids at schools such as this
really do tell physics jokes. Yet Klein is less successfid at thoroughly exploling the big-
picture questions he asks (Is it a good idea to segregate kids by academic ability? Have gifted
sla~dents been tmfairly ignored in the quest to raise basic sldlls?) thmt he is at capttuing the
distinctive and endeming arm osphere of a place "where the brainiacs prevail."

At Stuyvesant, at least, success on exams is still seen as a gate~vay to better things. Making
that trtte for kids who attend the nation’s non-elite schools will mean rejecting Kozol’s false
choice between creativity and daill-and-kill. Instead, accounts such as Perlstein’s and Brown’s
might profitably be used as cautionary tales: Test-based accotmtability is here to stay, but
reformers badly need to figure out how to get it fight. ?

Ben Wildavsky is a senior fellow in research andpolicy at the EwingMarion Kauffman

Foundation and former education editor ofU.S. Nmvs &amp; WorldReport.

06/05/2008
 Page 1179 Page 1 of 2

NonresponsivI
From: Ruberg, Casey
Sent: August 30, 2007 8:26 AM
To: Cariello, Dennis; Aud, Susan; TracyYoung; Halaska, Terrell; Dunn, David; Terrell,
Julie; Rosenfelt, Phil; Pitts, Elizabeth; Tucker, Sara Martinez; MacGuidwin, Katie;
Wurman, Ze’ev; Ruberg, Casey; McGrath, John; Kuzmich, Holly; Scheessele, Marc;
Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Flowers, Sarah; Young, Tracy; Williams, Cynthia; Mesecar, Doug;
Jones, Diane; Toomey, Liam; Tada, Wendy; Cohn, Kristine; Reich, Heidi; Landers,
Angela; Talbert, Kent; Colby, Chad; Briggs, Kerri; Private- Spellings, Margaret; Neale,
Rebecca; Morlfi, Jessica; Evers, Bill; Ditto, Trey; Maddox, Lauren; Beaton, Meredith;
Anderson, Christy; Yudof, Samara; Gribble, Emily
Subject: Education Secretary Visits Rural Alaska Schools (AP)

Education Secretary Visits Rural Alaska Schools (AP)

By JEANNETTE d. LEE
AP, August 30, 2007
SHISHMAREF, Alaska (AP) -- U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings toured schools in two
remote Alaska towns on Wednesday as part of a Bush Administration campaign to tout the successes
of the federal No Child Lelt Behind Act, which is up for reauthorization this year.
The ~dely criticized education law is the cornerstone of Bush’s education policy. Spellings is traveling
extensively this year to drum up support among members of Congress and see for herself how the
legislation plays out in the nation’s classrooms.
"1 really wanted to see the challenges that this part of Alaska faces as it relates to attracting and
retaining teachers and providing opportunities to kids," Spellings told The Associated Press. "We’re on
the eve of reauthorizing No Child Lelt Behind and want to make sure it’s workable in all sorts of
settings."
Accompanied by U.S. Sens. Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski, Spellings visited schools in the Eskimo
communities of Bethel, on the mouth of Kuskok~m River, and Shishmaref, in the Bering Strait.
Officials in the isolated communities were eager to share their opinions with the secretary, who helped
craft the legislation that outlined strict guidelines for student achievement and qualifications for teachers
and aides.
Agatha John-Shields, administrator at Ayaprun Elitnaurvik School, said she’s frustrated with testing for
proficiency in English at a young age.
The school teaches elementary students exclusively in the Yup’ik Eskimo language and phases in
English at the filth grade level.
"We’re having to add more English at the primary grade level, and we don’t want it," John-Shields said.
"Our focus is Yup’ik language revitalization."
Alaska Education Commission Roger Sampson said the law has worked for the state on some fronts,
b~t not on others.
"We think NCLB is improving accountability and bringing attention to the importance of education for a
lot of communities," Sampson said. "But it doesnt completely take into account the fact that no other
state is looking at the challenges Alaska has."
Class sizes are so small in dozens of rural Alaska villages that teachers routinely take on subjects they
are not officially qualified to teach. The situation pushes down the state’s rating when it comes to
tallying the percentage of teachers who can demonstrate sufficient mastery of their subjects through
testing.
According to Department of Education statistics, 64 percent of core academic classes in Alaska are
taught by what the lawterms "highly qualified teachers." The national average is nearly 91 percent.
Adding to complications, rural villages are dozens, if not hundreds of miles apart, and cannot be

06/05/2008
 Page 2 of 2
Page 1180

reached by road, making student transfers from ~nderperforming districts vi~~ally impossible.
Spellings said Alaska has done well under the law, pointing to federal data that shows 326 of the state’s
schools, or 65 percent, made adequate yearly progress in the 2006 school year, compared to 62
percent the year before.
Spellings, who has spent the last few months visiting dozens of schools, was circumspect about
whether she thinks the law will be reauthodzed.
"It’s a challenging time in Washington," Spellings said. "1 think we have the makings of an agreement
sooner rather than later and we’re going to push hard to get it done."
Stevens, R-Alaska, said he was inclined to vote in favor of reauthorization, b~t Murkowski, R-Alaska,
said she wants to see changes in the 5-year-old lawto accommodate the unique needs of rural schools
before voting to renew it. A member of the Senate Education Committee, Murkowski introduced a bill
this year proposing several changes to the act.
Among other things, the bill would require rural teachers to prove expertise in one academic subject
rather than the four or ~ve they may be responsible for teaching.
It would also allow mderpefforming districts to offer tutoring or distance-learning classes rather than
transfer students to other schools, which is currently allowed, and push English language proficiency
testing, now required in third grade, to sixth grade.
U.S. Education Secretary Visits Bethel, Discusses No Child Left Behind’s Impacts
In Alaska (KYUK)
By Angela Denning-Barnes
KYUK-Radio Bethel, Alaska, August 29, 2007
U.S. Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings is being guided through Alaska this week by Senators Ted
Stevens and Lisa Murkowski. Her first stop was in Bethel today.

06/05/2008
 Page 1181 Page t of 3

Nonresponsiv I
From: Ruberg, Casey
Sent: August 31,2007 8:00 AM
To: Cariello, Dennis; Aud, Susan; TracyYoung; Skandera, Hanna; Halaska, Terrell; Dunn,
David; Terrell, Julie; Rosenfelt, Phil; Pitts, Elizabeth; Tucker, Sara Martinez;
MacGuidwin, Katie; Ruberg, Casey; McGrath, John; Kuzmich, Holly; Scheessele, Marc;
Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Flowers, Sarah; Young, Tracy; Williams, Cynthia; Mesecar, Doug;
Jones, Diane; Toomey, Liam; Tada, Wendy; Cohn, Kdstine; Reich, Heidi; Landers,
Angela; Talbert, Kent; Colby, Chad; Briggs, Kerd; Private- Spellings, Margaret; Neale,
Rebecca; Morffi, Jessica; Evers, Bill; Ditto, Trey; Maddox, Lauren; Beaton, Meredith;
Anderson, Christy; Yudof, Samara; Gribble, Emily
Subject: Alaska Clips (5)

U.S. Secretary Of Education Touring Alaskan Schools (KTVA)

By Andrea Gusty
K-IVA-TV Anchorage, Alaska, August 30, 2007
Spellings observing No Child Left Behind law in action
The U.S. Secretary of Education is on a whirlwind tour of Alaska, visiting both rural and urban schools
to get a feel for howthe No Child Lett Behind lawis working out.
No Child Lett Behind was created to make sure all children are able to achieve--and prove it by passing
tests. Nowthat it is up for review, Alaskans are hoping to get some changes made.
Critics say No Child Left Behind doesn’t always work, especially in the Bush. That’s why the secretary
is here. She is trying to drum up support for No Child Lett Behind, and see the law in action.
Alaska is different: ~ide open spaces, a low population, and kids with learning abilities all over the
chart. This is why the cookie cutter regulations of No Child Left Behind don’t always work.
"It’s not realistic- we’re hoping that some flexibility can be built in," said Anchorage School District
Superintendent, Carol Comeau.
One of the biggest problems is finding teachers.
No Child Le~t Behind requires all teachers to be, "highly qualified."
But in a state where a single teacher might have to take on grades K through 12 all by themselves,
getting a teacher who has a degree in all subjects can be unrealistic.
"Maybe she’ll be a little more open to really solving some of these problems, without lowering the
standards, but be more realistic about what those standards are," said Comeau.
Now lawmakers and teachers are urging the Bush administration to look at child achievement in a
practical way--not just at test scores, but at the big picture, to make sure that Alaska’s kids aren’t left
behind in the education race.
"Were got some challenges when it comes to educating all of our kids, and that’s because of our
geography. It doesnt mean that kids in rural Alaska should get the short end of the stick when it comes
to educational opportunities," said Senator Lisa IV[~rkowski (R), Alaska.
The secretary and the senator have visited schools in Nome, Shishmaref, Bethel and Anchorage, so
that when No Child Left Behind comes up for reviewthis year, some changes can be made.
"We can make the law better, but the core principles, the things like all students on grade level by 2015,
are immutable. Opportunity for tweaking and perfecting yes, but we have gotto keep our eye on the
goal," said U.S. Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings.
And that goal is to give all kids a good education, no matter where they live.
Senator Murkowski says she won’t vote to renewNo Child Lett Behind without some big changes for
Alaska’s kids. Among other things, she’s pushing for teachers to prove expe[tise in one subject instead
of all they may teach and for testing in English proficiency to be changed from third grade to sixth.
To contact Andrea, call 907-273-3186.

06/05/2008
 Page 2 of 3
Page 1182

Scores Are Up. Elementary Students Celebrate Their Accomplishments (Klrvlo)

By Christina Coleman
KIMO-TV Anchorage, Alaska, August 31, 2007
School Celebration Includes the Secretary of Education
ANCHORAGE - Creekside Park Elementary students celebrated their improved reading levels with
more than just their teaches today, on Thursday. The Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, and
Senator Lisa Murkowski stopped by the school this afternoon to applaud students’ efforts.
The Students were recognized for increasing the number of students reading on their own grade level
by 10% since 2003.
School officials attribute this rise in reading levels to the No-Child-Left-Behind Act. The purpose of No-
Child-Left-Behind is to bdng every student up to grade level or better in both reading and math by 2014.
Creekside Park Principal, Dr. Robyn Rehmann spoke of the accomplishment, saying, "the funny thing is
that even though ourfocus is in reading, we really adjusted our teaching techniques to meet the needs
of children and we’re finding advantages in all academic areas."
Education Secretary Visits Anchorage School (AP)
AP, August 31, 2007
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP)- Education Secretary Margaret Spellings visited Creekside Park
Elementary School in Anchorage today (Thursday) as part of a 2-day tour of Alaska schools.
Spellings also met with school superintendents from around the state for a closed-door discussion on
the No Child Le~ Behind Act.
The. secretary said she expected to receive comments abou~ the laWs requirements that teachers show
proficiency in every subject they teach.
The provision is difficult to reach in rural Alaska. The low number of teachers means they are routinely
responsible for teaching a wide variety of subjects outside their areas of expertise.
Spellings spent Wednesday and Thursday visiting schools in Bethel, Nome and Shishmaref.
Secretary Of Education Visits Rural Alaskan Schools (KII~O)
By Christina Coleman
KIMO-TV Anchorage, Alaska, August 31, 2007
NOME - Secretary Spellings and Senator Murkowski commented on their trip to Nome, today, on
Thursday. They visited the town’s schools to better understand the educational needs of the students
there.
Senator Stevens also accompanied them on their visit. Before the No-Child-Left-Behind Act is re-
authorized, Spellings wanted to see for herself what needs to happen on Capital Hill to increase the
learning progress of rural Alaskan children.
Spellings says that this visit really helped her to better understand the academic challenges Alaska
faces. "Until you see how vast, how rural, how remote these places are, you really don’t have a full
understanding of what you can read in a paper and what you can see in real life," Secretary Spellings
said.
Senator Lisa Murkowski spoke of of educational challenges saying, "As you know here in Alaska we’ve
got some challenges, when it comes to education all of our kids that’s because of our geography, the
reality of our geography. It doesn’t mean rural children should be on the short end of the stick when it
comes to their educational opportunities."
Secretary Spellings and Senator Murkowski also held a round table discussim with Superintendents
from various parts of Alaska today, to discuss how the No-Child-Left-Behind Act can meet the needs of
the State.
Murkowski Seeks Change In No Child Left Behind Law (FrbnksDNMAK)
By Robinson Duffy
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, August 31, 2007

06/05/2008
 Page 3 of 3
Page 1183

Sen. Lisa Murkowski said the only way she would support a reauthorization of No Child Left Behind is if
the federal education law is changed to allow schools to compare students’ individual progress from
year to year rather than the progress of one year’s class of students to the previous year’s.
Local and state education officials applauded her stance.
In an interview Tuesday with the News-Miner, Murkowski said giving all states the option to use what is
known as a growth model in calculating schools’ adequate yearly progress was "absolutely imperative
for my support on NCLB."
"1 am all about accomtability in education, bL~ what I want to know is how is my son doing from year to
year. I want to see that level of accountability," she said.
The current standard for determining ifa school is meeting adequate yearly progress under the five-
year-old federal law is to compare test scores of, for example, third-graders his year with the test
scores of third-graders last year. Under growth models, the scores of an individual student this year
would be compared with his or her test scores the year before. Such a system simply makes more
sense, Murkowski said.
"To knowthat this third-grade class compared this way to last year’s class doesn’t really help me out,"
she said. "1 don’t think it helps the school district. I don’t think it helps anybody."
"1 want to know howmy child is doing and I think that’s what all parents are looking for and I think that’s
what administrators, teachers, everybody wants to know. Are we making progress one kid at a time?"
No Child Lett Behind was one of President Bush’s first major initiatives but needs to be reauthorized by
Congress this year. Murkowski is only one of several members of Congress calling for substantial
changes to the law before they will sign on again. Several bills are floating around Washington that
make changes to NCLB, including one sponsored by Murkowski that, among other changes, allows for
a growth model. Murkowski is a member of the Senate’s education committee.
"1 think this state is very fortunate she is representing us on the committee overseeing the
reauthorization of this law," said Louise Anderl, who oversees federal programs like NCLB for the
Fairbanks North Star Borough School district
Both Anderl and Fairbanks Superintendent Nancy Wagner said they also suRoorted a growth model.
"Measuring the growth of an individual student really makes sense," Wagner said. "We feel like that
would be a positive change in the law."
Eric Fry, a spokesman for the Alaska Department of Education, said adding a growth model into NCLB
is one of the most important changes state officials would like to see made to the law. Fry said he was
heartened to see that members of Congress, including Murkowski, were getting on board with the shift
to growth models, noting that the House Committee on Education and Labor earlier this wek released
a dratt proposal to change NCLB, including putting in place growth models as an option for states.
"It sounds like more and more people are getting the message that it makes sense to compare each
student to his or her own progress each year," he said.
The federal government, earlier this year, allowed several states, including Alaska, to test growth model
formulas as part of a pilot program to see if the system would give accurate data. Murkowski said she
was glad to see the administration take that move and wanted to see the program expanded.
Murkowski was in Alaska this week touring various schools across the state with U.S. Education
Secretary Margaret Spellings. It’s a visit Murkowski has been urging Spellings to make for three years
now so that the secretary could see that certain aspects of the federal law simply do not make sense in
a state like Alaska with a large number of small rural schools in isolated villages.
"It’s important to have these field trips to allow eyes to be opened to some of the challenges we have
(in Alaska)," Murkowski said. "But I think she does appreciate with the reauthorization of No Child Left
Behind coming up, she is looking for allies on the legislation. I think she knows it’s important to try to
figure out fully what Alaska’s challenges and what our issues are."
Contact staff writer Robinson Duff,/at 459-7523.

06/05/2008
 Page 1184

Nonresponsi
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: August 25, 2007 10:09 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey;
Dunn, David; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Kuzmich, Holly;
MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; Mcnitt, Townsend L.;
Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Simon,
Ray; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; tracy_d.
_.young@who.eop.gov; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Yudof, Samara
Subject: WEEKEND NEWS SUMMARY, 8.25.07

WEEKEND NEWS SUMMARY

August 25, 2007

Waslfington Post- Panel Probe On Massacre Is Winding Up, Repol~ Is Due Next Week
Waslfington Post- After Fai~ax Misses Target, Officials Cite ’No Child’ Flaws
New York Times - Companies Agree to Pay to Settle SAT Error Suit
New York Times - Ex-University Head in Texas on Trial for Money Misuse
Wall Street Journal - School Season Heralds a Time To Talk Savings
Grand Island Independent: Milliken recruits students in Chile, Brazil
Lincoln Journal Star - Millfl~en: Global partnerslfips critical

Panel Probe On Massacre Is Winding Up, Repo~ Is Due Next Week

By Tint Craig
Waslfington Post
August 25, 2007

CHARLOTTESVILLE -- The panel investigating the April 16 Virginia Tech massacre completed its four-
month investigation into the shootings Friday, capping offone of the most ambitious state-funded probes in
decades and setting the stage for an intense debate over its findings.

The panel spent eight hours in a closed-door meeting at the University of Virginia, putting the finishing touches
on its 300-page report, which it plans to deliver to Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) early next week. Kaine plans to
release the report to the public Thtusday.

Since May, the panel has held fore" punic hemings, reviewed thousands of pages of documents and conducted
dozens of interviews with first responders, Virginia Tech administrators and counselors, and people who knew
the shooter, Sueng Hui Cho.

The panel, which includes fo~mer U.S. homeland security secretary Tom Ridge, was backed by a team of
investigators who fanned out across the country to gather information relating to the massacre -- the deadliest
shooling rampage by an individual in U.S. history -- in which Cho killed 32 people and himself.

"In four months, we have investigated the worst mass tragedy dealing with firemrns in this country, and I think
the detail to which we have done it is amazing," saidW. Gerald Massengill, the panel’s chairman.

Massengill declined to discuss specifics of the report. The report, panel members said, includes a fimeline of
Cho’s life, including his infancy in Korea, his childhood and teen years in Centreville and his final moments in
Noms Hall, where he killed 30 people and himself. More than two horns before the Non’is Hall shootings, Cho
1
 Page 1t85
killed two students in a dormitory.

The report, which has 11 chapters, offers more than 70 recommendations on topics that include improving
mental health sewices and updating state and federal privacy la~vs. The report also scrutinizes Virginia Tech’s
response to the shootings and whether the university could tkave done more to prevent them.

The report probably will become a major factor next year when Virginia lawmakers review whether the state’s
mental health system is adequately funded. Colleges, universities and governments across the country are
expected to use it to evaluate secmity procedures.
"It will have a national impact," said Philip Schaenman, the panel’s staff director.

After Faiiq~ax Misses Target, Officials Cite ’No Clfild’ Fla~vs

By Maria Glad
Washington Pos~
Augus[ 25, 2007

Fairfax County schools boast SAT scores significantly higher than the national average. More than 93 percent of
graduates go on to college or trade schools. And the dropout rate is low.

But this week, the school system was given a new -- and negative -- label: faihn’e to meet academic goals under
the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
Fairfax educators say the system as a whole, along with 68 of its schools, fell short largely as the result of tighter
federal testing requirements for students with limited English skills. Officials and parents now face the question
of whether file rating will tarnish the district’s reputation.

Liz McGhan, mother of three children in Fairfax schools and president of Garfield Elementary School’s PTA,
said the rating doesn’t change her positive view of the schools.

"For me personally, and for other people I talk to, school scores are not everything about the school," McGhan
said. "I think a majority of the parents understand what’s going on behind all the nulnbers. There’s so much more
to a school than the testing."

School and county officials, who often cite the quality of schools as a lure for businesses and residents, argue
that Fairfax’s situation illustrates flaws in the federal law.

"This is not a question of academic perfolrnance. It’s a question of a rigid law," said Gerald E. Connolly (D),
chairman of the Board of Supervisors. "The No Child Left Behind law does not make allowances for a highly
diverse school systems such as we have in Northern Virginia."
Federal officials disagree. They say that all students nmst be held to the san~e standards and that Virginia had
ample time to adjust to testing requirements. "We know that some limited English students need an alterlmtive
assessment," U.S. Education Department spokesman Chad Colby said. "We’re worldng with states, but
[Virginia] could have done that going back to 2003."

Many other Virginia school systems fell short of academic targets. But some reached them, including those in
Chesapeake, Roanoke County and Virginia Beach.

The federal law, ~vhich aims to shine a light on blocs of struggling students and allow schools to pinpoint areas
that need improvement, requires annual reading and math tests in grades 3 ttn’ongh 8 and once in high school. It
 Page 1186
also requires schools, and school systerns, to show steady progress in improving scores. Subsets of students --
including ethnic minorities, students with disabilities, those with limited English sldlls and those from low-
income families -- also must show gains each year. If one group does not meet the target, the school or district
may be designated as not making "adequate yearly progress," or AYP.
Several other Northern Virginia school systems, including those in Alexandria and in Loudonn, Prince William
and Arlington counties, also did not meet targets on the spring Standards of Learning tests. The number of
Northern Virginia schools ttmt did not make the grade nearly doubled, rising from 76 in 2006 to 146 this yea.

Education experts say school systems nationwide are experiendng similar increases. Each year, it is tougher for
schools to meet standmds, because states raise pelTo~rnance targets as they move toward the goal of having
eveor child proficient in reading and math by 2014.

In MaTland, for instance, the number of elementa7 and middle schools targeted for academic improvement
because of low test scores rose this year from 167 to 176, the largest total since the No Child law was enacted in
2002.
"The crunch is stating to be felt," said Jack Jennings, president and chief executive of the D.C.-based Center on
Education Policy. "There’s more tests, and there’s a higher bar. The gane is getting more challenging."

The experience of Northern Virginia, and the question of whether student performance on standardized tests
should be the sole measure of a school’s success, is expected to play a significant role this fall as lawmakers
debate reauthofizafion of the federal law. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), House education committee chailrnan,
has called for additional measures, such as graduation rates or the number of students passing Advanced
Placement exams, to be included in the ratings.

Michele Men~ace, president of the Fairfax County Council of PTAs, said parents who are not familiar with the
intricacies of the federal law might question principals and school officials about the county’s ratings.

"I dor~t think people will be up in arms, but I think there will be questions asked," Menapace said. "There has
been a great deal of confusion, All they see is that their school didn’t make AYP, and they don’t undelstand all
the testing groups."

Fairfax Comity School Superintendent Jack D. Dale said he is not concerned about the label.

"What I hear from the community is, AYP infolrnation has become meaningless," Dale said. "Our parents want
to know how ldds are doing on a broad spectrum of assessments."

Companies Agree to Pay to Settle SAT Error Suit

By Karen W. Arenson
The Ne~v York Times
August 25, 2007

Two big testing organizations, the College Board andNCS Pearson ha., said yesterday that they had agreed to
pay $2.85 million to settle a class-action lawsuit involving more than 4,000 students whose SAT exams were
inconectly scored in 2005.

Under the proposed settlement, the students would receive $275 each or possibly more, if they can show they
had stfffered greater dalnages. The board said last year that for 4,411 students, the reported scores were too low -
in a few instances by as many as 450 points out of a possible 2,400. A retired judge will decide the final
payments.
 Page 1187

Edna Johnson, a spokeswoman for the College Board, said yesterday that the board had agreed to the settlement
because "we’re eager to put this behind us and focus on the future."

"We deeply regret the inconvenience and the ~vorry that this caused affected students and parents," Ms. Johnson
said, adding that the College Board had since "put in place even more quality control measures."

Amanda M. Hellerman, of Yorktov, q~ Heights, N.Y., who said she initially received a score that was more than
300 points below what it should have been, said, "It is great to hem that the College Board is being held
accountable."

Ms. Hellerman, who now attends Amherst College, added, "But what would be more promising to me is they
gave some indication of how they were going to insme that this kind of tiring does not happen again."

The College Board disclosed in March 2006 in the midst of the college admission season that about 1 percent of
the nearly 500,000 students who took the SAT exam in October 2005 had received inconect scores because
their answer sheets had become moist, causing them to be misread when scanned for scoring.

NCS Pearson, one of the country’s biggest testing companies, had a contract with the College Board to handle
the scoring.

While the board sent revised scores to colleges, some students said that the lower scores had affected where they
applied and that it was too late to make changes. The board discovered the problems after a couple of students
paid to have their tests rescored by hand.
The size of the minimum settlement is not that different from what some students pay for talcing the SAT
multiple times and for additional services like rushing their score reports, sending them to additio~al colleges,
changing their testing centers or verifying that an exam had been scored co~Tectly. Sitting for the basic SAT test
costs $43. The charge for having the results of the test double-checked is $50.
Robert A. Schaeffer, public education director for Fah’Test, a group that is critical of much standardized testing,
called the settlement "an important reminder that standardized tests are fallible and that reported scores can be
mong."

State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, a Republican from Port Jefferson, N.Y., who is chailanan of the Senate’s
higher education committee and who held hearings on the scoring problems, also welcomed the agreement.
"Vindication is always a nice thing," Mr. LaValle said, adding that he still felt the need for greater oversight.
"The testing institutions need to be accountable."

T. Joseph Snodgrass, one of the lawyers in Mim~esota ~vho represented the test takers, said that if the settlement
received final approval from a federal district judge in late November as expected, he believed that payments
could go out early next year.
Ex-Universily Head in Texas on Trial for Money Misuse
By Ralph Blumenfl~al
T he Ne~v York T hnes
Augus~ 25, 2007

HOUSTON - With Texas Southern University struggling to survive as one of the nation’s largest histc~ically
black colleges, the former president once hailed as its savior faced a state jtuThere Friday, charged with
 Page 1188
misspending hun&eds of thousands of dollars on personal luxuries.

A $1,000 silk canopy for a four-poster bed, $138,000 for landscaping and $61,600 for a secutty system are
among the items that prosecutors say the former president, Priscilla Slade, fraudulently billed the public for and
kept secret from trustees from 1999 to 2005.

The ctutrges being considered in Harris County Disttct Court ca~ay penalties from probation up to life in prison.

Describing Ms. Slade, 55, as a ’~ve~y fearsome leader" who intimidated underlings, Julian Ramirez, an assistant
Hm-ris County district attolIley, said the evidence would show "Priscilla Slade had her own set of rifles - if she
wanted it, Priscilla Slade was going to buy it."

But before the jury of six women and six men that included two black men and one black woman, another
poil~ait was painted by her lawyer, Mike DeGeurin, who said in his opening statement: "She worked 24/7 to
save lhat university." Mr. DeGeurin characterized the expenditures as proper and denied that Ms. Slade had
sought to conceal them.
°1"he records are there; it’s not like they’re hidden," he said, blaming subordinates for not reporting the
expenditures to the university’s regents.

"She was blindsided when the scandal hit the papers," he said.

The university’s chief financial officer, Quentin Wiggins, was recently convicted on related charges mxl
sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The revelations are the latest blow to Texas Southern, which has about 10,000 students and 45 buildings on a
150-acre can~pus in Houston’s lmgely Afiican-American Third Ward.

Established by the Legislature in 1947 as the Texas State University for Negnoes, Texas Southern counts
Barbara Jordan and Mickey Leland, former members of Congress, as alumni and has graduated more than one-
quarter of all the black lawyers in Texas.

But the university has made many missteps. In 1997, the federal Department of Education, finding
mismanagement of millions of dollars of student aid, required Texas Southern to pay the students first and then
file for reimbtnsement, diaining the university’s coffers and leaving some students without money and forced to
sleep in their cars. In 1999 the Legislature threatened to absorb Texas Southern into the University of Texas
system or place it under another higher education umbrella.
Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat whose disiaict includes the campus, showed up in cotnt on
Friday, hugged Ms. Slade and spoke to prosecutors, saying later that she had not been taking sides and that she
had faith in the judicial system.

But later at a news conference, Ms. Jackson Lee faulted Texas and federal officials for what she calledthe
longstanding neglect of the university.
Ms. Jackson Lee and others called on Gov. Rick Per~Tto fill the four vacancies on the tmiversity’s nine-member
Board of Regents so that a new pe~nanent president could be named. J. Timothy Boddie Jr., a retiredAir Force
brigadier general, has been interim president since November.

The university, about 85 percent of whose students are African-American, guarantees enrollment to all high
school graduates. It claims a proud histoI7 as ~he house that Sweatt built" from its segregation-era origins after
 Page 1189
a successf~ discrimination lawsuit by a black mail cartier, Heman Marion Sweatt, who was denied entry to the
University of Texas School of Law in 1946.

Although the indictment broadly chalges that Ms. Slade °’Inisapplied" more than $200,000 in university money
and failed to obtain approval for expenditures of more than $100,000, the prosecution’s opening specified at
least $429,579 in illegal spending.
This, Mr. Ramirez said, began shortly after Ms. Slade, then dean of the business school with a doctorate in
accounting, was elevated to interim president in 1999 as Texas Southern scrambled to assuage lawmakers over
the university’s string of troubles.
Although initially paid a salaly ors 147,500 with a $50,000 expense account, Ms. Slade, then living in her own
house in nearby Missouri City, "embarked on a spending spree that the board was not aware of," the l~’osecutor
said. Among the expenditures for her house were $48,864 for furniture; $19,021 for landscaping; $21,807 for
flooring; $21,878 for roofing; and $14,137 for drapes.

By 2005 when her base salmy had grown to $248,334 a yeal" plus $5,200 a month in housing and cal" allowances
and a $50,000-a-year expense account, she built a $1.2 million house in Houston’s exclusive Memofiai section
where, Mr. Ramirez said, she misspent $286,426 in utliversity money on fitrniture, landscaping and security,
sometimes using Texas Southern’s vendors.

The first prosecution witness was Alphonso R. Jackson, the federal secretary of housing and urban development
and a former chairman of the university board who said he and Dr. Slade had "had a very good relationship."
~Vhen asked by the defense why he had not asked for receipts, he said that perhaps he should have, °°but I trusted
her."

Mr. DeGem-in defended the expenditut’es as befitting a president who neededto entertain.

"She considered it, visionwise, an extension of T.S.U.," he said, adding at another point, "Yes, even the bed."
He defended, too, her purchases at Neiman Malcus instead of discount stores like Kohls. ’~I’hat’s not a crime,"
he said.
And later Mr. DeGeutin added, "Dr. Slade is not going to go third grade."

School Season Heralds a Time To Talk Sav~ngs

By Ron Lieber
Wall Sh’eet Journal
August 25, 2007

If you’re the parent of a college-aged kid, the back-to-school season offers one of the best chances you’ll ever get
for a crucial, teachable money moment.
Whether you’re packing students offto college with a four-figm’e financial-aid package, or wliting a $45,000
check out of your cunent income, it’s time to sit down and explain how you ended up here, and what your child
can learn from it.
Parents who claim their children as dependants on their tax folins are all but forced into full disclosure if the
family applies for financial aid. That’s because the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which
most fill out, asks for information on income and assets. Both students and parents must sign, and the kids have
access to the data if they want it.
 Page 1190
That doesn’t mean the numbers inspire a searching discussion, though. Why not? Joline Godfrey, chief
executive of Independent Means Inc., which does financial education for childien and families, describes a
silent collusion of sorts: Parents, facing the prospect of an empty nest, may have mixed feelings about their kids
growing up. Thus, they avoid starting grown-up conversations about fancily thlances.
Ideally, you’ve taken an entirely different approach all along. Shira Boss, a New York writer, says her family
didn’t take fancy vacations or buy many new clothes when she was growing up. To help explain why, Ms. Boss’s
father, Bruce, regularly marched each of his daughters down to Michigan National Bank in Flint. Once there, he
pulled out the safety deposit box and showed them the stock certificates slowly stacking up.

"Every yea, we’d make a pilgrimage," says Mr. Boss, a retired professor. "I’d explain that this is what the
objective is, this is what we have, this is how we got it and this is what we’re doing to manage it."

Sure enough, come college time, Mr. Boss, who supported the gifts on one salary with some help from his
family, was able to write a check to pay the bills outright. And Ms. Boss grew up to write "Green with Envy," a
book that explores the consequences of silence about money.

For many families, a lack of savings may cause regret -- and silence. Forget it. You did the best you could.
Explain the reality to your chad without apology -- but do explain it. If you don’t have a lockbox at the local
bank like the Bosses, translate your 529 college-savings account statement. Make sure they 1am their iTunes
purchases thi’ough Upromise, so they get a kickback for college with each download.

Then, show them your credit-card bills as they’re heading offwith one of yours tucked away for emergencies.
Lay out how much a few kegs of beer will ultimately cost them at 18% annually -- mid that the family bailout
policy doesn’t cover alcohol crises.

Finally, help them project the final amount of any student-loan debt. Just as you saved for years to help, it might
take years for them to pay for their share. Feel bad? Then let the bailout policy apply dining that first lean year
out of school.

Ron Lieber is managing editor of FiLife.eom, a fortheotning personal-finanee Web site that is a joint venture of
Dow Jones and IAC:

Milliken recruits students in Chile, Brazil

By Harold Reutter
Grand Island Independent
August 25, 2007

U1tiveasity of Nebraska President J.B. Milliken is hoping his trip to Chile and Brazil will entice more students
fi’om those two countries to enroll in the university system.
Milliken made the lxip with U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and officials from seven other U.S.
univea’sities.

Milliken and Spellings spoke with reporters during a conference call from So Paulo, Brazil.
He said Nebraska receives a direct financial benefit of $65 million from foreign students eurolled in the
university. Not only do foreign students gain from attending the University of Nebraska, but native-born
students benefit fiom being around foreign students as well.
Likewise, Nebraska students ~vho study in foreign universities learn valuable lessons, he said.
 Page 1191

"This trip has certaiifly drawn shalp focus for me on the fact that the world is, indeed, flat and that is more
important than ever for ore students to have a global education, a global experience by studying abroad and for
us to welcome students fiom other countries," Milliken said.
He said the University of Nebraska has about 2,500 international students, which he said provides "an incredibly
important part of the campus life and the experience at Nebraska."

Milliken said university faculty benefit fiom worldng with foreign students, especially in the area ofbiofuels,
where Brazil is an international leader, and agriculture, where the state has had a relationship with Brazil for
more than 30 years.

This is the third trip that Spellings and some university presidents have taken to key allies and partners around
the world. The first hip was to China, Japan and Korea. The second was to India.

Spellings said the cm-rent delegation shows the diversity of U.S. higher education.

It includes large public systems such as the University of Nebraska, private schools such as Stanford University,
conmatnity colleges such as Miami Dade Community College and research institutions such as Washington
University in St. Louis.

Spellings said she was tl~illed to join her counterpart in the Brazilian education ministi7 to announce a fourfold
increase in the number of disadvantaged Brazilian students who would be able to attend American universities.
Another agreement included the U.S. having up to 100 Chilean scholars in engineering and science at the
graduate and post-gradnate levels, Spellings said. An agreement with Brazil offers opportlmities at the
community college level for study in info~Ination technology, health care, computer technology and animation.

One reporter asked about efforts to increase international enrollment, which had declined since 9/11 before
finally stabilizing last year.

Spellings said the federal government has streamlined the visa process for international students and also for
U.S. students who want to study abroad.

Milliken said international student numbers at the University of Nebraska have rebounded, but not to pre-9/11
levels. He said the university is "fully committed to doing that."

He said he would talk more about proposals to recrnit more international students after retm-ning to the state.
Milliken said an existing program brings undergraduate Brazilian engineering students to Nebraska for a half-
year. They then can retm-n as gradnate students.

He said 18 international students enrolled in the undergraduate program last year and 15 retrained as graduate
students, "which is an incredible yield."
Milliken said he met a Brazilian high school student who had made a two-week visit to Nebraska. The Brazilian
revealed "the first rain forest he’d actually seen was at the Heln3z Doorly Zoo."

The student said he wanted to attend NU. That pleased Milliken because that statement was made in the
presence of the Stanford, Iowa State and Washington University presidents.
 Page 1192
Mfl|iken: Global partnerships crilical
By Melissa Lee
Lincoln Journal Star
Augus~ 24, 2007

J.B. Milliken’s business cards are now officially maldng their way through
Latin America.

Wrapping up a weeklong trip to Brazil and Chile Fri&ay, tile University of

Nebraska president reported the stack of cards he’d brought with him were
fast disappearing - signs of his effolts to strike up some new fiiendships
with NU’s peers down South.

Milliken was one of eight university presidents and chancellors to

accolrrpany U.S. Secretaly of Education Margaret Spellings to Latin America
this month to promote foreign exchange and study abroad programs and study
ways to strengthen relationships between U.S. and Latin American educators.

Spealdng by teleconference on their way from one meeting to the next,

Milliken and Spellings said it’s critical for U.S. lmiversities to recruit
more foreign students and, in tinn, send more students abroad.

Doing so enriches students" experiences both here and around the world,
they said.

°~Yhe world is flat. It is a smaller, more closely knit globe than in the
past," Mittiken said. Building on exchange programs "can only benefit us."
Echoed Spellings: °°Education is a universally shared value. Our prosperity
as naiions really is rooted in a high-quality education system."

Pm~nerships with Latin America could yield major benefits to both regions,
Milliken said. Students there have heavy interest in a wide breadth of
fields, including agriculture, water research, biofuels, plant science and
engineering - all areas of interest to Nebraskans, too.

Foreign students also add cultural value to U.S. campuses, he said.

In 2005-2006, nearly 8,600 students from Brazil and Chile studied in the
U.S. In 2004-2005, about 4,400 American students studied in those
countries.
Spellings is leading similar delegations to locations around the globe,
including Asia., India and Egypt.

###
 Page 1193

Nonresponsiv
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: August 14, 2007 8:40 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerd; Williams, Cynthia; Cohn, Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey;
Dorfman, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren;
Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.;
Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele,
Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail);
Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: HEA bill ’significant step’ for s~udents with disabilities (Education Daily)

HEA bill ’significant step’ for students with disabilities (Education Daily)
By Erin Uy and Andy Viccora
Education Daily, August 14, 2007
The Senate’s reauthorization of the Higher Education Act could provide a milestone reform for students with disabilities,
bringing them federal financial aid and more postsecondary programs.
’We are just very, very pleased and we think this is a very strong and significant step in the right direction," said George
Jesien, executive director of the Association of University Centers on Disabilities.
W~th the House yet to take action on reauthorization and Congress in recess, advocates have to wait and see where the
Senate bill goes, said Stephanie Smith Lee, senior policy advisor for the National Down Syndrome Society, which lobbied for the
measure.
While the Senate voted overwhelmingly (95-0) to pass its bill, S. 1642, the House has not yet introduced a companion
measure.
House education committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., has said he wants to introduce his own version of
reauthorization rather than work from the Senate dratt.
But legislators and education advocates are confident they can finish reauthorization, with Congress recently passing and
President Bush signing into a lawa temporary three-month extension of HEA programs until Oct. 31.
’I’m optimistic that reauthorization will be completed by the end of the year," said Cyndy Littlefield, federal relations director
for the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities.
She said Senate education leaders would like to conference the HEA bill at the same time as higher education budget
reconciliation legislation.
The House and Senate passed separate reconciliation bills in late July, and conferees nearly reached agreement on a
conference report just before this month’s recess.
Senate bill As it now stands, the Senate HEA bill would provide financial aid to students with intellectual disabilities in
postsecondary programs, Lee said.
Students with intellectual disabilities typically do not earn a high school diploma or lhe other credentials required to qualify
for federal aid such as Pell Grants, she said.
This continues to be an obstacle to pursuing postsecondary education, despite an increase in the programs available, she
said.
’The finish line for these young people is employment, independent living, belonging to their community, and pursuing their
life goals," Lee said. "And these postsecondary programs help these young people reach the finish line."
If enacted, the Senate bill would: ¯ Allow students with intellectual disabilities who attend higher education programs
designed for them to be eligible for Pell Grants, Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, and the Federal Work-Study
Program.
¯ Authorize the development and expansion of high-quality, inclusive model comprehensive transition and postsecondary
programs.
o Authorize the establishment of a coordinating center for technical assistance, evaluation and development of accreditation
standards.
Welcome surprise The bill went beyond what AUCD aimed to accomplish, said policy analyst Joe Caldwell.
His group focused on establishing more postsecondary and technical assistance programs.
 Page 1194
The financial aid components, he said, were a bonus.
’This is an even bigger step forward than we thought we were able to get," Caldwell said.
The federal aid would take some of the financial burden off parents, he said. While some states pay for services, families
soak up most of the costs, and that can limit a student’s opportunities when funding is already strapped, he said.
Growing demand Interest in postsecondary programs for students with disabilities has grown in recent years, Lee said.
There are more than 100 such programs across the country, the bulk of which are in New York, California and Maryland.
The bill would add momentum to the development of postsecondary programs for students with disabilities, Jesien said.
’We are just at the beginning of the process of really making our campuses welcoming and acceptable to people with a
wide range of disabilities," he said.
’We’ve been a long time coming, and understanding that postsecondary education is critically important for the
employment, self sufficiency, and quality of life for people with disabilities."
Veto unlikely In a letter she sent to budget reconciliation conferees Aug. 3, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings outlined
several problems with the reconciliation legislation and the Senate HEA bill.
But on the HEA legislation, Spellings stopped short threatening a veto, as she did with the reconciliation bills.
’The Administration has grave concerns with several provisions in S. 1642, which would create approximately 13 new
programs; reauthorize several programs the Administration proposed to terminate ... and restrict the Secretary’s regulatory
authority," Spellings wrote.
Still, given the strong bipartisan vote in the Senate and history of support for HEA programs in the House -- an HEA bill
cleared the House in 2005 -- most experts doubted a veto would happen or be sustained by Congress.
’We will likely see reauthorization legislation enacted," said Edward Elmendorf, senior vice president of government
relations for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.
 Page 1195

Nonresponsiv
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: August 14, 2007 8:40 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Cohn, Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey;
Dorfman, C~thia; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren;
Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.;
Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele,
Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail);
Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: MDC President Joins Education Delegation (MH)

MDC President Joins Education Delegation (MH)

IViami Herald., August 14, 2007
IViami Dade College President Eduardo Padr6n will join U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings as part of a
delegation to Chile and Brazil to build educational partnerships.
The trip, Aug. 18-24, will also include seven university presidents. Padr6n is the only community college president on the
trip. MDC, which has a handfi.~l of four-year degrees, is the nation’s largest college and has been a first stop for two generations
of Latin American immigrants.
The delegates want to strengthen ties in Latin America and plan to meet with business and education leaders as well as
students.
This will be the third high-level delegation of college and university presidents sent to promote higher education and
exchange ideas.
Last year, Spellings led the first delegation to the Asian countries of Japan, Korea and China. Karen Hughes,
undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, led a similar group to India earlier this year.
 Page 1196

~Nonresponsiv
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: August 13, 2007 8:39 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Cohn, Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey;
Dorfman, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren;
Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L;
Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele,
Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail);
Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: UMUC President Susan Aldridge Joins Officials’ Trip To South America (Exmnr)

UMUC President Susan Aldridge Joins Officials’ Trip To South America (Exmnr)
By Daniel Fowler
Examiner, August 13, 2007
BALTIMORE- The University of Maryland University College president and seven other college or university leaders will
join federal government officials on an educational expedition to South America this week.
’The mission of the delegation is to promote the importance of international education and to highlight the value of higher
education in America," said Rebecca Neale, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Education.
Susan Aldridge of Adelphi-based UMUC, the presidents of Stanford University, University of Nebraska and Miami D ade
College, and other higher education leaders will visit Chile and Brazil from Saturday through Aug. 24.
’It’s really a range of different colleges and universities that are representative of all that American higher education has to
offer," Neale said.
U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings is leading the delegation, which will meet with government, business and
higher education leaders along with current students and alumni of such programs as Fulbright scholarships.
’The purpose of the delegation really is to encourage bilateral agreements and cooperation between various universities in
South America and universities in the United States," Aldridge said.
!Ne want to encourage students from Brazil and Chile and other countries to come to the United States to our Campuses
and join our universities for research and to encourage American students to go overseas for study abroad programs."
While she is in South America, Aldridge said she would took to establish partnerships with universities where, for example,
UMUC students might be able to complete the last two years of their degrees abroad and foreign students could finish their
degrees in Maryland.
UMUC is the 12th-largest degree-granting university in the U.S. and has 90,000 students worldwide. Most of UMUC’s
students are working professionals, Aldridge said, and the majority of students take some classes online.
 Page 1197

I~Nonresponsiv
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: August 10, 2007 8:42 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings,
Margaret; McGrath, John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale,
Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy;
Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-m all); Tucker, Sara Martinez;
Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Inside Politics (WT)

See "Spellings’ letter" below

Inside Politics (WT)

By Greg Pierce
The Washin.qton Times, August 10, 2007
Headed for Iowa
Republican Fred Thompson, the all-but-certain 2008 presidential candidate, will make his initial foray into Iowa next week,
meeting with lawmakers and checking out an Iowa State Fair tradition -- a cow carved from butter.
Mr. Thompson, an actor and former Republican senator from Tennessee, will spend Aug. 17 in the state, aide Andrew Dorr
said yesterday. His visit will come less than a week alter Saturday’s Republican presidential straw poll in Ames, an event that
could prompt some candidates to drop out of the race.
Mr. Dorr said Mr. Thompson will meet privately with a handful of Republican state legislators, talk with reporters and see
the sights at the Iowa State Fair.
Mr. Thompson is expected to join the field of Republican candidates, but the date of his announcement has been
repeatedly pushed back and is now expected in September, the Associated Press reports. He has spent little time organizing in
Iowa and has only a skeleton staff, though polls have shown him running relatively strong compared to candidates who have
devoted enormous time and energy to the caucus campaign.
"Is it too late? No. Is it very late? Yeah, it’s going to be very difficult to crawl out of the organizational deficit he is in," said
Chuck Laudner, executive director of the Republican Party of Iowa.
Going nuclear
Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who chastised rival Sen. Barack Obama for ruling out the use of nuclear weapons
in the war on terror, did just that when asked about Iran a year ago, the Associated Press reports.
"1 would certainly take nuclear weapons offthe table," she said in April 2006.
Her views expressed while she was gearing up for a presidential run stand in conflict with her comments this month
regarding Mr. Obama, who faced heavy criticism from leaders of both parties, including Mrs. Clinton, after saying it would be "a
profound mistake" to deploy nuclear weapons in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
’q-here’s been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That’s not on the table," he said.
Mrs. Clinton, who has tried to cast her rival as too inexperienced for the job of commander in chief, said of Mr. Obama’s
stance on Pakistan: "1 don’t believe that any president should make any blanket statements with respect to the use or non-use of
nuclear weapons."
But that’s exactly what she did in an interview with Bloomberg Television in April 2006, the wire service said. The New York
senator, a member of the Armed Services Committee, was asked about reports that the Bush administration was considering
military intervention -- possibly even a nuclear strike --to prevent Iran from escalating its nuclear program.
’1 have said publicly no option should be offthe table, but I would certainly take nuclear weapons offthe table," Mrs. Clinton
said. ’qhis administration has been very willing to talk about using nuclear weapons in a way we haven’t seen since the dawn of
a nuclear age. I think that’s a terrible mistake."
Not a monolith
Democrats hold an edge with Hispanics in national elections, but Hispanics’ growing tendency to register as independents
and split their vote between parties is buoying Republican prospects for 2008, the Associated Press reports.
Younger and college-educated Hispanics in particular offer fertile ground for the Republican Party, new data show. And
 Page 1198
while no one suggests Republicans have become the party of choice for the nation’s fastest-growing minority, Democrats have
been gradually losing ground.
’q-he Democrats began in the 1980s to slowly lose Latino registration," said Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C.
Velasquez Institute, a San Antonio-based research group that studies Hispanic issues. "lfs drip, drip, drip."
President Bush claimed 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004, a record for a Republican presidential candidate.
Although Hispanics tend to vote Democratic, the percentage of Hispanics who call themselves Democrats has declined in
the past decade, even as the overall number of Hispanic voters climbed.
~llionth supporter
One million people like Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, NewYork Democrat, and she wants you to know it, reporter Christina
Bellantoni writes in her "On the Democrats" blog at www.washingtontimes.com.
"What’s the power of a million? It’s the power to run a winning campaign; it’s the power to restart the 21 st century; it’s the
power to make history," Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle wrote in an e-mail yesterday morning.
Mrs. Clinton’s millionth supporter, computer programmer Ron Wood of Douglasville, Ga., will join the former first lady on the
campaign trail, Miss Doyle says.
"We’re not going to stop here. We’re going to keep working to change America for the better," she says. "We’re in this
together, and you and I know that Hillary is ready to lead America out of the mess created by the Bush administration. But she
can only do it with you at her side."
The message also links to a video of what staffers have been calling Mrs. Clinton’s "money line" in Tuesday’s AFL-CIO
debate: "For 15 years, I have stood up against the right-wing machine, and I’ve come out stronger. So if you want a winner who
knows how to take them on, I’m your girl!"
Spellings’ letter
Education Secretary M argaret Spellings sent a letter yesterday urging colleges and lenders of student loans to
voluntarily reform some of their practices now, before new federal government regulations become finalized next year.
The federal regulations, which won’t take effect until July, aim to prevent conflicts of interest, kickback schemes
and other questionable practices between lending companies and schools. These practices came to light in a
nationwide student-loan scand~ earlier this year that put the Education Department in the hot seat.
In her letter, Mrs. Spellings said she wants schools and lenders to willingly make those changes. "1 urge you to act
now to assure students and parents that we have their best interests at heart," she wrote.
Mrs. Spellings yesterday outlined some of the actions her agency is taking, including an investigation of 900
colleges and universities that have 80 percent of their student loan volume with a single lender.
Obama’s ad
Democratic Sen. Barack Obama has a new ad running on Iowa television stations portraying himself as the candidate who
can unite Americans.
The ad, "What if," intersperses shots of Mr. Obama speaking to applauding crowds with pictures of him working as a
community organizer and lawmaker.
"What if there was hope instead of fear?" an announcer says. "Unity instead of division? What if we had a president who
believes that we are one nation?"
Mr. Obama has been spending about $160,000 a week to run ads in Iowa, the Associated Press reports.
¯ Greg Pierce can be reached at 202/636-3285 or gpierce @washingtontimes.com.
 Page 1199

Nonresponsiv
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: August 10, 2007 8:41 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings,
Margaret; McGrath, John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale,
Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy;
Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; TracyYoung (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez;
Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Spellings Describes Scrutiny Of Colleges In Lending Controversy, Urges Use Of Guidelines
(CHRONED)

Spellings Describes Scrutiny Of Colleges In Lending Controversy, Urges Use Of Guidelines

(CHRONED)
By Jeffrey Brainard
The Chronicle of Hiqher Education, August 10, 2007
The U.S. Department of Education plans to question some colleges that give most of their student-loan business to one
lender and might visit their campuses to obtain additional details about those arrangements, Education Secretary Margaret
Spellings said on Thursday.
The department also sent colleges, lenders, and loan-guarantee agencies a letter on Thursday asking them to voluntarily
follow the "principles" embodied in draft regulations that the department proposed in June. The regulations, which are to govern
colleges’ relationships with lenders, are scheduled to take effect next year.
In a news conference, Secretary Spellings described her agency’s response to the continuing controversy over conflicts of
interest in those relationships. Her department has been criticized recently by the Government Accountability Office (The
Chronicle, August 10) and others for not using its existing authority to police those ties. One critic, Attorney General Andrew M.
Cuomo of New York, has accused the department of being "asleep at the switch" in its oversight of student-loan companies (The
Chronicle, May 4).
Ms. Spellings has asked Congress to give her agency greater powers to conduct that oversight, and she again called for
that authority on Thursday, adding that it was the right time for her to air her views, during "this quiet time in Washington" that
followed Congress’s adjournment last weekend. Some critics of the nation’s student-lending system contend that the Education
Department already has enough authority to battle many of the problems cited by Mr. Cuomo.
For now, the secretary said, her department planned to follow up with a subset of the 921 colleges and universities that the
agency wrote to in June (The Chronicle, July 10). The June letter went to institutions identified as having 80 percent or more of
their federally guaranteed student loans provided by a single lender. The department said such a pattern could indicate that the
institutions were not providing their student borrowers a choice among lenders, as required by law.
Secretary Spellings would not specify how many colleges might get the additional scrutiny and campus visits orwhy. She
described the work as "ongoing oversight" and "fact-finding."
"We Will act accordingly when we find misdeeds or wrongdoing," she said. "1 don’t knowthat yet."
Regarding the report released this month by the Government Accountability Office, she called it "basically kind of old news
in many ways."
"We had already begun to observe those things internally ourselves, obviously as had other parties, including the Congress
and attorneys general and the like, and were on the case prior to the release of that particular document," she said. The report by
the GAO, an investigative arm of Congress, said that the department had failed in its oversight of the student-loan industry, had
relied on outside complaints to identify potential problems, and had not updated its guidance on the laws affecting lenders in
almost 20 years.
A Plea for Voluntary Compliance
Among the voluntary guidelines she proposed, one asks colleges that recommend preferred lenders to students to do so
based solely on the students’ "best interests." The letter also asks colleges to avoid accepting payments or other inducements
from lenders in return, as many financial-aid officers have done.
The guidelines contain elements of the new regulations proposed in June by the department. The rules would restrict the
 Page 1200
use of preferred-lender lists and clarify what constitutes an improper inducement under federal law (The Chronicle, June 15). The
department is reviewing comments on its proposal, and the regulations would not take effect until July 1, 2008.
Secretary Spellings said that colleges could and should act quickly on "key elements" in the proposal. "It’s not good for the
academy, for this department, or for students for us to be on our back foot on this sort of thing," she said. "We need to make sure
that this system has integrity and confidence."
The secretary’s call for action is "perfectly appropriate," said Becky Timmons, assistant vice president for government
relations at the American Council on Education. "Everybody is interested in raising the bar to where there aren’t clouds hanging
over the whole enterprise."
In other news related to student loans, Secretary Spellings announced that the department had restored public access for
"nearly all parties" to a federal database -- the National Student Loan Data System -- that contains information on millions of
student borrowers. The department shut down the system in April out of concern over potential misuse by lenders and marketing
companies (The Chronicle, May 11), and has since improved controls over its use, she said.
In addition, Ms. Spellings said the department would unveil at the end of August the "Fafsa4caster," a new online tool
intended to help students and their families make better financial plans for college before a student’s senior year of high school.
The tool will help families calculate a student’s eligibility for federal student aid, including Pell Grants and subsidized loans
(The Chronicle, March 22). It is also meant to reduce the lengthy time required to complete the online Free Application for
Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa, which students fill out to apply for aid.
 Page 1201

[Nonresponsi~
kathei-iiie-m-ci-an e{ ..........................
"--"" "f=J6n:(h ~ (~}J’°,m: ............................. August 10, 2007 5:50 AM
To: scott m. stanzel@who.eop.gov; cheryt.oldham@who.eop.gov; kristin.conklin@who.eop.gov;
vickie.schray@who.eop.gov; Tucker, Sara (Restricted); Manning, James; Beaton, Meredith;
Briggs, Kerri; Ruberg, Casey; Colby, Chad; Williams, C~thia; Dunn, David; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunckel, Denise; Evers, Bill; Gribble, Emily; Kuzmich, Holly; La Force, Hudson; Landers,
Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private - Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John;
Mesecar, Doug; Moran, Robert; Neale, Rebecca; Oldham, Che@; Reich, Heidi; rob
Saliterman; Yudof, Samara; ,Scheessele, Marc; Halaska, Terrell; Toner, Jana; Mcnitt,
Townsend L.; Young, Tracy; Ditto, Trey; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Wurman, Ze’ev
Subject: Education Dept. Seeks Early Compliance on Loan Rules (NYT)

August i0, 2007

Education Dept. Seeks Early Compliance on Loan Rules

By JONATHAN D. GLATER
Criticized for lax oversight of student loans, the federal Education Department is asking
universities and lenders to abide voluntarily by its proposed rules banning certain
marketing practices by loan companies, before the rules take effect next year.

The department’s move was announced yesterday by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings in
a conference call with reporters. Ms. Spellings also said the department could not enforce
the rules before their effective date, once the federal regulatory review process was
complete.

In a letter sent yesterday to lenders and universities, she wrote, "I urge you to act now
to assure students and parents that we have their best interests at heart in providing
competitive student loans."

Ms. Spellings also outlined other steps she said the department was taking to step up its
oversight of the student loan industry. One is holding a meeting with representatives of
other federal agencies -- including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the
Treasury Department and the Federal Trade Co~tm~ission -- that play a role in regttlating
private student loans, those that are not guaranteed by the federal government.

Ms. Spellings said the department was also following up on letters it sent in June to more
than 900 colleges and universities where 80 percent or more of the loan volume is held by
a single lender, asking for more information about the relationships some colleges have
with lenders.

"When 900 schools have 80 percent of their loan volume with one szngle lender, that’s
red flag," Ms.
Spellings said. She added, "We are in that fact-finding phase," but declined to offer
details.

The steps announced by Ms. Spellings left some of the department’s critics puzzled.

"I thought they were already doing this," said Luke Swarthout, a higher-education advocate
at the U.S.
Public Interest Research Group in Washington. Holding a meeting with other regulators, for
example, Mr.
Swarthout said, was a logical next step in the wake of remarks by Ms. Spellings at a
Congressional hearing in early May.

"You’d have just imagined that, coming out of that, this would be a natural step," Mr.
Swarthout said. He added, "It doesn’t lead one to believe that they’re acting with the
level of speed and intensity that the situation seems to demand."

Ms. Spellings’s announcement comes a week after a government report sharply criticized the
department for its oversight of the $85 billion student loan industry, which has faced
increasing scrutiny recently over questionable ties between lenders and universities. The
 Page 1202
report, by the Gover~~ent Acco<~tability Office, portrayed the department as sometimes
reacting to outside complaints but not "proactively" detecting problems on its own.

It found that the department had no oversight tools to determine whether lenders were
giving improper incentives to colleges to steer borrowers their way, and that since 1989,
the department had offered lenders no comprehensive guidance on what incentives might be
forbidden. In 20 years, the report found, the department has tried to punish only two
lenders for violating gover~nent rules.
Even as she annot~ced the new measures, Hs. Spellings dismissed the findings of the
G.A.O., the gover~ment’s research arm, as "old news." "We had already begun to observe
those things internally ourselves," she said.

Be a better Heartthrob. Get better relationship answers from someone who knows. Yahoo~
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 Page 1203

Nonresponsij
From: Neate, Rebecca
Sent: August 09, 2007 8:39 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerd; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flow,s, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: Sara Tucker, Disappointed But Determined (IHE)

Sara Tucker, Disappointed But Determined (IHE)

By Doug Lederman
Inside Higher Education, August 9, 2007

In December, as she began what promised to be an intense two-year stint as the federal government’s top higher education
official, Sara Martinez Tucker eyed the challenge in front of her with a mix of excitement, enthusiasm and determination. In an
interview at the time about her ambitious agenda, Tucker described the department’s goals for carrying out the recommendations
of the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, on which she served; the tight time window
available to accomplish her expectations; and her belief that college leaders and other key parties could work collaboratively with
department officials on that agenda. ’1 wouldn’t be commuting from San Francisco," she said of her weekly travel to be with her
family, "if l didn’t believe in these two years we can get a lot done."
Now, eight months later, Tucker remains determined, doggedly so, and confident that Secretary Margaret Spellings’s campaign
to change higher education has changed the public policy conversation in Washington and, more importantly, captured the
imagination of the public. In a newinterview (a podcast of which can be heard here), she says that Spellings has "hit a home run"
in stimulating the "national dialogue" she set out to create. She defends the department’s much-maligned work overseeing the
federal student loan programs. And she urges Congress, in the budget and student aid legislation it is now considering, to focus
the new funds it would provide on the low-income students who need it most.
"[President Bush’s 2008 budget proposal] set a high standard with 90 percent [of new funds] going to Pell, and 99.7 percent
going to needy students still in school," Tucker says. "rd like for [Congress] to get as close as possible to the president’s budget."
But as much as Tucker continues to express her sense of the possible, it also appears that her initial enthusiasm and optimism
have been dampened by higher education and Washington politics, and displaced to a large extent by new impressions and
emotions: Frustration and anger about what she says is the tendency of some college officials and journalists (including this one)
to misrepresent the department’s policies on accreditation and student learning outcomes. Disappointment that Congress has
taken steps to limit the department’s regulatory authority. Shock at how the agency’s efforts to improve higher education have
been wrongly perceived as a threat to damage it. And, ultimately, defiance.
’1 guess what I’m stunned beyond belief [about]," Tucker says, "is that people believe we had some sort of agenda that wants to
destroy the American system of higher education, and that’s been real disconcerting."

Progress on Priorities

By any measure, the eight months since Tucker became U.S. under secretary of education have been event-fill.ed, verging on
chaotic. The Education Department, with Tucker leading the way, has engaged in an aggressive, multi-pronged effort to carry out
the recommendations of the Spellings Commission through regulatory and other means. It sponsored national and regional
summits of educators and the public to build support for the commission’s work. It juggled four separate negotiations aimed at
producing new regulations for federal education programs or policies, including on student loans and accreditation. It convened a
behind-the-scenes meeting of experts to discuss ways to revamp the federal financial aid system. It reshaped the staff and
membership of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, which advises the education secretary on
accreditation issues.
And at the same time, department officials have faced significant distractions, in time and energy, from the months of controversy
stemming from the student loan investigations begun by NewYork’s attorney general and Democrats in Congress, who have
 Page 1204
gone out of their way to put the department on the defensive.
In a wide-ranging interview in her office in downtown Washington, Tucker says she believes the Spellings Commission has had a
significant impact so far, resonating with the public’s deep concern about accessibility to the increasingly necessary credential of
a higher education. Getting outside Washington for a series of regional summits and "town hall" meetings with parents and
students and with rank and file college officials in June reinforced for Tucker and her team, she says, how high the stakes are to
make college more affordable and colleges more effective and efficient.
Tucker describes the "absolute terror in the faces of parents" when they talked to her about how to pay for their children’s
education. She also says she was pleasantly surprised by the frequency with which individual faculty members and campus
officials department leaders met on their "listening tour" expressed support for what the department was doing and hunger to be
a part of the solution. ’They told us, just don’t listen to the ’inside the beltway’ conversation -- listen to us... deal directly with us,"
Tucker says. ’There’s a hunger for leadership out there."
Tucker’s implication is that what department officials heard as they traveled was an antidote to the negativism and nay-saying
that she and Spellings have heard too consistently from Washington’s higher education associations and others as the
department has sought to carry o~ the work of the Spellings Commission. As Tucker lists the accomplishments she believes the
Bush administration has achieved so far-- proposing a hefty increase in the maximum Pell Grant in the president’s 2008 budget,
prodding accrediting agencies and colleges to pay more attention to the learning outcomes of students, pushing to simplify the
process by which students apply for financial aid -- she notes that in many of the cases, higher education’s Washington lobbyists
have criticized them. (College leaders objected, for instance, to the department’s decision to fund the Pell Grant increase in part
by cutting other aid programs for students.)
"I’m stunned by the number of people who have attempted to shed light on the Spellings Commission and the commission’s
recommendations as federal intrusion," Tucker says. She says that one accrediting agency --which she declines to name --
went so far as to try to "hijack" the commission’s town hall meeting for parents in New Hampshire in June by busing in
"professionals" who hewed to a highly critical party line. (Offidals of the Council on Higher Education Accreditation and the New
England Association of Schools and Colleges, the primary accreditor in that region, said they were unaware of any such effort.)
Asked if she was heartened by signs that some higher education groups and leaders appear to have gotten behind the
commission’s agenda -- for example, the voluntary accountability system embraced by the two major associations of public
universities, and efforts by private liberal arts colleges to experiment with new ways of measuring their students’ learning --
Tucker offers a qualified Yes. ’1 know there are a lot of people out there saying, ’We were on our way’ "to tackling the the
affordability and efficiency problems in higher education, Tucker says, but in the years she spent at the Hispanic Scholarship
Fund before becoming under secretary, ’1 wasn’t seeing much" in the way of progress.
’To the extent that there are efforts outside the department that are voluntary, whether it’s what state legislatures or what
governors are doing," or initiatives sponsored by college groups, ’1 don’t know that a lot of these efforts ... would have started
without" the commission’s prodding, Tucker says. "I’d give Secretary Spellings all the credit myself ... Whether it’s they’re afraid
that we’ll do it to them so they’re going to do it first, or because they got it and believe it is something that should be worked on"
doesn’t really matter. ’The bottom line for me and for the kids I represent is, there’s action, and that’s the important thing."
Congress has also acted in recent weeks on many of the department’s and the commission’s priorities, and Tucker is similarly
conflicted on whether the actions of lawmakers have complemented or conflicted with her own goals.
While Congress is poised to pass legislation that would redirect billions in new federal funds from subsidies for student loan
providers to financial aid for students, exactly how it will do so is still up in the air. Tucker complains that the House of
Representatives approach, which would funnel several billion dollars to interest rate reductions for middle income borrowers after
they leave college and to create several new programs, would direct only 30 percent of its newly created funds to need-based aid
for low-income students, while President Bush’s budget would have directed 90 percent of its funds to the Pell Grant Program.
"My benchmark is how close they come to the standard the president set," she says, and the Senate’s bill comes closer. "If we
end up coming out closer to the Senate, I’m going to feel optimistic that I can find a way to drive a lot of the commission
recommendations. If it’s the House side," she says, "1 have real concerns."
Tucker also bristles at the steps the Senate proposes taking in legislation to renew the Higher Education Act to turn up the
pressure on accrediting agencies to hold colleges accountable. The Senate approach would fall far short of what the department
was prepared to push in federal rules it planned to release this summer, and Tucker says that Spellings agreed to hold back
those regulations after senators agreed to talk to her about the authority they were willing to give her.
Instead, when the Senate passed its legislation, it contained provisions that would severely restrict the Education Department’s
ability to promulgate regulations on student learning outcomes. "I’m disappointed that commitments that were made to her were
not carried out," Tucker says. "1 sit back and I think.., agencies are supposed to regulate, and they’re specifically saying you
can’t regulate on a statute. What happened to the separation of the three branches here?.. The good news is that l believe we’re
 Page 1205
on the right side. I’m hopeful that at the end, wisdom will prevail."

The Student Loan Distraction

Tucker knew when she became under secretary of education that many college leaders opposed some of her department’s
efforts, and she also had to anticipate that a Democratically controlled Congress would not necessarily be amenable to some of
the Bush administration’s priorities. But Tucker’s work in carrying out the Spellings Commission’s recommendations has
undoubtedly been affected u if not damaged m by a tsunami she could not have seen coming: the student loan scandal, which
has dominated headlines and, increasingly, the department’s time and energy in recent months.
She asserts that the many hours that she and her department colleagues have had to spend responding to Congressional
requests for documents and reports and answers about the agency’s oversight of the loan program -- including allegations that a
top department official owned stock in a lender--"are not going to slow me down .... Us having to stop what we’re doing to put
together responses, briefing the Hill ... just meant that we stayed at night to get the job done," she says.
Tucker acknowledges that some of the findings of the months-long student loan inquiry "looked terrible," and that there were "a
couple things we could have done better" in overseeing the loan programs = "You always wish you had enough early detection
to tell you about it before it happened."
But she also admits to being "angry" that lawmakers have lambasted Spellings for her perceived failures when "the secretary saw
things that nobody else saw and started action," including appointing a negotiated rule making committee last fall -- before the
loan scandal broke --to propose tougher regulation of college-lender relationships. Congressional and other critics have too
often ignored the legal limits -- set, of course, by Congress --on the department’s ability to regulate the loan industry, Tucker
says.
The department has responded to the loan scandal in part by being more open about steps it might have taken behind the
scenes in the past. "Our lesson was instead of doing it quietly and respecting the dignity of the institutions we’re investigating,
we’re just being a little more public about what we’re doing," she says. Does that mean the department has not stepped up its
regulatory activity in response to the loan scandal?
"No, let me choose my words more carefully," Tucker says. "We can always be better. So we have instituted processes that say,
How long has it been since we looked at that oversight process? Has the world changed, should be doing it differently? So where
we have found mistakes, we’ve used it as a learning opportunity to say, All right, we’re going to be doing it differently."

What’s Ahead

In the interview she gave upon taking office, Tucker said that her willingness to commute to Washington from San Francisco
every week was a sign of how much she believed in her mission at the department. Asked in July if she was glad she took the
job, she again refers to the commute, in a rare moment of letting her guard down: "Every time I get on the plane [to head back to
San Francisco] I think, what the heck am I doing here?"
In a town and a job where she has learned that it is "hard to get things done," Tucker says she is increasingly dividing people into
two camps: the "creators" and the "critics." She has found a hardy band, she says, of"creators who want to build things," but "a
lot more people who love to criticize."
As the department prepares to shitt its focus in the months ahead to finding "solutions" to the problems the Spellings Commission
identified, Tucker says, she will increasingly be on the hunt for creators who want to work with her and the department and "steel
myself for the critics who can’t stand to see progress made."
 Page 1206

~Nonresponsiv
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: August 09, 2007 8:36 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: Shuttle Launches With Teacher Aboard (AP)

After liffoff, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings sent congratulations from Washington and called Morgan "an inspiring
example for our next generation of teachers, scientists, engineers, innovators and entrepreneurs."

Shuttle Launches With Teacher Aboard (AP)

By Marcia Dunn
AP, August 9, 2007
Space shuttle Endeavour roared into orbit Wednesday carrying teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan, who was finally fulfilling
the dream of Christa McAuliffe and the rest of the fallen Challenger crew.
Endeavour and its crew of seven rose from the seaside pad at 6:36 p.m., right on time, and pierced a solidly blue sky. They
are expected to reach the international space station on Friday.
Once Endeavour was safely past the 73-second mark of the flight, the moment when Challenger exploded shortly after the
call "Go at throttle up," Mission Control exclaimed that Morgan was "racing toward space on the wings of a legacy."
Immediately after the shuttle reached orbit, Mission Control announced: "For Barbara Morgan and her crewmates, class is
in session."
Morgan, now 55, was McAuliffe’s backup for Challenger’s doomed launch in t 986. Even after two space shuttle disasters,
she never swayed in her dedication to NASA and the agency’s on-and-off quest to send a schoolteacher into space. She
rocketed away in the center seat of the cabin’s lower compartment, the same seat that had been occupied by McAuliffe.
MoAuliffe’s mother, Grace Corrigan, watched the launch on TV from her home in Massachusetts. "I’m very happy that it
went up safely," she said. "We all send her our love," she added, her voice breaking.
More than half of NASA’s 1 t4 Teacher-in-Space nominees in 1985 gathered at the launch site, along with hundreds of
other educators.
Also on hand was the widowof Challenger commander Dick Scobee. She said earlier in the day that she would be praying
and pacing at liftoff and would not relax until Morgan was safely back on Earth in two weeks.
The Challenger crew "would be so happy with Barbara Morgan," June Scobee Rodgers said. "It’s important that the
lessons will be taught because there’s a nation of people waiting, still, who remember where they were when we lost the
Challenger and they remember a teacher was aboard."
NASA Administrator Michael Griffin met Tuesday night with several members of the Challenger astronaut families who
were in town for the launch -- although not with the McAuliffe family.
Atter littoff, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings sent congratulations from Washington and called Morgan "an inspiring
example for our next generation of teachers, scientists, engineers, innovators and entrepreneurs."
~dway through the flight, Morgan will speak with students in Idaho, where she taught elementary classes before moving to
Houston in 1998 to train as a full-t]edged astronaut, the first teacher to do so. If the mission is extended from 11 days to 14 days
as planned, she will have a chance to answer questions from students in two other states.
But Morgan’s main responsibility in orbit will be to her commander, Navy Cmdr. Scott Kelly. She will help operate
Endeavour’s robot arm and oversee the transfer of cargo from the shuttle to the station. The rest of the crew will be busy
installing a huge square-shaped beam to the exterior of the station and replacing a broken gyroscope. Three and possibly four
spacewalks are planned.
Late Wednesday, Morgan sounded all business from orbit, periodically updating Mission Control on the activation of the
shuttle’s cargo-carrying module.
 Page 1207
’q-here’s a lot of work, a lot of challenges in front of us, but I think this is a great way to start out," NASA’s space operations
chief, Bill Gerstenmaier, said atter the shuttle reached orbit..
The space station is currently more than half finished. NASA plans to wrap up construction in 2010 when the shuttle
program ends.
Endeavour’s astronauts also will use a 50-foot laser boom on the end of the robot arm to inspect the shuttle’s ~ings, nose
and belly. The scan for damage from fuel-tank insulating foam and other debris from launch, or micrometeorites in space, has
been standard procedure ever since Columbia’s catastrophic re-entry in 2003.
A preliminary check of launch video showed four or five small pieces of debris falling offthe external fuel tank, but it
occurred too late in the launch to pose any threat to the shuttle, NASA off~cials said.
NASA is hoping a successful flight will draw some attention away from the rash of embarrassments it has faced this year,
most recently a NASA-commissioned medical panel’s report suggesting astronauts were intoxicated on launch day on at least
two occasions.
Griffin said NASA is investigating the anonymous allegations. The space agency’s top safety official has gone back 10
years through every shuttle flight and can find no flight surgeon, astronaut or document hinting at launch day drinking by a crew
member, he said.
No evidence has been found yet for astronaut drinking ~ight before a Russian Soyuz flight, either, he said.
"]his is not a credible scenario. They’re on TV. We just watched them having breakfast," Griffin said eady Wednesday
afternoon, referring to the Endeavour astronauts.
"The charges seem uncredible, and it also seems uncredible that somebody would just make it up. That’s why it’s so
puzzling and that’s why it’s serious and that’s why we will investigate."
This is EndeavouCs first flight since 2002. The shuttle underwent a massive overhaul and was outfitted with complete
satellite navigation, improved main engine monitoring equipment, and a new system for transferring power from the station to the
shuttle. The extra power will allowthe shuttle to remain docked at the space station longer than ever before.
Besides Morgan and commander Kelly, the crew also includes Marine It. Col. Charles Hobaugh, the copilot; Rick
Mastracchio, Tracy Caldwell, Air Force Col. Alvin Drew and Canadian physician Dave Williams.
 Page 1208

[N,~onresponsi
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: August 09, 2007 8:36 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Doff.man, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: Latin America clips (3)

Miami Dade College Boss On Americas Trip (MH)

By Noah Bierman
The Miami Heral~d, August 9, 2007
IViami Dade College President Eduardo Padr6n will join U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings as part of a
delegation to Chile and Brazil to build educational partnerships.
The trip, Aug. 18-24, will also include seven university presidents. Padr6n is the only community college president on the
trip. MDC, which has a handfi.~I of 4-year degrees, is the nation’s largest college and has been a first stop for two generations of
Latin American immigrants.
The delegates want to strengthen ties in Latin America and plan to meet with business and education leaders as well as
students.
This will be the third high-level delegation of college and university presidents sent to promote higher education and
exchange ideas.
Last year, Spellings led the first delegation to the Asian countries of Japan, Korea and China. Karen Hughes, under
secretary of State for public diplomacy and public affairs, led a similar group to India earlier this year.

O’Keefe Set To Join Education Secretary On Latin America Trip (BRDR)

Baton Rouge Daily Report ILA), August 9, 2007
LSU Chancellor Sean O’Keefe is one of eight college and university presidents who will make a tdp to Latin America next
week with Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. The trip to Chile and Brazil is set to promote higher education partnerships
and exchanges between the United States and other nations. O’Keefe and the other presidents will meet with students,
university, government and business leaders. The trip, which includes the presidents of Stanford University, the University of
Maryland and Iowa State University, will be Aug. 18-24.

Hennessy To Reach Out To South American Schools On Trip (STANDAY)

Stanford Daily, August 9, 2007
President John Hennessy will join U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and a band of other education leaders
on an expedition to Chile and Brazil from Aug. 18-24. The trip aims to build educational partnerships and support study abroad.
The trip was sparked by the 2006 U.S. University Presidents Summit on International Education. Similar delegations of
university presidents have visited India and Asia.
Hennessy will be joined on the upcoming expedition by the heads of seven other colleges and universities across the
country, including the University of Maryland University College, Iowa State University, University of Nebraska, Louisiana State
University, Miami Dade College, Washington University in St. Louis and UC-Santa Barbara.
 Page 1209

~l~nresponsi
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: August 08, 2007 8:38 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angeta; Maddox, Lauren; Private - Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Case?’; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: Not By Geeks Alone (WSJ)

Not By Geeks Alone (WSJ)

By Chester E. Finn, Jr. And Diane Ravitch
The Wall Street Journal_ , August 8, 2007
In a globalizing economy, America’s competitive edge depends in large measure on how well our schools prepare
tomorrow’s workforce.
And notwithstanding the fact that Congress and the White House are now controlled by opposing parties, lawmakers on
both sides of the aisle are bent on devising new programs and boosting education spending.
Consider the measure -- the America Competes Act -- that recently passed Congress and is on its way to the president’s
desk. The bill will substantially increase government funding for science, technology, engineering and math ("STEM" subjects).
President Bush, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings as well as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid support this initiative. Nearly all of the 2008 presidential candidates endorse its goals. And 38 state legislatures have
also recently enacted STEM bills. The buzz is as constant as summer cicadas.
Indeed, STEM has swiftly emerged as the hottest education topic since No Child Lef~ Behind. They’re related, too. NCLB
puts a premium on reading and math skills and also pays some attention to science. Marry it with STEM and you get heavy
emphasis on a particular suite of skills.
But there is a problem here. Worthy though these skills are, they ignore at least half of what has tong been regarded as a
"well rounded" education in Western civilization: literature, art, music, history, civics and geography. Indeed, a new study from the
Center on Education Policy says that, since NCLB’s enactment, nearly half of U.S. school districts have reduced the time their
studer~s spend on subjects such as art and music.
This is a mistake that will ill-serve our children while misconstruing the true nature of American competitiveness and the
challenges we face in the 21 st century.
As with all education reforms, the STEM-winders mean well. They reason that India and China will eat America’s lunch
unless we boost our young people’s prowess in the STEM fields. But these enthusiasts don’t understand that what makes
Americans competitive on a shrinking, globalizing planet isn’t out-gunning Asians at technical skills. Rather, it’s our people’s
creativity, versatility, imagination, restlessness, energy, ambition and problem-solving prowess.
True success over the long haul -- economic success, civic success, cultural success, domestic success, national defense
success -- depends on a broadly educated populace with flowers and leaves as well as stems. That’s what equips us to invent
and imagine and grow one business line into another. It’s also how we acquire qualities and abilities that aren’t easily
"outsourced" to Guangzhou or Hyderabad.
Students who garner high4ech skills may still get undercut by people halfway around the world who are willing to do the
same work for one-fifth of the salary. The surest way to compete is to offer something the Chinese and Indians (and Vietnamese,
Singaporeans, etc.) cannot -- technical skills are not enough.
Apple’s iPod was not just an engineering improvement on Sony’s Walkman. It emerged from Steve Jobs’s American-style
understanding of people’s lifestyles, needs, tastes and capacities. (Yes, Mr. Jobs dropped out of college -- but went on to study
philosophy and foreign cultures.)
Pragmatic folks naturally seek direct links from skill to result, such as engineers using their technical knowledge to keep
planes alo~ and bridges f]-om buckling. But what about Abraham Lincoln educating himself via Shakespeare, the Bible and other
great hterary works. Alan Greenspan s degrees are in economics but he plays a mean jazz saxophone. Indeed, many of today’s
foremost (and wealthiest) entrepreneurs, people like Warren Buffett, studied economics -- not a STEM subject -- in college.
 Page 1210
Adam Smith studied moral philosophy.
The liberal arts make us "competitive" in the ways that matter most. They make us wise, thoughtful and appropriately
humble. They help our human potential to bloom. And they are the foundation for a democratic civic polity, where each of us
bears equal rights and responsibilities.
History and literature also impart to their students healthy skepticism and doubt, the ability to question, to ask both "why?"
and "why not?" and, perhaps most important, readiness to challenge authority, push back against conventional wisdom and
make one’s own way despite pressure to conform. (Howwill lhat be viewed in China?)
We’re already at risk of turning U.S. schools into test-prepping skill factories where nothing matters except exam scores on
basic subjects. That’s not what America needs nor is it a sufficient conception of educational accountability. We need schools
that prepare our children to excel and compete not only in the global workforce but also as full participants in our society, our
culture, our polity and our economy.
Addressing a recent Fordham Foundation education conference, Arts Endowment chairman Dana Gioia said "We need a
system that grounds all students in pleasure, beauty and wonder. It is the best way to create citizens who are awakened not only
to their humanity, but to the human enterprise that they inherit and will -- for good or ill -- perpetuate."
Creating such a system calls not for a host of specialized new institutions and government programs, but for closely
examining the curriculum in all our schools. It also calls for recalibrating academic standards and graduation requirements, as
well as amending our testing-and-accountability schemes -- most certainly including NCLB -- by widening the definition of
"proficient" to include reasoning, creativity and knowledge across a dozen subjects as well as basic cognitive skills. We need to
start reconceptualizing "highly qualified" teachers as people who are themselves broadly educated rather than narrowly
specialized.
Abandoning the liberal arts in the name of STEM alone also risks widening social divides and deepening domestic
inequities. The well-to-do who understand the value of liberal learning may be the only ones able to purchase it for their children.
Top private schools and a few suburban systems will stick with education broadly defined, as will elite colleges. Rich kids will
study philosophy and art, music and history, while their poor peers t111 in bubbles on test sheets. The lucky few will spawn the
next generation of tycoons, political leaders, inventors, authors, artists and entrepreneurs The less lucky masses will see
narrower opportunities. Some will find no opportunities at all, which frustration will tempt them to prey upon the fortunate, who in
turn will retreat into gated communities, exclusive clubs, and private this-and-that’s, thereby widening domestic d~ts and
worsening our prospects for social cohesion and civility.
Not a pretty picture. Adding leaves and flowers to STEM and NCLB won’t necessarily avert it -- but hewing to basic skills at
the expense of a complete education will surely worsen it.
Mr. Finn and Ms. Ravitch, former assistant U.S. Secretaries of Education and members of the Koret Task Force on K-12
Education at the Hoover Institution, are editors of "Beyond the Basics: Achieving a Liberal Education for All Children"
(Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 2007).
 Page 1211

Nonresponsiv
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: August 02, 2007 8:48 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angeta; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: GRIEGO: Hispanic Gathering Unites Over No Child Left Behind (RMN)

GRIEGO: Hispanic Gathering Unites Over No Child Left Behind (RMN)

By Tina Griego
Rocky Mountain News, August 2, 2007
Among the people U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings met during her visit to Denver this week were 12
influential Hispanics known for their work in education and political circles.
I’m acquainted with several of them, and while t cant be certain of their party affiliation, I know at least half of those invited
are liberals.
The group met at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, around a long conference table, where Spellings quickly got to the
point: No Child Le~t Behind, the controversial education act, is up for reauthorization in September and a fight is brewing. The
law, Spellings said, remains in effect until at least 2014, when all students are supposed to be reading and calculating math at
grade level, but reauthorization presents the opportunity to tinker, to expand its authority or roll it back.
’qhe central piece of NCLB is accountability," Spellings told the group. "If we unwind around that, it all starts to driE away.
There is a lot of pressure in Washington to do just that... We are right on track. The last thing we need to do is let up now."
So, how many of these influential Hispanics did Spellings have to persuade?
Not one.
Judging by the conversation, the group was with her before she opened her mouth, before she referred to the Hispanic
dropout rate as a "silent epidemic." Before she started rattling off statistics: Only 2 percent of Hispanic students in Colorado
completed a truly rigorous college prep curriculum; this state is losing $3.4 billion every year in earning potential due to its
dropout rate. In fact, a few at the table argued that NCLB should be stronger. I’ve come to believe the Democratic Party
leadership is generally out of tune with its minority constituency on this issue, so it was fascinating to hear Lawrence Hernandez,
who disagrees with President Bush on, well, pretty much everything, say: "1 don’t think NCLB is doing enough. So many states
are figuring out ways to game the federal government. My worry is that there is no enforcement."
Hernandez, founder of Cesar Chavez Academy, an acclaimed K-8 public charter school in Pueblo, told Spellings that after
the official count day last year, 40 kids showed up at his door. Schools receive the money attached to each student if those
students are present on count day. If, atter that day, students leave, are kicked out, are "encouraged" to go to another school
because, say, they are not likely to do well on the state standardized test, the money allocated to educate them stays with the
school.
You could argue that this type of behavior is a consequence of bad legislation, that NCLB has distorted what has happened
in classrooms, sacrificing a well-balanced curriculum in favor of reading and math drills. You could argue, and I have, that such
heavy reliance upon a single standardized test score unfairly indicts schools that may actually be making progress.
But you’d be missing the reason most people at that table Monday spoke in favor of the act- despite its flaws. NCLB forced
states to look at the progress of each group of students. Like our own CSAP, which preceded the federal act, it has offered a
measuring stick independent of classroom grades, allowing parents to see and question how it is an A student still cannot read at
grade level. It has made what was once a suspicion that low-income students (who tend to be minorities) have been, in fact, lett
behind a veritiable fact.
So, you argue, it’s the parents’ and the kids’ fault. I repeat: It’s more complicated than that. Poverty has many
consequences, some easier to pinpoint than others.
We have operated in darkness. How dark? When Hemandez was working on his doctorate, he tried to get the 1980
dropout rate in Pueblo. No such data existed. He ended up going through yearbooks, using the neighborhood network, to tind
 Pa~e 1212
out who had graduated.
"We have been cheating these families by telling them everything is fine. And it’s not," Hernandez said Monday. And he’s
right.
NCLB needs work. No one at the meeting, not even Spellings, denied that. Among the suggestions offered Monday: more
money for early grades, more advanced placement classes, required parent-leadership classes, and the biggie, more help to
struggling schools.
"We have accountability and that’s undoubtedly important, but now what?" Denise Maes, an attorney and chair of the
Hispanic Chamber Education Foundation, told me later. "My concern is that part of the accountability, by necessity, relies on
punitive enforcement, and nobody is talking about [hat. Maybe this does go back to resources, to strong funding that says, "fou
are not making the grade; here is howwe can help you.’"
The day a~er the meeting, the state released its latest CSAP data showing that low-income students are generally scoring
at least 30 points less than other students. The numbers also showed 81 percent of white third-graders are reading at grade
level. Only half of Hispanic third-~aders can say the same.
 Page 1213

INonresponsi!___
August 02, 2007 7:16 AM
To: scott m. stanzel@who.eop.gov; kelly_s.._scott@who.eop.gov; cheryl.oldham@who.eop.gov;
kristin.conklin@who.eop.gov; vickie.schray@who.eop.gov; Tucker, Sara (Restricted);
Manning, James; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Ruberg, Casey; Colby, Chad; Williams,
Cynthia; Dunn, David; Dorfman, Cynthia; Dunckel, Denise; Evers, Bill; Gribble, Emily;
Kuzmich, Holly; La Force, Hudson; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren;
Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mesecar, Doug; Moran, Robert; Neale,
Rebecca; Oldham, Cheryl; Reich, Heidi; rob Saliterman; Yudof, Samara; Scheessete, Marc;
Halaska, Terrell; Toner, Jana; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Young, Tracy; Ditto, Trey; Tucker, Sara
Martinez; Wurman, Ze’ev
Subject: Education Dept. Criticized as Lax in Policing Loans (NYT)

August 2, 2007
Education Dept. Criticized as Lax in Policing Loans

By JONATHAN D. ®LATER
The federal Department of Education, after months of criticism for lax oversight of the
student loan program, still has no system to detect and uncover misconduct by lenders and
protect student borrowers, a new government report said yesterdmy.

The report, by the Government Accountability Office and released by Congressional

Democrats, found that the department had "no oversight tools" to see whether lenders were
giving improper incentives to colleges to steer student borrowers their way, and, that
since 1989, the department had offered lenders no "comprehensive guidance" on what
incentives might be forbidden. In 20 years, the report found, the department has tried to
punish only two lenders for violating goverrm~ent rules.
The department does not have a way to find out whether universities are improperly
limiting students’ choice of lenders, according to the G.A.O., the gover~ent’s main
research arm.

The report, the agency’s first since revelations of potential misconduct in student
lending this year, said the department’s lack of oversight of federal student loans "may
have resulted in some students taking loans with higher interest rates or fewer borrower
benefits." Over all, the report portrays an agency that ~my at times react to outside
complaints, but does not "proactively detect" problems.

In a letter included with the accountability office’s report, the department agreed with
many of its findings. In a statement issued yesterday, Katherine McLane, a spokeswoman for
the Education Department, said, "Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings takes very
seriously the department’s oversight of schools and lenders." Ms. McLane added, "We have
taken a number of steps to tighten our oversight responsibilities of federal student
financial aid programs."

In its letter to the G.A.O., the department outlined the efforts, including creating a
"workgroup" to review lender compliance with the law. In Jr~e, the department proposed
rules banning certain marketing practices by lenders. But the G.A.O. report notes that
these rules will not take effect until July 2008, at the earliest, and calls for the
department to act sooner.
The student loan industry has faced increasing scrutiny of its business practices as
tuition has skyrocketed and more students hive been forced into debt to finance their
education. Last year, students took out more than $85 billion in federal and private loans
to pay for college.

Inquiries by Congress, the news media and various state attorneys general have exposed
tangled financial relationships between colleges or individual college officials and
student lenders -- relationships that the department did not detect, the report said. The
investigations have revealed practices by the lenders like paying colleges commissions or
bonuses in exchange for business, and giving college officials free trips, meals and other
 Pa~e 1214
perks to win spots on so-called preferred lender lists, on which students rely when
selecting a loan company. They have also found colleges where financial aid administrators
held stock in lenders they recommended to students.

In testimony before Congress in May, Ms. Spellings pointed to the removal of federal
student aid programs in 2005 from the accountability office’s "high-risk list" for fraud,
waste and abuse of as a sign that the Education Department was resolving "financial
integrity and ~nagement issues." But the G.A.O.
report, requested by members of Congress last year, undermines that earlier conclusion.

The new report puts a harsh light on the internal workings of the Education Department.
For example, if the department suspects misconduct by a lender, it has no established
procedure on how to respond, the report says. The department may send a company a letter
asking it to "cease the activity" that may be questionable. But it does not monitor
whether those letters work, the report found.

In addition, before October 2006, the department did not have a centralized system to
track external complaints -- by consumers, by colleges or even by other lenders -- about
possible misconduct by lenders.
In more than a dozen instances from 2001 to 2006, the department may not have concluded
whether specific conduct complied with regttations at all, the report fot~d.

As if to underscore the report’s criticism, the New York attorney general, Andrew M.
Cuomo, who in Congressional testimony in April described the department as "asleep at the
switch," announced yesterday that he was expanding his inquiry into the student loan
industry.

Mr. Cuomo said his office had sent subpoenas and document requests to dozens of
universities around the country, demanding information about arrangements with student
loan companies that rewarded college athletic departments with payments for steering
students to particular lenders.

The G.A.O. report recommended that the department come up with ways to detect misconduct
by lenders -- for ex~nple, by finding out how colleges choose which loan companies to
include on their lender lists. It also reconunended giving lenders guidance on what
incentives are prohibited, before the new rules take effect next year. And the report
called on the department to come up with a way to decide how to respond to violations of
rules; by writing a letter, imposing a fine or expelling a lender from the loan program.

Congressional Democrats trumpeted the report as further evidence that the department had
failed to protect students and their families.

"This report again underscores that the Department of Education completely defaulted on
its responsibilities to protect the nation’s student loan programs,"
Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who is chairman of the House
Education and Labor Committee, said in a statement yesterday. "There is simply no excuse
for this administration ignoring repeated }~rnings about potential lender abuses, both
from independent agencies and even from lenders themselves."

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Senate Education
Committee, said, "Students and families should be deeply concerned that the Department of
Education failed to enforce the laws designed to protest them from unscrupulous lender
tactics for so long."

Michael Dar~nenberg, director of education policy at the New America Foundation, based in
Washington, said the report was significant for finding that the department lacked
procedures for determining when and how to enforce rules on lenders.

"The processes aren’t there," Mr. Dannenberg said.

"But it’s more than that, because even if the processes were there, there’s evidence that
they don’t seem to be taking their enforcement responsibility very seriously."
 Page 1215

Looking for a deal? Find great prices on flights and hotels with Yahoo! FareChase.
http://farechase.yahoo.com/
 Page 1216

[Nonresponsi,
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: August O1, 2007 8:34 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; TracyYoung (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: Republican NCLB Bill Reflects Areas of Reauthorization Consensus (Title I Monitor)

Republican NCLB Bill Reflects Areas of Reauthorization Consensus (Title I Monitor)

By Travis Hicks
Title I Monitor August 2007
As Democratic leaders in the House and Senate worked behind the scenes to develop proposals for revamping No Child
Left Behind, two Republican senators introduced a K-12 education measure that has caught the eye of the Bush administration.
The staffs for Rep. George ~ller, D-Calif., and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., the chairmen of their respective
chambers’ education committees, are crafting legislative language for the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Miller,
in fact, recently solicited feedback from freshman House members on nine key areas that have been identified for
reauthorization, including growth models, interventions for struggling schools and teacher quality.
But before either leader could complete a reauthorization proposal, Sens. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., and Richard Burr, R-N.C.,
introduced the first comprehensive package for overhauling NCLB. According to their statement, the 361-page bill (S. 1775)
would preserve NCLB’s basic accountability mechanisms, but would incorporate a number of changes proposed by the U.S.
Department of Education (ED) and interest groups such as the Education Trust, the Council of the Great City Schools, the
Hispanic Education Coalition, the Business Coalition for Student Achievement and the Commission on No Child Lef~ Behind.
The Gregg-Burr proposal would not authorize any sort of private school voucher program -- a priority of the Bush
administration -- but it would give extra aid to districts that make students’ per-pupil Title I allocation portable among public
schools. The bill also would authorize a high school program aimed at boosting graduation rates.
Although a bill presented by minority members rarely becomes the vehicle for a reauthorization, the Gregg-Burr bill has
garnered more-than-usual interest because Gregg was one of the leading authors of the original NCLB. Before assuming his
position as ranking minority member of the Senate Budget Committee, Gregg headed the Senate Health, Education, Labor and
Pensions (HELP) committee.
He remains a member of the HELP subcommittee that will rewrite NCLB. Burr is also on the HELP committee.
In a statement, U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings applauded the Gregg-Burr measure, saying the bill "strikes a
strong balance between preserving the fundamental accountability that is helping students improve, and responding to legitimate
concerns raised by parents and educators."
Based on Miller’s letter and the Gregg-Burr bill, a consensus appears to be emerging on the major issues that will be
considered during the reauthorization debate. In general, ED officials, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and advocates all
seem to support:
¯ Incorporating growth models;
° Creating "differentiated consequences" for schools and districts missing their accountability benchmarks for just one
subgroup and those that chronically under-perform;
¯ Offering incentives for effective teaching;
¯ "Flip-flopping" the required order of public school choice and supplemental education services;
o Making permanent the so-called "1 percent" and "2 percent" rules for testing disabled students; and
¯ Providing flexibility for testing limited English proficient students.
The inclusion of growth models in the new Senate bill and the continued expansion of an ED pilot program bolsters the
chance that the alternative accountability system will be added to a reauthorized NCLB. In early July, ED added two states --
Alaska and Arizona -- to the gro~h model demonstration program, raising the total number of participating states to nine.
During a recent presentation at the 15th Annual Model Schools Conference in Washington, D.C., Ray Simon, deputy
 Page 1217
secretary at the U.S. Department of Education (ED), stressed that Congress should preserve NCLB’s core accountability
requirements while adding "commonsense" flexibility such as growth models.
However, "[w]e have to be very careful that whatever we introduce into the law doesn’t create a giant loophole for us to go
back to the way things were," Simon cautioned.
Multiple measures of accountability, another change being pitched by Miller, could prove a more difficult sell.
The Gregg-Burr package conspicuously rejects adding new measures to the test-based accountability system.
Moreover, a number of liberal civil rights groups made dear in a July 13 letter that incorporating additional measures into
the current "adequate yeady progress" system could "dilute" NCLB’s focus on literacy and mathematics, among other
consequences.
Whether Congress will complete work on a reauthorizatJon bill this year is still the subject of much debate. A number of
conservatives support a proposal that would completely gut NCLB and many Democrats campaigned last fall on promises to
ease the laws provisions -- considerations that could make reauthorization difficult politically.
Nonetheless, Katherine McLane, an ED spokeswoman, said that Secretary Spellings is "optimistic" that an agreement can
be reached this year. "We’re glad to see that there’s movement and momentum, and that [Congress] is moving on this," she said,
adding that the Gregg-Burr proposal is "a good starting point."
 Page 1218

Nonresponsi
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: July 31,2007 8:32 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, C~nthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: more Miller clips (5)

Lawmaker: No Child Law Should Be Changed (AP)

By Nancy Zuckerbrod
AP, July 31, 2007
WASHI NGTON --A revised No Child Lett Behind law should include medt pay for teachers and new ways of judging
schools, the chairman of the House education committee said Monday.
"We didn’t get it all right," said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif.
The law, which isnow up for renewal, requires annual math and reading tests in grades three through eight and once in
high school. Schools that miss progress goals face consequences, such as having to offer tutodng or fire their principals.
triller said the law places too much emphasis on the math and reading tests, although those are still important indicators.
Other tests or graduation rates could also be used to judge how schools are doing, he said.
The teachers unions have called for that kind of change, but the Bush administration and some Republicans in Congress
say it could weaken the law.
rvtller also said the law should pay teachers extra for boosting student achievement, an idea generally opposed by the
national teachers unions.
IViller said he hopes the full House will vote on the legislation this September.
Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Edward Kennedy, who chairs the Senate education committee, said he hopes the bill gets
through his committee in September.
The legislation is a priodty for President Bush, who pushed for its initial passage in 2001.
A majority of Americans want the lawto be renewed as it is or with minor changes, according to a poll out Monday by
Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and Education Next, a publication of the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University.

Democrats Seek Broader School Gauges (WT)

By Amy Fagan
The Washin.qton Times, July 31, 2007
House Democrats want a September vote to renew the 2002 No Child Left Behind law, and their bill will make some
changes, such as using more than test scores to gauge progress and providing performance pay for educators, a top Democrat
said yesterday.
’qhis legislation is really about changing some of those things we didn’t get completely dght," said Rep. George Miller, a
California Democrat who helped craft the original law. Mr. Miller, who chairs the House Committee on Education and Labor, said
his bill will retain the law’s accountability and high standards but also will address "strong feelings" from many Americans that the
law "isn’t fair or flexible enough."
The 2002 No Child Left Behind law -- one of President Bush’s signature domestic accomplishments -- requires states to
test and track student progress, with the goal of ensuring all can read and perform math at grade level by 2014. Schools that fail
to make adequately yearly progress face penalties.
Mr. Bush has made the laws renewal a top pdodty this year. But many in Mr. Bush’s own party dont like the education law
and want to reduce federal involvement in the classroom. Sixty-three House Republicans have signed onto a bill by Rep. Peter
Hoekstra, Michigan Republican, that would essentially gut the law by letting states opt out of it.
Mr. Miller defended the law in a speech yesterday, while also outlining his proposed changes. He said under his bill, a
 Page 1219
school’s progress will be judged using a variety of measures. He has not given specifics, but he suggested graduation rates and
advanced placement could be factors.
His bill also would help states develop different types of tests for students who dont speak English fluently. It would let
states use "growth models" to track student progress over time rather than comparing different groups of students year to year.
The legislation will retain the accountability provisions and penalties for schools, Mr. Miller said, but it also will provide more
assistance for struggling schools.
It also will aim to hire, train and retain more top-notch educators, in part by financially rewarding teachers and principals
who perform well, he said.
IVt. Miller also called for more education funding and urged Mr. Bush not to veto a Democratic spending bill that contains
steep increases for education. He said his education bill is being crafted with input from Republicans and ongoing talks with
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.
Mrs. Spellings thanked Mr. IViller yesterday for his leadership and said it will be essential to passage. She added, though,
that "weakening our schools’ accountability ... would be a disservice to American children and families."
The ranking Republican on the Committee on Education and Labor, Howard P. "Buck" McKeon of California, also warned
that weakening the laws accountability, flexibility or parental choice provisions "will be met with strong opposition from House
Republicans and are likely to be a fatal blow" to the effort.
rvt. Miller said his proposed changes won’t weaken the law, but approving a final bill won’t be easy.
"When you have narrow margins in the House and Senate, it doesnt take much to put sand in the gears," he said. He
added, however, that among parents and students "there is general agreement on the need and the purpose and the interest of
what we want to do -- and that’s a pretty good place to start."
Miller Plans NCLB Reauthorization By September (HILL)
By Klaus Marre
~ July 31, 2007
House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) said Monday he thinks No Child Left Behind can
be reauthorized by September, adding that the legislation will test whether Democrats and Republicans in this Congress are able
to work together.
’There are no votes in the House of Representatives for continuing the No Child Left Behind Act without making serious
changes to it," Miller said at a National Press Club event.
However, the lawmaker said that the legislation is "coming together rather rapidly" and that he views September as a
realistic goal.
IViller stated that he and others have spent the last five years trying to talk to all involved parties in an effort to improve No
Child Left Behind.
’iAs a result, the process by which this bill is being developed is open, transparent and bipartisan," Miller said. "It reflects the
input of members of Congress from both parties, all backgrounds and all ideological positions, who testified and submitted
suggestions before our committee."
He also stressed the important role that ranking committee member Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) played in the process.
The legislation has a history of bipartisanship. When it was first passed, President Bush worked together with IViller, Sens.
Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) and current House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio).
Despite his plan to proceed in a bipartisan fashion, Miller noted that he was aware of the differences between Republicans
and Democrats.
1Ne’re trying to iron those out," said Miller, pointing to regular meetings he has with McKeon on the issue. "We’re trying not
to make any of them a deal-breaker at this stage."
While Miller noted that his committee has a "long history of doing these large bills in a bipartisan way," he also pointed to
the political realities.
’This is a tough environmenl~" the lawmaker said. "When you have narrow margins, as we’ve all learned, when you have
narrow margins in the House and the Senate, it doesn’t take much to put sand in the gears."
In response to Miller’s speech, McKeon voiced his concern over the progress of the legislation.
’No Child Lef~ Behind is the law of the land because it balances real accountability with state and local flexibility and
expanded parental choice like no education law before it," he said. "Changes to the law that weaken any of these three pillars of
NCLB - accountability, flexibility, and parental choice -will be met with strong opposition from House Republicans and are likely
to be a fatal blow to the reauthorization process."
McKeon added that he is "disappointed with the pace of negotiations and hopeful that we can reach an agreement soon."
 Page 1220
However, the lawmaker stated, members of the business and civil rights communities, along with Republicans have expressed
"concerns that some of the Democrat proposals will undermine transparency for parents and the ability to hold schools
accountable for student performance."
IViller said he remains hopeful that a bipartisan compromise can be worked out in large part because ’there’s a genuine
commitment in both parties to an improved education system."
The lawmaker also issued a warning to the White House. Calling No Child Lett Behind "the most important domestic
bipartisan legacy of this president," Miller warned Bush not to veto the education funding that will be included in the Labor-Health
and Human Services appropriations bill.
"The legacy of a great American education system for our children and our country will not be built on the cheap, and
America deserves better," Miller said.

Miller offers highlights of House reauthorization bill (Education Daily)

By Sarah D. Sparks
Education Daily, July 31, 2007
After a flurry of NCLB-related bills introduced from all sides, House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George
Miller, D-Calif., stepped in Monday to previewthe committee’s reauthodzation proposal, expected in September.
It would leave in place the annual math and reading testing in third through eighth grades and high school and would keep
the 2014 deadline for students to become proficient in those subjects.
Leaders call for strength in reauthorization, see p. 4 Yet Miller announced that the new version of the lawwould include
substantive overhauls to assessment and accountability as well as bolstering the money for state and local infrastructure.
’1 think the legislation is in fact coming together," he said. "1 have met with all of the caucuses. There’s growing enthusiasm
that the changes we make in this lawwill address their concerns." While the committee plans to keep the core of the law in place,
’there are no votes in the House of Representatives for continuing the No Child Lett Behind Act without making major changes to
t, he said.
Chief among them would be a nationwide expansion to the Education Department’s gro~h model pilot program, coupled
with new money to help states develop the standards and assessment systems to support it.
The bill is expected to require federal and state education agencies to partner with businesses and colleges to align
standards and curriculums to workforce requirements.
It would also call for broader assessments that cover "critical thinking and the ability to apply knowledge to newand
challenging contexts," though Miller quickly said that did not mean the bill would support a national test or curriculum.
IViller also offered his take on multiple measures: States that conduct annual assessments in tertiary subjects such as
history and science could use them to get a better picture of students just belowthe bubble on math or reading.
"If you have an eighth-grader who passes history, passes science, passes math and then fails reading by that much...
he’s on a trajectory," Miller said. Yet he quickly cautioned, ’q-hey would have to do very well on those tests. This is a way to
produce better measurements .... This is not an escape hatch."
Likewise, Miller suggested that states would be provided more money and flexibility to target schools differently based on
how they miss adequate yeady progress.
’lf you have a house where the bathroom doesn’t work, you get in a plumber to fix the sink; it doesn’t mean the whole
house is failing," he said.
Still tip in the air Miller also voiced strong support for performance pay plans for teachers and principals and said the next
iteration of NCLB could incorporate NCLB (continued from page 1 )the TEACH Act he proposed in 2005, which would include
incentives for mentoring and recruiting teachers for hard-to-staff schools and subjects.
"Some portion of pay has to be tied to student achievement," he said.
rvtguel Gonzalez, senior press officer for the National Education Association, the largest teachers union, did not reject the
proposal but said the union is in "intense negotiations" with la~.unakers about how it would work.

Miller Outlines Proposed Changes For NCLB (EDWEEK)

By Mark Walsh
Education Wee~k, July 31, 2007
Washington -- The chairman of the House education committee said today that the No Child Let~ Behind Act is not working
as well as it should, and that there was no support among lawmakers for continuing the law without significant revisions.
’Throughout our schools and communities, the American people have a very strong sense that the No Child Left Behind
 Page 1221
Act is not fair, not flexible, and is not funded. And they are not wrong," Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., said in remarks at the
National Press Club to outline his priorities for reauthorizing the law.
Rep. Miller said that both Democrats and Republicans on the Education and Labor Committee had listened closely to
various critiques of the law and were working toward ironing out a bipartisan reauthorization bill that he hopes the House could
pass eady this fall.
’1 can tell you that there are no votes in the U.S. House of Representatives for continuing the No Child Lef~ Behind Act
without making serious changes to it," Mr. Miller said. "It is my intention as chairman of the Education and Labor Committee to
pass a bill in September, both in committee and on the floor of the House."
The NCLB act passed Congress with broad bipartisan support and was signed into law in early 2002 by President Bush as
a five-year reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Its centerpiece is a requirement that schools
test students annually in reading and math in grades 3-8, and once in high school. Schools that fail to meet performance
benchmarks face a series of consequences, including the loss of federal aid. Adjusting Accountability
Rep. Miller said his first goal for the next version of the law will be to provide schools with more flexibility and fairness. His
bill will introduce so-called growth models, accountability approaches that give schools credit for the progress that students make
over time instead of just comparing one cohort of a grade of students with its predecessor.
The U.S. Department of Education is conducting a growth-model pilot program in which 12 states have been approved to
use the method for complying withthe NCLB law.
Mr. Miller said U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings deserved credit for her leadership on making the law more
flexible and for the growth-model pilot.
Meanwhile, another change in the laws accountability framework that Rep. Miller plans to propose is the use of so-called
multiple measures to determine whether a school is achieving adequate yearly progress under the law. He said the law would
continue to include annual tests of reading and mathematics in most grades.
’,we will allow the use of additional valid and reliable measures to assess student learning and school performance more
fairly, comprehensive, and accurately," Mr. Miller said. "One such measure for high schools must be graduation rates."
Pressed about the extent of relief from test scores that such other measures might provide schools, Mr. Miller said students
would have to be close to scoring proficient on math and reading tests for such measures to play a role.
’This is not an escape hatch," he said. Performance Pay
Rep. Miller said his bill would provide for performance pay for principals and teachers "based on fair and proven models."
Joel Packer, the director of education policy and practice for the National Education Association, said the teachers’ union
would oppose the inclusion of performance pay as a requirement for schools and districts to receive funding under the
reauthorized NCLB.
"We are opposed to, in this bill, for the federal government to tell schools and school districts that if you take this pot of
money you must include test scores as one of the measures of evaluating or compensating teachers," Mr. Packer said. "The
other thing with linking evaluations to test scores is that there is not much of a track record to see where it works. So if it is
relatively unproven, why would the federal government require it?"
Mr. Miller’s bill will also include more emphasis on improving U.S. high schools.
’The bill will include comprehensive steps to turn around low-performing high schools," he said, including uniform standards
for measuring graduation rates.
Rep. Miller declined to put a specific price tag on his bill, but he called for "a greater and sustained investment in American
education." Warning on Veto
He swung a minor political jab at President Bush by saying that the president’s legacy on education "cannot be established
if he vetoes the education funding in the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill."
The White House has threatened a veto for the fiscal year 2008 bill that covers Labor, Health and Human Services, and
Education department programs. The measure has passed the House with a nearly 8 percent increase in Education Department
spending.
But Rep. Miller praised the administration’s input on reauthorizing the law and stressed that his committee had a tradition of
bipartisanship.
’There are differences between us," he said, in reference to Democrats and Republicans on the education committee.
"We’re trying to iron them out. We’re trying to not let any of them be a deal breaker."
Steve Forde, a spokesman for Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon of California, the ranking Republican on the House
education committee, agreed in a phone interviewthat Rep. Miller has included Republicans in the process.
’It’s been a bipartisan process," Mr. Forde said. "Will it be a bipartisan product? That’s debatable. The devil is inthe
details."
 Page 1222
A statement by Rep. McKeon said he was "disappointed by the pace of negotiations" over the reauthorization.
’The content of the legislation is far more important than the calendar," Rep. McKeon said, "and any attempts to weaken
the lawwill be met with stiff resistance from House Republicans who have already joined with the civil rights community and
business leaders in expressing concerns that some of the Democrat proposals will undermine transparency for parents and the
ability to hold schools accountable for student performance." Change of Outlook?
William L Taylor, the chairman of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, a Washington watchdog group that has been a
strong supporter of the NCLB laws accountability measures, praised Mr. Miller’s priorities for reauthorization.
’lt’s clear that whatever adjustments are made" to the law, ’%ye’re going to have accountability remain the key," said Mr.
Taylor, who attended the National Press Club event.
rvt-. Packer of the NEA, who was also present, said he noticed a change in tone on Rep. Miller’s part with regard to
reauthorization of the school law.
’He has been much more of a defender of the existing law," said Mr. Packer, who is the NEA’s chief lobbyist on NCLB. "But
I think he is changing his view based on what he is hearing from educators, and based on what he is hearing from his fellow
members, especially House freshmen."

The taws school choice and tutoring provisions are even more up in the air. Miller gave no details on how the accountability
sanctions would be addressed in the bill beyond mild support for switching the order of tutoring and choice in the sanctions
timeline.
’That’s under considerable discussion; that’s not resolved yet," he said.
 Page 1223

L
Nonresponsiv
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: July 31,2007 8:31 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: Pupils Too Passive, Education Chief Says (DENP)

Pupils Too Passive, Education Chief Says (DENP)

By Bruce Finley
Denver Post, July 31, 2007
Individualized schooling and a sense of urgency are needed to keep students competitive in a global market, the secretary
said.
On Monday, July 30, 2007, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings joined Colorado business leaders for a
discussion on ways the business community can help drive education reform and ensure our schools and students are equipped
with tools for success as our nation’s next generation of leaders in the 2t st century global marketplace. The roundtable
discussion will be hosted by Colorado Succeeds, a non-profit, non-partisan coalition of business leaders committed to education
excellence and preparing every child to succeed in a global economy. (Post / Helen H. Richardson)
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on Monday confronted a challenge on many Americans’ minds: how relatively
comfortable U.S. students can compete against the family-driven zeal children bring to school in countries such as China and
India.
Political leaders "have to keep putting the elephant on the dining room table" and kindling a sense of urgency on this front,
Spellings said Monday during a swing through Denver.
Today’s U.S. educational system "is not sufficient" to prepare students to compete in the global economy, she said. "In
some places, you’ll have to have big plant layoffs and soul-searching" before Americans grasp what’s at stake.
Spellings made the remarks in an interview after meeting with 23 Colorado business leaders downtown. Improving schools
"is absolutely relevant to us as businesspeople," said Zack Neumeyer, board chairman of Sage Hospitality Resources, a hotel
management firm.
He and other local executives raised concerns about global competition. Convinced that Colorado schools are failing to
prepare students to succeed, they~e launched a campaign called Colorado Succeeds to improve schools and student
competitiveness.
Executives elsewhere have announced they’re considering moving more business abroad where they can drawon a better-
educated workforce.
The point of Spellings’ visit was drumming up support for congressional reauthorization of the Bush administration’s No
Child Lef~ Behind reforms now in place for five years.
This is "a good, strong, hawkish" law that is improving schools and student achievement, she said, acknowledging core
problems such as half of minority students dropping out of high school at a time when most new jobs require at least two years of
college.
Even if Congress balks at renewing No Child Left Behind, new, mandatory testing of students in math and reading, with
schools held accountable, will remain in place, she said.
The question is how to strengthen the effort. Among the next steps: using test data more effectively "to inform improvement
in the system," Spellings said. For example, school days could be lengthened for students who would benefit from extra work.
"We have to start differentiating instruction for kids," she said, "like they do around the world."
Staff writer Bruce Finley can be reached at 303-954-1700 or bfinley@denverpost.com.
 Page 1224

~Nonresponsiv,
(b) (0~S)~nt:"
ore. ............................ ......................... 1
July 31,2007 6:00 AM
1"o: scott m. stanzel@who.eop.gov; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Ruberg, Casey; Colby,
Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Dorfman, Cynthia; Dunckel, Denise; Evers, Bill;
Gribbte, Emily; Kuzmich, Holly; La Force, Hudson; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie;
Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mesecar, Doug; Moran,
Robert; Neale, Rebecca; Oldham, Cheryl; Reich, Heidi; rob Saliterman; Yudof, Samara;
Scheessele, Marc; Halaska, Terrell; Toner, Jana; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Young, Tracy; Ditto,
Trey; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Wurman, Ze’ev
Subject: Crucial Lawmaker Outlines Changes to Education Law (NYT)

July 31, 2007

Crucial Lawmaker Outlines Changes to Education Law

By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

WASH~GTON, July 30 -- The chairman of the House education committee, an original
architect of the federal No Child Left Behind law, said Monday that he wanted to change
the law so that annual reading and math tests would not be the sole measure of school
perfor~mnce, but that other indicators like high school gradrmtion rates and test scores
in other subjects would also be taken into account.

"Our legislation will continue to place strong emphasis on reading and math skills," the
chairman, Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, said at the National Press
Club. "But it will allow states to use more than their reading and math test results to
determine how well schools and students are doing."
In the speech, Mr. Miller described an array of criticisms that have emerged over the past
year in hearings on renewing the education law. But he repeated his commitment to the law
and spoke passionately of its goal of raising the achievement of poor and minority
students.

His co~ents were the first public disclosure of changes he would make to the law, which
was put together by President Bush with strong bipartisan support in 2001. Although
business leaders and education and civil rights advocates praised Mr.
Miller’s vision for renewal, they also said they would reserve ~udgment until an actual
bill appeared. Mr.
Miller said that would probably occur in September.

In response to questions about his proposal for broadening the measures of student
achievement, Mr.
Miller said additional indicators of progress could include participation in Advanced
Placement or college preparatory curriculums, high school graduation rates and storewide
tests in sr~gects other than reading and math.

Students "would still have to do very well on reading and math," he said, adding, "This is
not an escape hatch."

Still, Mr. Miller’s remarks provoked i~ediate reaction from the ranking Republican on the
education committee, Representative Howard P. McKeon of California, who said any changes
that would weaken "accountability, flexibility and parental choice will be met with strong
opposition from House Republicans and are likely to be a fatal blow to the reauthorization
process. "

The White House referred questions to Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who
hinted that the a@ninistration would rather see no bill at all than one that "rolled back
the clock on school accountability."
"While we all hope to see action on reauthorization soon, a comprehensive bill that has
bipartisan support and holds firm to the goal of every child reading and doing math on
grade level by 2014 is worth the wait,"
Ms. Spellings said in a prepared statement.
 Page 1225

In his speech, Mr. Miller acknowledged the many complaints about the No Child Left Behind
law from school districts nationwide, saying: "Throughout our schools and co11~unities, the
~merican people h~ve a very strong sense tl~t the No Child Left Behind Act is not fair.
That it is not flexible. And that it is not funded. And they are not wrong."

Mr. Miller said he would also propose so-called pay for performance, which would pay
teachers more based in part on how much their students improved, and a system to reward
schools if students were on a trajectory to reach proficiency within a few years, even if
they were not actually on grade level. He also said a new law would differentiate between
schools that failed on a broad scale and those in which only one or two groups of students
came up short, allowing solutions tailored to each school’s specific deficiencies.

Currently, the law requires annual testing in reading and math for students in Grades 3 to
8. High school students must be tested once. Schools must report results to show that each
demographic group -- low-income, minority and special education students, along with
students for whom English is a second language -- is showing sufficient progress toward
i00 percent proficiency by 2014. High poverty schools that fail to show sufficient
progress, which currently n~ber more than 9,000, face steadily more severe penalties,
including possible closure.

Susan Traiman, director of education and workforce policy at the Business Roundtable, a
coalition of companies closely involved in the passage of the original law, said the group
was encouraged by Mr.
Miller’s remarks but hoped to see a bill with bipartisan support.

"We need to see the details on what he means by these multiple measures and how these
would work," Ms.
Traimmn said.

Ready
for the edge of your seat?
Check out tonight’s top picks on Yahoo! TV.
http://tv.yahoo.com/
 Page 1226

Nonresponsive
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: July 30, 2007 8:33 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angeta; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; TracyYoung (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: Key NCLB-Renewal Bills Withheld Until Fall (EDWEEK)

Key NCLBoRenewal Bills Withheld Until Fall (EDWEEK)

By David J. HoffAnd Alyson Klein
Education Week, July 27, 2007
As process slows in Congress, campaign debate on lawpicks up.
Congress has delayed any significant action on the reauthorization of the No Child Lef~ Behind Act until it returns from its
summer recess atter Labor Day.
Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, announced this week that his
committee would not consider an NCLB bill next week, the last before lawmakers take their August break.
Instead of presenting a bill to his committee, Rep. Miller planned to give a speech &=ly 30 at the National Press Club in
Washington. In it, he was planning to tout the success of the 5½-year-old law and explain his priorities for reauthorizing it, said
Tom Kiley, the congressman’s communications director. But Mr. Kiley declined to say how specific the chairman would be in the
speech.
Rep. Miller had been preparing to introduce a bill to revise the NCLB law before Congress lett town.
The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee had delayed consideration of its NCLB-renewal bill while
lawmakers in that chamber worked on their plans to reauthorize the Higher Education Act and alter federal financial-aid programs
for college students.
Civil Rights Letter
With committees in both chambers waiting until September to produce NCLB bills, time is starting to run out for completing
the reauthorization of the main federal law in K-12 education before the 2008 presidential-primary season, which is expected to
slow down legislative activity in Congress.
One issue that may have stalled Rep. Miller’s plans for committee action is whether states should be able to use multiple
measures to gauge student progress under the NCLB law, an overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that
requires annual testing to determine whether schools are doing enough to raise academic proficiency.
In a memo to freshman members of Congress, circulated on Capitol Hill in June, Rep. Miller suggested that states might be
permitted to use graduation rates and "realtime classroom tests that allowteachers to adjust instruction" to meet accountability
requirements under the reauthorized law. ("NCLB-Renewal Ideas Circulate on Capitol Hill," July 18, 2007.)
But that idea met with criticism from some civil rights and other advocacy groups, which worried it could weaken the law.
Five groups sent a letter to Rep. Miler and Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon of California, the education panel’s ranking
Republican, outlining their concerns. The Washington-based groups include the Center for American Progress, a progressive
think tank; the Education Trust, which advocates for poor and minority children; the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights; the
Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under the La~ and the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy group.
’ln our experience, institutions that are held accountable for too many things are, in the end, accountable for nothing," the
organizations wrote July 13. "Worse still, a system that papers over poor reading and math performance with ’extra credit
indicators’ will deny struggling schools the additional attention, technical assistance, and financial resources that they need to
improve."
Rep. McKeon cited the letter as one reason he was reluctant to support Rep. Miller’s early drafts of a reauthorization bill,
according to Steve Forde, Mr. McKeon’s spokesman.
On July 23, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings told a Capitol Hill audience that she questioned whether the law
should add measures other than statewide tests for accountability.
 Page 1227
In her brief presentation to a forum convened by the Congressional Black Caucus, she said she would oppose anything
she believes would ’keater down the ability of African American kids ... to read on grade level."
Responding to reporters’ questions atter the event, Ms. Spellings said she is not certain that states are ready to implement
such complex systems. More than five years after the lawwas enacted, some states "still have issues" with implementing the
current accountability system, she said.
Democrats on the ’Tube’
If Congress doesn’t renewthe NCLB legislation this year, lawmakers would likely pass an extension as a formality. That
would keep the $23.6 billion in federal funding appropriated under the law flowing to school districts.
The delay also could foretell significant changes for the law, especially if a Democrat is elected to succeed President Bush.
tn a July 23 debate at the Citadel in Charleston, S.C., and in other recent forums, Democratic candidates criticized the laws
emphasis on testing and what they contend is inadequate funding for it.
For the debate, co-sponsored by CNN and the YouTube Web site, a participant identified as Randy McGirr of Trona, Calif.,
produced a heavy-metal-style video that declared: "NCLB was such a scam. So now tell me, sir or ma’am, would you scrap the
whole thing or just revise? Tell me the truth, don’t tell me no lies."
CNN host Anderson Cooper directed the question to just two candidates: Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico and Sen.
Joseph R. Biden of Delaware.
’1 would scrap it. It doesn’t work," Gov. Richardson said, to applause from the audience. "It is not just an unfunded
mandate, but the one- size-fits-all doesn’t work."
Sen. Biden said he had made a mistake in voting for the law in 2001, when it passed both houses of Congress with big,
bipartisan majorities. He said he had done so "against my better instinct" because he had great faith in Sen. Edward M. Kennedy
of Massachusetts, a leading Democratic architect of the law, which President Bush had made a top domestic priority. Mr.
Kennedy, the chairman of the Senate education committee, remains one of the law’s most prominent supporters.
’My wife’s been teaching for 30 years,~ Sen. Biden added in his answer at the debate. "She has her doctorate in education.
She comes back and points out how it’s just not working."
While other candidates weren’t offered the chance respond to Mr. McGirr’s question, several of them have criticized the law
in speeches, including several who appeared at the National Education Association’s convention this month.
Mark Walsh contributed to this report.
Vol. 26, Issue 44, Pages 20-21
 Page 1228

Nonresponsiv
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: July 30, 2007 8:32 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angeta; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: Washington Whispers (USNEWS)

Washington Whispers (USNEWS)

By Paul Bedard
U.S. News and World Report, July 29, 2007
Golf Pro Mickelson Coaches Spellings
Masters champ Phil Mickelson knows there’s a lot more to golf than turf and beer. It’s the fancy angles and calculations
involved that wow him, and he thinks those golf traits are a good way to get kids into math and science. And now even the
Education Department is interested in his joint venture, the IVickelson ExxonMobil Teachers Academy, a camp that provides
leadership and motivational training to grade-school teachers. We hear that Education Secretary Margaret Spellings joined
Mickelson for a teacher town hall recently at the Virginia academy. The pro had Spellings demonstrate how the angle of a golf
club face is really the key to sinking a putt, more important than the stroke itself. How’d she do? "Let’s just say Phil didn’t want to
follow her act when she hit the pin on her first try," says Spellings spokeswoman Casey Ruberg.
 Page 1229

~ onresponsi
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: July 29, 2007 10:12 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunn, David;
Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers,
Angola; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend
L.; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Roserr[elt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey;
Scheessele, Marc; Simon, Ray; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam;
tracy_d._young@who.eop.go~ Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Yudof, Samara
Subject: WEEKEND NEWS SUMMARY, 7.29.07

WEEKEND NEWS SUMMARY

July 29, 2007

Spending Issues Prompt Changes at UDC (Washington Post)

Certain De~’ees Now Cost More at Public Universities (NYT)
’Play It Smat~’ High School Program Is Putting Some Players on Track (NYT)
Tests tax im~ulgrant students (Rochester Dem)

Spending Issues Prompt Changes at UDC

New Financial Controls Initiated; School Also Prepares to Name Acting lh’esident
Waslfington Post
By Valerie Strauss
July 29, 2007; C05

University of the District of Columbia officials are introducing new financial controls following their discovel7
that the school was in danger of overspending its budget for the year and that some payment records were
unclear, according to knowledgeable school sources.

UDC, the District’s only public institution of higher education, is also planning to narne an acting president to
mnthe school, according to James W. Dyke Jr., chaim]an of the board of trustees. The previous president,
William Pollard, was forced to resign in June after a five-year tenure when trustees said they wanted a new
leader.

The daily operations of the Northwest Washington school are being rml by Senior Vice President Stanley
Jackson, a former D.C. deputy mayor who joined the university administration this year. He is ctmently
reviewing the financial records and working on administrative and fiscal refoIrns.

"One of the things we’re faying to get ahold of is malting sure that all out bills are getting paid properly and out
finandal house is in order," Dyke said.
Dyke would not say whether the school was facing a deficit. But other soutces at the school, who insisted on
anonymity because of the sensitivity of the review, said that seemed likely until Jackson, with trustees’ support,
recently took steps to add new controls.

The sources did not say how much the university might have overspent or in what areas. They said they have
foundit difficult to determine that because some bills were being paid from accounts that were not supposed to
be tapped for those purposes.
 Page 1230
As a result, one top-raw,king official said, "you really could not trust" some of the financial data at the school.
Officials have to sort out the records to detei:tnine actual spending patterns, the source said.

Part of the problem involved the Presidential Reserve fund, which is not intended to pay ordinary expenses but
was being used in that fashion by Pollard, the sources said. It is designed to be used for special initiatives by the
president.
Pollard declined to comment. He has previously referred to receiving "five consecutive clean-budget opinions."

One doctmaent obtained by The Washington Post shows that as of March 14, the "Presidential Reserve Analysis
Balance" was $2.4 million. It listed a series of expenses that were to be paid from the account, including
nonunion automatic step salmy increases totaling $301,867. It does not identify the recipients.
Other "commitment to-dates" included an entry for "Interiors UItlimited" for $126,933, one for "catering" at
$12,512 and another labeled "City Council Retreat" for $3,194.78.

One enla% for $107,000, was labeled "Robert Claytort" Clayton is a lawyer who has handled the university’s
response to an ongoing NCAA investigation of the school’s atltletic program. The NCAA is looldng into
allegations of multiple rule violations, including athletes receiving excessive financial aid and failing to meet
academic eligibility requirements for playing, sources with knowledge of the investigation said.

Clayton was paid $949,172 over four years while working at tv¢o different law filrns on two different
investigations, UDC officials said in reply to a Freedom of Information Act request.

Much of the payment was for his work on the NCAA case, but he was also paid $188,000 for helping the
university respond to an ongoing investigation by the Department of Educaticn that school sources said involves
the use of federal fun& for financial aid and questions about whether some recipients were ineligible.

It is not clear which accounts were used to pay t~im. He has not tetraned numerous phone calls made by a
reporter over several months.

Sources said one reason l~-ustees became disillusioned with Pollard’s stewardship of the university was that a
majority did not feel he was paying enough attention to the investigations.
During his tenure, Pollard oversaw the reaccreditation of the university and took a leading role in winning the
long-sought accreditation of its law school. Other accomplishments included establishing a courtseling and
career services center for students, remaldng the infom~ation techi~ology branch sel~cice and improving the
school’s deteriorating physical condition.
In October, the Irustees extended Pollard’s contract for five years. But tiffs year, they agreed to ask him to resign,
saying publicly only that it was time to find a new leader who could take the open-adinissions school to another
level.
A national search for the school’s fifth pelananent president in 15 years is being conducted by a committee led
by T~mtee Donald N. Langenberg, foIrner chancellor of the University System of Maryland. He said recently
that the search could take six to 12 months.

UDC officials are preparing to announce the appointment of an acting president. They recently realized that
their accreditation by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education could be in jeopardy because the
school has gone so long without a permanent president, the sources said.
 Page 1231
Certain Degrees Now Cos~ More at Public Universities
The Ne~v York Thnes
By Jonafl~an D. Gla[er
J~y 29, 2007

Should an undergraduate studying business pay more than one studying psychology?. Should a journalism degree
cost more than one in literature? More and more public universities, confronting rising costs and lagging state
support, have decided that the answers may be yes and yes.

Starting this fall, juniors and seniors pursuing an undergraduate major in the business school at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison, will pay $500 more each semester than classmates. The University of Nebraska last year
began charging engineering students a $40 premium for each hour of class credit.

And Arizona State University this fall will phase in for upperclassmen in the journalism school a $250 per
semester charge above the basic $2,411 tuition for in-state students.

Such moves are being di-iven by the high salaries commanded by professors in certain fields, the expense of
specialized equipment and the difficulties of getting state legislatm’es to approve general tuition increases,
university officials say.

"It is something of a trend," said BalTnak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of
Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

Even as they embrace such pricing, many officials acknowledge they are queasy about a practice that appears to
value one discipline over another or that could result in lower-income students clustering in less expensive
fields.
"This is not the prefelled wayto do this," said Patrick V. Farrell, provost at the University of Wisconsin,
Madison. "If we were able toraise resources uniformly across the cmnpus, that would be a prefened move. But
with our cunent situation, it doesn’t seem to us that that’s possible."

At the University of Kansas, which started charging different prices in the early 1990s, there are signs that the
higher cost of majoring in certain subjects is affecting the choices of poorer students.

°°We are seeing at this point put’ely anecdotal evidence," said Richard W. Lariviere, provost and executive vice
chancellor at the university. ’’The price sensitivity of poor students is causing theln to forgo majoring, for
example, in business or engineering, and rather sticldng with something like history."

Private uttiversities do not face the same tNtion constraints and for the most part are avoiding the practice,
educators say, holding to the traditional idea that college students should be encouraged to get a well-rounded
education.
Richard Fass, vice president for plarming at Pomona, a private liberal arts college in California, said educators
there considered it fundamental for students to feel part of the larger college, not segmented by differential
costs. °’The entire curriculum is by design available to all students," he said.

Some pnblic university officials say they wony that students who are charged more for their major will stick to
the courses in their field to feel that they are getting their money’s wolN.

"I want students in the College of Engineering at Iowa State to take courses inthe humanities and to take
courses in the social sciences," said Mark J. Kuslmer, the dean of that college. To addiess problems like climate
 Page 1232
change, Mr. Kushner said, graduates will need to understand much more than technology. °~That’s sociology,
that’ s economics, that’ s politics, tt~t’ s public policy."

Undergn’aduate juniors and seniors in the engineering school at Iowa State last year began paying about $500
more annually, he said, and the size of that additional payment is scheduled to rise by $500 a year for at least the
next two years.
Mr. Kushner said he thought society was no longer looking at higher education as a common good but rather as
a way for individuals to increase their earning power.

°°-fhere was a time, not that long ago, 10 to 15 years ago, that the vast majority of the cost of education at public
universities was borne by the state, and that was whytuition was so low," he said. ’°I’hat was based onthe
premise that the education of an individual is a public good, that individuals go out and become schoolteachers
and businessmen and doctors and lawyers, that makes society better. That’s no longer the perception."

Neither the State University of New York nor the Connecticut State University System use differential pricing,
officials say. New Jersey, however, has done so for years, according to a spokesman, Greg Trevor. In the new
school year, in-state undergraduates in the general progran~ will pay tuition of $8,541, but engineering and
phaimacy students will pay $9,484.80 and business students will pay $8,716.
Various tmiversities have adopted different versions of differential pricing to try to fight the unintended
consequences it may create. Colleges that chmge higher tuition for a major like business, engineering or
journalism generally allow students outside the field to take some comses in the subject without paying more.

"We do try to encoreage crossing disciplines, to get a feel for the world," said Randy Kangas, assistant vice
president for planning and budgeting at the University of Illinois, where students studying business, chemistry
and the life sciences pay higher tuition.

Most tmiversities with differential tuition use some of the money - 20 to 25 percent - for additio~ml financial aid
to offset some of the impact.

Offidals at universities that have recently implemented higher tuition for spedfic majors say students have
supported the move.

Students in the business school at the University of Wisconsin, for example, got behind the program because
they believed that it would support things like a top-notch faculty. "It’s very important to all the students in the
business school to sustain ore" reputation," said Jesse C. Siegelman, 21, who expects to graduate in December
2008.

Mr. Siegelman said representatives of 26 of 28 student groups that belong to the school’s Undergraduate
Student Leadership Council, of which he was president last year, voted to support the tuition proposal.

In engineering programs, the additional money often goes toward costly laboratory equipment, because students
and the companies that will employ them expect graduates to be able to go to work immediately using state of
the art tools, said Mr. Lmiviere of the University of Kansas.
"In many instances," he said, °fndustry itself is demanding this."

And in business schools, professors’ salaries have risen, with some schools paying starting professors $130,000
or more, said G. Dan Parker llI, associate executive vice president of Texas A&M, which he said was
considering whether to charge higher tuition to undergraduate students studying business.
 Page 1233

’‘The salaries we pay for entering assistant professors on average is probably larger than the average salary for
fi~ professors at the university," Mr. Parker said of business professors. "That’s how far the pendulum has
swung at the business schools, and I sttre wish they’d fix it."

While several university ot~dals said students in majors that carried higher costs could bear the bm’den because
they would be better paid after graduation, Mr. Lariviere said he was skeptical of that rationale. He pointed out
that many people change jobs several times over a career and that a major is a poor predictor of lifetime income.

"Where we have gone astray cultmally," he said, °fs that we have focused almost exclusively on stm-fing salary
as an indicator of life earnings and also of the value of the particular major."

’Play It Smart’ High School Program Is Pu~fing Some Players on Track

The Ne~v York Thnes
By Pete Thamel
July 29, 2007

Ray Rice is a ptmishing tailback for Rutgers who earned his prep reputation at New Rochelle High School
outside New Yoik City.
DeSean Jackson is an explosive wide receiver at California who went to Berkeley from the powerhouse program
at Long Beach Polytechnic High School in the Los Angeles area.

They are being cited as leading contenders for the Heisman Trophy this college football season and, despite
being opposite coasts, they are bound in another way.

Both are graduates of Play It Smart, a nonprofit program sponsored by the National Football Foundation and
College Hall of Fame to help football players in inner-city schools with their studies.
"It helped me out a lot," Rice said. "It helped me balancing academics and school work at the same time. It’s
one oftttose things that everyhigh school program should have. Ira kid is going to go Division I, theyneed to
be guided."

Since being founded in 1998, Play It Smart has expanded to 136 high schools ttuoughout the country. There are
more than 200 Play It Smart graduates in Division I-A football, including seven at Rutgers.

Rice and Jackson said that Play It Smart offered them a taste of college life before they walked on campus. They
were introduced to academic connselors and tutors, and were taught time-management skills.

’‘The Play It Smart program definitdy helped me manage my time," Jackson said. "We had practice at a certain
time. We couldn’t practice until we had out" study hall out of the way. It was like being a freshman in college."
At New Rochelle High School, the Play It Smm-t program is based in a team room 10 feet fiom the office of the
football coach, Lou DiRienzo. Since the Play It Smart program began at New Rochelle in 2004, its office has
served as a gateway to the football field.

Any student ~vho wants to play for New Rochelle has his classwork tracked by ka~dy Capellan, a retired
principal at the school with a low tolerance for nonseuse.
If football players cut class, they sit out practice. If they are strnggling in a subject, an honors student tutors
them. The results at New Rochelle have transcended simply helping star athletes like Rice and his Rutgers
 Page 1234
teanm~ates Glen Lee and Courtney Greene receive Division I scholarships.

"Last year’s team, we didn’t lose one kid on the varsity to eligibility,’" Capellml said. "We used to get clobbered
in terms of eligibility."

Capellan said that the program had helped send five New Rochelle players to Division I universities since 2004.

He said that before this run of players, he could not recall a football player from New Rochelle accepting a
Division I-A scholarship for nearly 20 years.

"Most of them weren’t even graduating," Capellan said. ’°And it’s not that we didn’t have anyone stellar or
outstanding."

At Ne~v Rochelle, a school of 3,200 students, Capellan said that the counselors did not have a lot of time to sit
and explain to student attdetes what the N.C.A.A. academic minimums were in order to earn college
scholarships.

Capellan meets with the students in Play It Smart and their parents before the start of each season to lay out the
specific classes and grades needed. The results of those talks and the subsequent academic support and
preparation for the SAT through the program have been apparent.

’~Fhere’s not just kids going Division I mid becoming Heisman Trophy candidates," DiRienzo said. "There’s
kids going to Division II and Division III schools because of the emphasis put on academics through athletics.
’°1"here’s more kids not just settling for high school diplomas and moving on."
The NoDam is paid for by a $30,000 grant to each school, although that number can be tailored to fit the needs
of a school. Capellan, who also coaches gifts track and cross country, said he was supposed to work 12 hours a
week to earn his $10,000 salary from Play It Smart as an academic coach.

But with meetings with players, teachers and parents, m~ming study halls and tracking academics, he said that he
~vorked close to 30 hours. (The other money goes to resources like computers and SAT prep.)

Steve Hatchell, the president and chief executive of the National Football Foundation and College Football Hall
of Fame, said that it was the consistent presence and dedication of people like Capellan in schools that had
helped make Play It Smart so successful.
"In 10 years, we’ve proven that this ~vorks," Hatchell said. ’There’s no in-between. We don’t just come in and
say, ’Hello, we hope you’re doing well.’ We’re there and we care about you and we want you to graduate."

The program’s sponsors include a $1.1 million annual donation from the N.F.L. and the N.F.L. Playels
Assodation, and $800,000 fiom the Department of Justice. The Chick-fil-A Bowl announced last week that it
would give $180,000 annuallyto provide all the public high schools in Atlanta with the program N.C.A.A.
Football mid the New Balance Foundation each give $100,000 a year.

Hatchell said spreading the word about the program’s success was nearly as important as financing, but there is
a long list of high schools hoping to receive a grant to establish the program.
"You wish you could get to Oprah and others just to make people aware of the program," Hatchell said.

As for how the program translates on the field in college, Rice and Jackson said they went to college prepared
 Page 1235
for the academic rigors. That helped each player focus on the field, where they contributed significantly as
freshmen.

California Coach JeffTedford and Rutgers Coach Greg Schiano said they were pleased with how each player
handled their studies as soon as they arrived on campus.

°°Ray got his work ethic from his mother, Janet, and his upbringing," Schiano said. °°You take a guy like Ray and
then you give him some organizatioi~al skills and time-management skills to go along with it, you get a really
productive student athlete. That’s what he is."
Rice has committed to giving back to the program. Markell Rice, Ray’s brother, is a senior at New Rochelle and
in the Play It Smart program. Capellan said Markell Rice struggled early in high school, cut classes and was not
focused academically.

Ray Rice went back to New Rochelle from Rutgers as part of a sit-down meeting to help focus his brother in
school.

Capellan said Markell Rice had overcome his early problems and was in line for a scholarship, probably from a
midmajor school.

"I definitely see myself giving back to Play It Smart," Ray Rice said.

"Whatever I can do. Even ifI can go back now and talk to the kids, I’d do what I can to help them."

Tests tax immigrant students

Rochesger Democrat & Chronicle
By Rep. James Walsh, Guest essayist
Jtfly 29, 2007

As the ranking Republican on the Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations
Subcommittee, I am in a lmique position to advocate for Rochester-area health care facilities, colleges and
universities, work force initiatives and public schools.

In 1995-2006, under the Republican majority in Congress, the federal government spent more money on
elementary and secondm3~ education than at any other time in U.S. history. As a result of the No Child Left
Behind Act of 2001, federal Title I grants to states and local schools increased from $8.7 billion in 2001 to more
than $12.8 billion in 2005.

But like any major new initiative, NCLB also has its shortcomings. One issue that I am particularly concerned
with is that of Lilnited English Proficient and English Language Learner students. Under current NCLB
regulations, states are required to administer an English Language Arts assessment to students after only one
year of English insta-uction.

This is detrimental to these students and mffair to schools, particularly ore urban school districts with high
proportions of immigrant students. While I recognize the benefits of monitoring LEP/ELL student achievement
yearly, schools should not be penalized for students’ scores after only one year ofiustmction. Instead, we must
provide states with the flexibility to irnplement testing and accountability suited to their students. In New York,
there are more than 192,000 hnmigrant students learning English. According to U.S. census figures, LEP/ELL
students are the fastest growing subgroup ofU. S. students.

Recently, I met with Education Secretm-y Margaret Spellings to express my concerns. I also wrote to tl~e House
 Page 1236
Education and Labor Committee chairman and ranking member asldng that they work with me to prohibit test
scores for LEP/ELL students from counting against schools until after students complete ttuee years of English
language insh-uction.

Schools also face similar issues with respect to students in special education. To better support these students
and teachers, I successfully introduced an amendment to increase Individuals with Disabilities Education Act
fmlding in FY2008 by $335 million. With the federal government providing more of its needed share to local
school disla-icts, less pressure is placed on local property taxpayers.

As a husband of a lifelong educator and the father of three grown children, I lmow the value of sla’ong public
school systems. I’ll continue my push in my new role to ensure appropriate federal financial support continues
and grows.

Walsh, R-Onondaga, Onondaga County, represents the 25th District, U.S. House of Representatives.
 Page 1237

Nonresponsive
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: July 26, 2007 9:02 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angeta; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrelt, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: Debra Saunders: Rx for failure- Pay more to teach less (SFC)

Rx for failure - Pay more toteach less (SFC)

By Debra J. Saunders
San Francisco Chronicl~e, July 26, 2007

WITH DEMOCRATS now in control of Congress, expect Congress to try to water down No Child Left Behind, as Washington
works on a bill to reauthodze the landmark Bush education reform enacted in 2002. That is, expect Democrats to try to squeeze
as much money as possible from federal taxpayers, while watering down accountability requirements so that schools wont have
to do a better job of teaching. And they’ll do it by undermining the testing system so that illiterate students can be labeled as
success stories.

Or, as U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said during a phone interview Thursday, "All the people who have railed
against too much testing now are for multiple measures" - which entail more tests, but tests that can hide what children are not
learning. "The more complicated" the tests they propose, "frankly the more obfuscation" results, Spellings noted.

As Education Week reported in May, Rep. Tim Walz, D-Minn., a new member of Congress and a former schoolteacher, wants to
add portfolio assessments of student work - essays, drawings and reports - to measure vTnether students are reading and doing
math at grade level. National Education Association President Reg Weaver has proposed the same.

Such a proposal shows, as Spellings pointed out, that they can support more testing - if it is amorphous testing that can pave
over gaps in a child’s knowledge.

The argument for adding portfolios to NCLB assessments, Spellings noted, is, "We’re over-testing (students), so let’s have more
tests." You~e heard the arguments against standardized tests. They are "one size fits all." They do not measure the scope of a
child’s understanding. They are boring. They represent drill and kill. They are unfair to non-English speakers.

But as Spellings noted, "The reason we have assessments is to find out how many poor and minority children read at grade
level." If schools had not made a practice of graduating students who do not read or compute at grade level, these tests would
not be ne0essary. But in that so many students have fallen behind - while their grades have not - standardized tests have
become an essential tool in the public’s quest, first, to find out which schools are failing students, then, fixing those schools.
Standardized tests also can help determine which teaching methodologies and textbooks work best with different student groups.

Where critics see "once-size-fits-all," others see tests that can find gaps in student knowledge - so that teachers can fix them.

In June, a report by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy found that significant improvement among elementary school
math students in 37 of 41 states, as well as improvement in middle school reading in 20 out of 39 states, and in high school
reading, in 16 out of 37 states, according to the Washington Post. After years of dumbed-down education, these modest gains
are cause for celebration.

Rep. Carol Shea-Poffer, D.-NH., according to Education Week, once called No Child Left Behind an attempt by Republicans to
"undemnine our confidence in our public schools."
 Page 1238

In fact, the bill, while imperfect, was designed to increase confidence in public schools, not by pretending that failing schools work
well, but by making failing schools better.
 Page 1239

I~Nonresponsiv
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: July 26, 2007 8:32 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: Spellings: HQT sanctions still possible (Education Daily)

Spellings: HQT sanctions still possible (Education Daily)

By Stephen Sawchuk
Education Daily, July 26, 2007
Teacher groups and states have been pressuring the Education Department for months for details on whether the agency
would sanction states for not meeting the summer 2007 deadline for having a highly qualified teacher in every classroom.
No state has yet reached that goal (see box, p. 4); Montana, with 99 percent of its teaching force considered highly
qualified, is closest.
This week, ED gave its answer. ’Maybe.’
In a letter sent to state chiefs, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings reassured states that ED will not withhold funds
solely for not meeting the deadline. However, a state could still face withholding if ED monitoring teams -- scheduled to begin
visits this fall -- show that the state is not making an ’adequate effort’ to fulfill the terms of its HQT plan, she wrote.
ED solicited the plans last year and has since accepted every state’s plan except Puerto Rico’s.
’All decisions about sanctions will be made on a case-by-case basis,’ Spellings wrote.
National Education Association officials called the letter’encouraging’ in its acknowledgement that states face ’unusually
difficul~ challenge[s]’ finding HQTs for small rural schools, advanced high school courses, and special education situations in
which teachers instruct in several core subjects.
’[Spellings] is saying to states that can’t get to 100 percent despite all their best efforts, ’We’re not going to penalize you;
we’re going to penalize states that just aren’t trying," said Joel Packer, NEA director of education policy and practices.
In the letter, Spellings wrote that ED monitoring teams will focus on: ¯ Whether states monitor school districts to ensure that
they expedite the process of becoming HQTs who have not attained HQT status.
¯ Whether states are providing technical assistance to districts in that process.
¯ Whether states have processes in place to collect and verify the accuracy of HQT data.
ED released a dratt of its monitoring protocols eadier this year. Officials did not respond to requests for additional details on
the monitoring schedule.
Still, states could face challenges in their efforts to show improvements. Watchdog groups like the The Education Trust
have said most states’ HQT plans lack measurable benchmarks for increasing the number of HQTs and for ensuring an equitable
distribution of qualified and experienced teachers between high- and low-poverty schools
Complicating matters, a handful of states reported lower percentages of HQTs in 2005-06 than they did three years
previously because of ongoing data reporting glitches and issues with their own HQT definitions.
No other developments The letter revealed no other policy developments on the HQT front, and some experts expressed
skepticism that ED would actually make good on the continued threat of sanctions.
Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, said ED might be trying to show Congress that it is ’on
top of things, without actually having to come down on anyone.’
She continued, ’You can look at the letter two ways: as a warning that [ED] is going to enforce, or a way of enforcing
without really enforcing.’
 Page 1240

Nonresponsive
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: July 26, 2007 8:32 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, C~thia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angeta; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara MaRine.z; Young, Tracy; .
Yudof, Samara
Subject: Schools Cut Other Subjects To Teach Reading And Math (USNEWS)

Schools Cut Other Subjects To Teach Reading And Math (USNEWS)

By Alex Kingsbury
U.S. News and Wodd Report, July 26, 2007
President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act pushed students into a regimen of high-stakes testing in two core
areas: reading and math. The effects could hardly have been more predictable: Now, it seems, teachers and schools are
dedicating more and more energy to math and reading instruction at the expense of other subjects.
Call it teaching to the test. According to findings from the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy, 62 percent of school
districts reported increasing time for reading andlor math instruction in elementary schools since 2001-02 (Bush signed the
NCLB law in January 2002), while middle schools reported a 20 percent rise. The study was based on survey results from nearly
350 school districts around the country. Those increases for math and science instruction have come with a price: Forty-four
percent of those districts said they cut time from activities like recess and lunch or subjects like social studies and art. "The
standards movement is having an impact on our classrooms," says CEP President Jack Jennings. "If higher test scores are the
objective, we can show that teachers are concentrating more on getting better scores."
In elementary schools, for example, 36 percent of the schools surveyed decreased the amount of time spent on social
studies, and 28 percent reduced time spent on science--despite the fact that boosting science education has been the goal of a
variety of government-sponsored initiatives to spur competitiveness. Science testing does not yet have the emphasis that reading
and math have received under NCLB.
Earlier this year, commenting on the results of nationwide history and civics testing (where test scores improved only
slightly), Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said that the NCLB focus on reading and math was not narrowing the
curriculum. "While critics may argue that NCLB leads educators to narrowtheir curriculum focus, the fact is, when students know
how to read and comprehend, they apply these skills to other subjects like history and civics," she said.
The C EP study doesn’t directly address the efficacy of the instruction time. But it does show that teachers are concentrating
their efforts on the areas of the curriculum that are under the most scrutiny, while other subjects like science, art, and social
studies are receiving less and less attention.
 Page 1241

eNonresponsiv
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: July 26, 2007 8:32 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: What Can Science Teachers Learn From A Pro Golfer? (USAT)

"Ninety percent of our fastest-growing jobs now require two years of college, and most of those jobs require aptitude in
math and science," said Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who spoke at a session Monday. "We all have to become more
math and science literate."

What Can Science Teachers Learn From A Pro Golfer? (USAT)

By Tim Gardner
USA Today, July 26, 2007
FAIRFAX, Va. --Vicki Way steps to the front of the classroom, broom in hand, as nearly 40 pairs of eyes focus intently on
her.
"And I dont even sweep," Way says.
No matter.
Way, a fourth-grade teacher from Findley Academy in Akron, Ohio, wasn’~ in front of the group to clean up a mess. Instead,
she was there to help demonstrate force, friction and gravity for 200 teachers from around the country at the five-day Mickelson
ExxonMobil Teachers Academy here this week.
PGA golfer Phil Mickelson and his wife, Amy, are the parents of three children, ages 8, 5 and 4, and have long been
interested in education. After he played a round of golf with several global leaders nearly five years ago, Mickelson, 37, says, he
began to realize how big a problem substandard education -- specifically in math and science -- had become in the USA.
"When I heard that, we started looking into a way to contribute," says Mickelson, who has a degree in psychology from
Arizona State University.
In its third year, the Mickelson ExxonMobil Teachers Academy offers an intense, five-day curriculum that gives teachers
new ideas, tools and networking opportunities. It works with the National Science Teachers Association and Math Solutions, an
organization dedicated to the professional development of standards-based instruction in mathematics.
Three seminars were offered this summer, up from just one in the academy’s first two years. The others were in Houston
and Baton Rouge.
Participation is free, including travel and lodging, ExxonMobil’s Truman Bell says. Each academy costs about $700,000 to
put on, he says, and in some cases includes contributions from the Mickelsons.
At the seminar, the 200 teachers are divided into groups of about 40, where they hit the classroom to learn a curriculum
created by the science teachers group and Math Solutions employees, who are former teachers themselves. They are given
DVDs with experiments and worksheets to take back to the classroom.
"]he goal is to give the teachers tools and ideas to ignite passion" about the subject matter, says Amy Mickelson, 35. "It’s
so infectious. Every time we come and we get around those teachers, it makes you want to do something to change the world.
They’re amazing, amazing people."
The Mickelsons’ contributions to the academy include appearances at each event, work on the DVDs and Phil’s
appearances in commercials that ExxonMobil runs to promote the initiative, for which he is compensated.
Teachers need all the help they can get, a report from 2005 suggests. The report by the National Academy of Sciences, the
National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine found that more than two-thirds of fourth-, eighth- and 12th-grade
students do not perform at proficient levels in science. It also says nearly 30% of high school math students and 60%of science
students have teachers who did not major in the subject or are not certified to teach it.
"Ninety percent of our fastest-growing jobs now require two years of college, and most of those jobs require aptitude in
 Page 1242
math and science," said Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who spoke at a session Monday. "We all have to become more
math and science literate."
Other professional athletes also are involved in education projects. They include PGA star Tiger Woods, who last year
opened the Tiger Woods Learning Center in Anaheim, Calif., offering fifth- to 12th-graders extracurricular programs focused on
higher education and careers. And Tampa Bay Buccaneers linebacker Derrick Brooks is on the board of a non-profit that is
opening a charter school in Florida next month for ninth- to 1 lth-graders.
But instead of children, the Mckelsons’ academy focuses on teachers.
Some teachers miss opportunities to illustrate science in everyday life, says Gerry Wheeler of the National Science
Teachers Association. "It gives the child the wrong impression of what science is. Science and mathematics is much more
exciting than a list of facts."
Back at the academy, Way, 56, is fine-tuning her craft. A day full of experiments and networking with other teachers gave
her plenty of new experience.
"Science is always changing," she says, "and since I have to teach all the subjects, it gives me a chance to really think
about the science part of it and get better at that."
 Page 1243

INonresponsive
~rom: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: July 25, 2007 8:42 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerd; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; Maddox, Lauren; Private - Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: Spellings: ED against ELL accountability’loopholes’

Spellings: ED against ELL accountability ’loopholes’

By Frank Wolfe
Education Daily, July 25, 2007
The Education Depaffment will oppose legislators’ effoffs to water down the accountability provisions of NCLB, including
any blanket measure that would alter the requirement for testing English-language learners after one year, Education Secretary
Margaret Spellings told Education Daily@ this week.
Some educators have said one year is not sufficient time for many ELLs to learn English and that ELL scores should be
counted for AYP only atter three years.
’Obviously, this is an issue for discussion dudng the reauthodzation,’ Spellings said after her bdef appearance on Capitol
Hill before the Congressional Black Caucus Education Summit.
’What I want to remind folks up here is that while we ought to make some distinctions about late ardvals and that sod: of
thing N and we do already -- we also to have to keep our eye on the ball that two-thirds of these kids were born in the United
States of America, and three-fouffhs of these kids have been here for five or more years,’ Spellings said. ’So, I don’t think it’s
unreasonable at all for someone who was born in the United States of America to get to the end of the third grade and be able to
read on grade level in English.
q-here’s a little bit of a ’baby-bathwater’ problem here when we star~ to look at three years. I want to guard against things
that are loopholes against accountability for achievement by poor and minority kids that are being discussed.’
Spellings said she would ’absolutely’ oppose any blanket three-year allowance for ELLs in a reauthorized NCLB.
Allowance for ELLs is becoming a hot-button issue, as the number of ELLs attending K-12 public schools is an estimated 5
million -- more than 10 percent of public school enrollment. The ELL population is more than 75 percent Latino and concentrated
in large urban school districts -- 25 of which have an ELL population of at least 15 percent. Educators now see ELL achievement
as intrinsically linked to the success of the public school system.
Regulations finalized last year now give students who have been in the United States fewer than 12 months an exemption
from reading tests, and that provision is expected to be codified into law in the NCLB reauthorization.
One public policy exper~ said ED has already made reasonable changes to NCLB, including the new regulations on recent
arrivals.
’We agree with Secretary Spellings’ perspective on this,’ said Melissa Lazarin, associate director of education policy at the
National Council of La Raza, a Latino advocacy group. ’Eighty percent of ELLs are native-born U.S. citizens. It concerns us a
great deal that exempting U.S. citizens is being discussed.’
Lazarin said it’s conceivable for ELLs to achieve high standards under NCLB timelines, provided that states are equipped
with the right assessments to measure ELL performance, including portfolio assessments, simplified English assessments, and
native-language assessments. The latter tests can measure analytical skill and classroom learning and are allowed in a small
number of states. Educators are discussing a blanket three-year provision to exempt ELL test scores only because most states
are not yet armed to measure ELL performance adequately, Lazarin said.
Beyond modifying ELL assessments, the timeline for counting ELL scores is sure to arise in the reauthorization debate on
Capitol Hill. Some advocates are not calling for a blanket three-year provision but a more tailored one.
’We see what Secretary Spellings is saying,’ said Daniel Fuller, public policy director for the Association for Supervision and
Curriculum Development. Native-born, English-speaking students should receive standard instruction, ’but if they immigrated
here from somewhere else and English is not their first language, we want them to have the appropriate time to assimilate and
 Page 1244
learn the language.’
 Page 1245

Nonresponsiv,
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: July 25, 2007 8:42 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, C~thia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angeta; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
First Lady Makes Rare Foray Into Lobbying For ’No Child Left Behind’ Law (CQ)

First Lady Makes Rare Foray Into Lobbying For ’No Child Left Behind’ Law (CQ)
By Michael Sandier
Congressional Quarterly, July 25, 2007
As he weathers dismal approval ratings and defections within his own party, President Bush is enlisting his closest
compatriot -- and one untouched by his administration’s political troubles -- to lobby for his core education objective on Capitol
Hill.
First lady Laura Bush has held a handful of small-group meetings at the White House in recent weeks, hoping to shore up
support among GOP members for the reauthorization of the 2002 elementary and secondary education law (PL 107-110).
It’s a rare step into the public policy realm for Mrs. Bush, who forthe most part has shied away from politics and legislative
haggling dudng her husband’s first six years in office.
The foray comes at a time when Bush’s own popularity inside and outside Washington is near an all-time low -- and is in
particular need of a boost with those Republicans who believe the law Bush dubbed "No Child Lett Behind" went overboard on
federal mandates.
Laura Bush’s approval ratings are among the highest of anyone currently in the administration -- a CNN poll in late 2006
had her at 76 percent.
’You use everything you can," said Howard P. "Buck" McKeon of California, the ranking Republican on the House
Education and Labor Committee, who has attended two meetings with Mrs. Bush and about a half-dozen House Republicans.
By all accounts, Mrs. Bush has been an effective advocate. She’s an experienced librarian who has devoted time to
children’s literacy programs the law created. But whether she can make a difference in what is shaping up to be a highly
contentious debate over the future of the law is unclear.
"She’s not someone you see as a policy heavyweight," said Mary Kusler, Washington lobbyist for the Amedcan Association
of School Administrators, which represents 13,000 superintendents.
’1 think at this point the Bush administration is very concerned about their legacy," Kusler said. "If that means having Laura
Bush go out and meet with members of Congress on the rea~hodzation, then that’s what they are going to do."
The first lady’s spokeswoman would not say who has attended the meetings or offer any details about the substance of the
discussions.
"She was just talking about he successes of No Child Left Behind and the need for it to continue," said Sally McDonough,
Mrs. Bush’s communications director.
Coffee and Persuasion
The idea to get Mrs. Bush involved came up dudng a meeting between McKeon and Education Secretary Margaret
Spellings. The two sensed a number of Republicans potentially walking away from the administration on the education renewal,
and Spellings had an idea.
"She said maybe it would help if we had Laura Bush working on it," McKeon remembered. "1 said, ’Yeah, that would be
good.’"
Working with Spellings, the first lady has invited at least two groups of House Republicans, as well as at least one group of
senators, to the White House to discuss over coffee the importance of the reauthorization. Mrs. Bush has expressed her support
for the law, discussed where the renewal stands and what those in attendance can do to help move the process along, according
to a Republican aide.
"She’s viewed as good a lobbyist as you can get," said Republican Rep. Michael N. Castle of Delaware, who has attended
 Page 1246
two meetings with Mrs. Bush.
"She’s very effective," said Republican Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, who attended a meeting with senators.
Independent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut also attended a meeting, and Mrs. Bush spoke with Democrat
Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, at a White
House social function July 12.
"She comes with a professional background, not only as a librarian but also as someone who continues to do a good deal
of reading with children," Kennedy said. "So I think she’s respected and I would imagine people listen to her."
A Legacy at Stake
How much of a role Mrs. Bush intends to play going forward is uncertain. But the president can use all the help he can get.
Earlier this month, McKeon indicated that he could not suppor~ any legislation that wuld not have a majority of GOP
members behind it.
That could be an extremely difficult goal to reach, considering a competing measure (HR 1539), sponsored by Republican
Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, already has 60 GOP cosponsors. That bill would, in Hoekstra’s words, make the law
"voluntary" by letting states come up with their own ways to measure school performance.
Two weeks are left before lawmakers leave for the four-week August recess, and neither chamber has begun moving a
measure. The law is set to expire at the end of September. A one-year extension kicks in if no action is taken; and even if that
year passes, Congress can continue core elements of the law by appropriating money for its programs.
Complicating the lack of movement are significant policy debates that have emerged between Republicans and Democrats,
particularly over the weight standardized testing should be given in determining adequate yearly progress -- the centerpiece of
the law once expected to be President Bush’s domestic legacy.
’1 think it is getting pretty late," said Sandy Kress, who served as a special adviser to Bush in 2001 and is largely credited
with bdnging various paffies together to pass the odginal law.
Now lobbying for a coalition of business interests, Kress said the shoffened time frame, the complexity of the issues,
disagreements over key aspects of the law and a more partisan mood on Capitol Hill have dimmed the prospects for renewal.
’1 think these are the more serious issues, rather than the president’s effectiveness," Kress said.
Having Laura Bush out front on the issue might not be a silver bullet to win over the laws critics, but she could salvage
support among those who have yet to decide.
’1 think the president recognizes there are some real problems with the reauthorizalJon, especially in light of what Mr.
McKeon said," about needing a majority of Republicans, said
Dale E. Kildee, D-Mich., who chairs the House Education and Labor subcommittee with jurisdiction over the
reauthodzation.
’1 think she can play a significant role. She’s respected on both sides of the aisle. [Mrs. Bush] probably can move them
toward getting a majority of the minority."
 Page 1247

INonresponsive
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: July 25, 2007 8:42 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gate, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angeta; Maddox, Lauren; Private-Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toom ey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-m ail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: Debate Over School Tests: What’s Being Left Behind? (NSL)

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings reacted coolly to the report, saying its recommendations could "roll back the
clock on the great progress we’ve made for our poor, minority and special education students."

Debate Over School Tests: What’s Being Left Behind? (NSL)

By John Mooney
Newark Star-Ledger (N J), July 25, 2007
Focus on math, reading may hurt other subjects
For Bruce Rothenberg, principal of Parsons Elementary School in North Brunswick, the tradeoffs of the federal No Child
Lett Behind Act couldn’t be clearer.
This year, reading and math test scores rose at his school, but students who needed extra help in those subjects had to
give up time in other classes. That meant things like social studies and science suddenly weren~ quite as important.
’rf’hey certainly have less priority, no question about it," he said. "All the energy is focused on math and reading."
A sweeping new national study of the federal legislation -- perhaps the toughest education bill ever -- has found that many
districts with low-performing schools radically shifted their emphasis to the basics of reading, writing and math at the expense of
other subjects.
The wisdom of teaching to the test is being hotly debated in the education community. Some point out that reading, writing
and math are essential skills; others say the gains don’t justify the sacrifices.
But the study, released today by the Washington-based Center on Education Policy, provides clear evidence schools are
literally changing schedules to avoid the law’s most severe penalties.
Schools whose students fail to meet the benchmarks of the act six years running are ordered to "restructure," something
that can mean sacking administrators, transferring teachers or even giving up and converting to a charter school.
In New Jersey, 50 schools with some 35,000 students were forced to restructure in September, and nearly 500 more found
themselves facing some sanction.
Polling more than 350 districts nationwide, the center found that more than half of surveyed elementary schools had
increased reading instruction by as much as two hours a week since the federal law was enacted. One-third had reduced time on
social studies more than an hour a week, and a quarter had cut back on science.
The impact was most profound in schools listed by the law as under-performing, with more than three-quarters increasing
time on reading and half reducing time on social studies. Even the cafeteria wasn’t spared, with a fifth of the districts saying
lunchtime was cut back.
"What gets tested gets taught," said John Jennings, president of the think-tank that conducted the study. "Under No Child
Lett Behind, there is reading and math, and then there is everything else."
Signed by President Bush in 2001, the law demands that schools annually test students in reading and math and show
steady progress in their performance. The schools are judged not just on overall performance, but by how well subgroups of
students, such as low-income or special education, fare.
The law’s stated goal is 100 percent proficiency by 2013.
In the past, Jennings and his organization has praised the progress many schools have shown, pointing out significant
gains in student achievement, especially in elementary schools.
But with the law up for reauthodzation in Congress this year, the latest report makes several recommendations to ensure
other subjects aren’t left behind, including gradually adding state tests in social studies, the arts and science.
 Page 1248
It also recommended that schools do a better job weaving other subjects into math and reading instruction.
’qhe tests scores are going up, but are they at some expense, and are there better ways to do it?" said Jennings, who last
month made the case in testimony before Congress.
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings reacted coolly to the report, saying its recommendations could "roll back the
clock on the great progress we’ve made for our poor, minority and special education students."
Among the districts highlighted in the report is Bayonne, where local officials acknowledged their focus on reading and
math has led to schedule changes. For instance, the district moved programs for gifted artists and musicians to after school.
In addition, Bayonne was among those districts that adjusted how they teach reading and math, emphasizing specific skills
covered in the state tests such as answering open-ended questions or using special grading "rubrics" to evaluate writing.
’r]-hese are things that really were never even part of our vocabulary prior to NCLB, and they are a major part of our
instructional program now," said Bayonne assistant superintendent Ellen O’Connor.
Whether or not driven by the federal law, recent surveys in New Jersey have found subjects like world language and the
arts are getting short shritt.
A study to be finalized this fall found virtually all New Jersey schools still include arts classes, as required, but a majority fall
short in exposing students to mandated disciplines like music, theater and dance.
Still, local educators said it is a complex equation. One social studies supervisor worried that if his subject area is ever
tested, it may lead to a dumbing down of the curriculum.
"Beware what you wish for," said Steve Missall, the social studies supervisor in Plainfield schools and a supporter of a
statewlde civics test.
.Rothenberg stressed that while he fears some of the teaching creativity is lost with the focus on reading and math,
his North Brunswick school is better for it. "Kids have to learn reading and math first, and that should be the focus," he
said. "It’s not a bad tradeoff."
 Page 1249

Nonresponsi
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: July 25, 2007 8:42 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: SMS/FLOTUS event clips (5)

First Lady Focuses On Literacy, History In Connecticut Visit (AP)

AP, July 25, 2007
HARTFORD, Conn. -- Mark Twain had hoped that a president or two might visit his gothic Victorian home in Hartford
someday.
On Tuesday, he got his belated wish - almost.
First lady Laura Bush, a personal fan of Twain’s writings, took a private tour of the home. She is the only first lady to visit
the house, according to the Mark Twain Home & Museum officials. No president has yet toured the rooms, designed by Louis
Comfort Tiffany.
"It’s a real big deal for us. It’s just an honor to have her here, especially since Twain always wanted to have a president visit
his home. To have a first lady, he’d be thrilled," said Augusta Girard, marketing and public relations manager for the house.
Mark Twain was among the authors featured in a recent White House literary series hosted by the first lady. Twain wrote
some of his most famous works, including "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," in his Hartford home, where he lived from 1874to
1891.
’qhis is a wonderful chance for me to be able to visit, arguably, our greatest authoCs home," Mrs. Bush told reporters.
Reading is one of Mrs. Bush’s passions. Tuesday’s trip to Connecticut marked the second time in three months she has
visited the state to promote reading.
Before touring Twain’s house, Mrs. Bush, a former public school teacher and librarian, visited with second- and third-grade
students in a summer reading program at the Driggs School in Waterbury. She was accompanied by U.S. Education Secretary
Margaret Spellings.
While in Waterbury, Mrs. Bush announced the 2007 Improving Literacy Through School Libraries grants. More than 300
schools, many in impoverished districts, in 28 states are sharing $18 million in grants to restock their library shelves with new
books, provide new technology for student research, extend library hours and offer professional development for teachers.
Twenty schools in Waterbury will share nearly $300,000, Mrs. Bush said.
"]hanks to the grant, more than 9,400 children in Waterbury will strengthen their skills in research and reading," she said.
Before addressing a crowd of more than 100 people, including state and local dignitaries, Mrs. Bush and Spellings met in
the school library with small group of second-graders attending the Reading First Summer School. Mrs. Bush read to them
"Curious George Visits the Library."
She asked the group seated quietly at her feet whether they understood what the word curious meant. Some shook their
heads no.
"He’s interested in things and a lot of times he gets in trouble because he’s so curious," Mrs. Bush explained.
As first lady, Mrs. Bush has championed literacy programs in the United States and abroad. In September, she hosted a
White House conference on global literacy in New York, on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly.
She spoke Tuesday of the need for updated books in school libraries, mentioning one school in rural Pennsylvania where
the school’s atlases still included the former Soviet Union.

First Lady Focuses On Literacy, History In Connecticut Visit (WTNH)

By Tricia Taskey
WTNH-TV New Haven, Connecticut, July 24, 2007
(Waterbury-WTNH) _ Former public school teacher and librarian, First Lady Laura Bush was in Waterbury today promoting
one of her passions - reading.
 Page 1250
The summer school students at Driggs Elementary School were thrilled to learn Mrs. Bush would be coming to their school.
Twenty second graders listened quietly as Bush read them a story this morning.
Following the reading, Bush announced that the Waterbury school district would be receiving a $300,000-grant through the
’Literacy School Library Program.’ Waterbury is one of the 78-school districts in the country that will receive some $18-million.
The money is to promote reading, an issue very close to Laura Bush who is a former librarian. Bush says reading is essential for
every student to succeed.
"With this money, urban and suburban schools can update their outdated materials. They can keep longer hours before
and atter school and even stay open during vacation," said Bush.
Principal Mary Ann Marold is happy to see the funds at her school saying, "This is a compliment to what we are doing her.
We haven’t had the money to update our library. This will also help with co-teaching with librarian and hopefully we’ll see test
scores go up."
The $300,000 will be divided up among the cities 20-elem entary school libraries for the purchase of new books and new
technology.
Mrs. Bush also visited the Mark Twain House in Hartford today.

First Lady Focuses On Literacy, History In Conn. Visit (WVIT)

W/VIT-TV Hartford, Connecticut, July 24, 2007
WATERBURY, Conn. -- First lady Laura Bush returned to Connecticut Tuesday for the second time in three months to
promote one of her passions -- reading.
As first lady, Bush has championed literacy programs in the United States and abroad. In September, she hosted a White
House conference on global literacy in New York, on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly.
The former public school teacher and librarian, Bush Tuesday morning visited and read a book aloud with elementary
students at the Driggs School.
Bush read the book, "Curious George Meets the Library," with 17 children. She said the school project at Driggs is part of
the Read First Summer School program.
The first lady said the program involves some 250 children from kindergarten through third grade in Waterbury and her visit
included the announcement that the city would be receiving a $300,000 grant to update school libraries.
Bush said the grant would allow school officials to purchase more nonfiction books and provide new training for teachers in
science, social studies and math.
Bush said the programs funded by the grant would affect some 9,400 students.
Later, the first lady was to visit the Mark Twain House in Hartford. The first lady canceled a trip to the famed author’s home
in April because of bad weather. She planned to tour the Farmington Avenue historic site in the afternoon.
Mark Twain was among the authors featured in a White House literary series that Bush hosted.

First Lady’s Reading Class (HARTC)

By Mark Pazniokas
The Hartford Couran!, July 25, 2007
Laura Bush Promotes "Curious George,’ And Library Grants, At Waterbury School
To promote reading, first lady Laura Bush brought Curious George for show and tell Tuesday at Driggs Elementary School.
She lett the other George at home.
"I’m Laura Bush," said the first lady, introducing herself with a smile to 17 second-graders seated in a semi-circle on a blue
rug in the school’s L-shaped reading nook.
Bush and U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who once clashed with Connecticut officials over President Bush’s
No Child Le~ Behind Act, used the school as a backdrop to announce $18 million in library grants awarded Tuesday to 300
schools in 28 states.
"1 brought one of my favorite books," she told the children, holding up a copy of "Curious George Visits the Library." "And
it’s about a library. And it’s also about who?"
On cue, the children yelled, "Curious George~"
"Curious George. That’s right, and you know what curious means?" asked Bush, a former teacher and school librarian. "It
means interested in things."
Waterbury is the recipient of nearly $300,000 under the federal program, Improving Literacy Through Libraries.
Bush read aloud to the children, who are enrolled in a summer reading program. She then briefly addressed teachers and
librarians in the school cafeteria.
’qhese resources will help librarians in 78 of our nation’s most impoverished school districts expand and upgrade their
2
 Page 1251
school library collections," Bush said.
On the way back to Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, she stopped in Hartford to visit the home of a favorite
author, Mark Twain, where a half-dozen anti-war protesters stood across the street.
"1 want Laura to tell George to stop the war," said Meg Scat& who described herself as a librarian in Portland.
On the other side of Farmington Avenue, Bush was taken on a tour of the rambling Victorian home where Twain lived from
1874 to 1891, a period in which he wrote a half-dozen major works, including "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," "The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court."
"Many scholars think that Mark Twain was the first real American writer; that most writers before Mark Twain wrote in really
sort of the English novel tradition and not only was his style American, but obviously his subject was so American," Bush said as
she stood in the home’s library. "So I love having the chance to be here."
A storm forced Bush to cancel a planned trip to the landmark in April. She dropped in Tuesday on a workshop for three
dozen middle and high school teachers.
"And, as it turned out, it was perfect to be here today because today teachers f~om around the country are here for a week
of seminars, a seminar that is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities," Bush said.
The first lady, who has long championed literacy, contradicted her husband a fewyears ago after he announced that he
doesnt read newspapers.
"He does read the papers, of course," Bush told The New York Times in February 2004. "1 mean we’ve read the
newspapers for years. It’s our morning ritual, since the day we married."
Contact Mark Pazniokas at mpazniokas@courant.com.

First Lady Visits Driggs School In Waterbury (WtrbryRA CT)

By Randy James
Waterbury Republican-American (’CT), July 25, 2007
WATERBURY -- Reading time was an event to remember at Driggs School Tuesday as first lady Laura Bush regaled a
class of second-graders with "Curious George Visits the Library."
Bush and U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings paid a brief visit to the Hillside elementary school to promote
reading and announce a $300,000 grant to improve the city’s 20 elementary school libraries.
The two spent about 45 minutes in the school after arriving by motorcade, first in the library and later in the cafeteria
addressing a small crowd that included Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele, Mayor Michael J. Jarjura and other local officials.
"Reading is vital to a good education. Across America, ~tudents are receiving a better education because they have better
access to books," Bush said, standing before a giant American flag decorated with cut-outs of Driggs students’ hands.
 Page 1252

Nonresponsive
July 25, 2007 6:05 AM
To: scott m. stanzel@who.eop.gov; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Ruberg, Casey; Colby,
Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Dorfman, Cynthia; Dunckel, Denise; Evers, Bill;
Gribble, Emily; Kuzmich, Holly; La Force, Hudson; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie;
Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mesecar, Doug; Moran,
Robert; Neale, Rebecca; Oldham, Cheryl; Reich, Heidi; rob Saliterman; Yudof, Samara;
Scheessele, Marc; Halaska, Terrell; Toner, Jana; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Young, Tracy; Ditto,
Trey; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Wurman, Ze’ev
Subject: Focus on 2 R’s Cuts Time forthe Rest, Report Says (NYT)

"In a statement, Secretary Spellings said the report’s scope was "too limited to draw
broad conclusions."

"In fact," she said, "there is much evidence that shows schools are adding time to the
school day in order to focus on reading and ~mth, not cutting time from other subjects."

July 25, 2007

FOCUS on 2 R’s Cuts Time for the Rest, Report Says
By SAM DILLON
Almost half the nation’s school districts h~ve significantly decreased the daily class
time spent on subgects like science, art and history as a result of the federal No Child
Left Behind law’s focus on annual tests in reading and math, according to a new report
released yesterday.
The report, by the Center on Education Policy, a Washington group that studies the law’s
implementation in school districts nationwide, said that about 44 percent of districts
have cut time from one or more st~ects or activities in elementary schools to extend time
for longer daily math and reading lessons. Among the subjects or activities getting less
attention since the law took effect in 2002 are science, social studies, art and music,
g!Nn, lunch and recess, the report said.
The report, based on a survey of nearly 350 of the nation’s 15,000 districts, said 62
percent of school districts bad increased dmily class time in reading and math since the
law took effect.

Within a year of the law’s implementation, teachers and their associations were reporting
that schools and districts were suggesting or requiring that they spend more time on
reading and math to improve test scores, and that they cut back time spent on other
disciplines.

The n~rrowing of the nation’s elementary school curriculum has been significant, according
to the report, but may not be affecting as many schools as previously thought.

A report that the center issued in March 2006, based on a similar survey, gave one of the
first measures of the extent of the narrowing trend. It said 71 percent of districts had
reduced elementary school instruction in at least one other subject to make more time for
reading and ~mthematics. That finding attracted considerable attention, with many groups
opposed to the law decrying the trend.

The law’s backers, including Secretary of F~ducation Margaret Spellings, argued thmt the
intensification of English and math instruction made good sense on its own because, they
said, students who could not read or calculate with fluency would flounder in other
subgects, too.

The center’s new report raises the question of how to explain the considerable discrepancy
between last year’s finding, tbat 71 percent of districts bad reduced instructional time
in subgects other than math and reading, and this year’s, which gives the n~Joer as 44
percent.
 Page 1253
Jack Jennings, the center’s president, said in an interview that the discrepancy was a
result of a change in the wording of the questionnaire. Last year’s survey asked districts
to say whether they had reduced instructional time in subjects other thmn reading and math
"to a great extent, .... somewhat,"
"minimally" or "not at all." Districts that reported even minimally reduced instructional
time on other subjects were included in the 71 percent, along with districts that carried
out more substantial changes, Mr. Jennings said.

This year, the center listed English/language arts and math as well as social studies, art
and music, science and other subjects on the survey, and asked districts whether class
time in each had increased, stayed the same or decreased since the law’s enactment. In a
second column, the survey asked districts to indicate the n~ber of minutes by ~{hich
instructional time had increased or decreased.

Districts that made only small reductions this year, 10 minutes a day or less, in the time
devoted to courses other than reading or math, may have chosen to report that
instructional time had remained the same, Hr. Jennings said. On last year’s survey, the
same districts may instead have acknowledged reducing the time, while characterizing the
reduction as minimal, he said.

According to the new survey, the average ct~nge in instructional time in elementary
schools since the law’s enactment has been 140 additional minutes per week for reading, 87
additional minutes per week for im~th, 76 fewer minutes per week for social studies, 75
fewer minutes for science, 57 fewer minutes for art and 40 fewer minutes for g!~.

In a statement, Secretary Spellings said the report’s scope was "too limited to draw broad
conclusions."

"In fact," she said, "there is much evidence thmt shows schools are adding time to the
school day in order to focus on reading and math, not cutting time from other subjects."

Need a vacation? Get great deals

to an~zing places on Yahoo! Travel.
http://travel.yahoo.com/
 Page 1254

INonresponsi
(b)( 9cOniC..: ................ : ............. [~th~i]ii ~~ ~]~ii~t- .........................
July 25, 2007 5:59 AM
l

To: scott m. stanzel@who.eop.gov; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Ruberg, Casey; Colby,
Chad; Williams, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Dorfman, Cynthia; Dunckel, Denise; Evers, Bill;
Gribble, Emily; Kuzmich, Holly; La Force, Hudson; Landers, Angela; MacGuidwin, Katie;
Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mesecar, Doug; Moran,
Robert; Neale, Rebecca; Oldham, Cheryl; Reich, Heidi; rob Saliterman; Yudof, Samara;
Scheessele, Marc; Halaska, Terrell; Toner, Jana; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Young, Tracy; Ditto,
Trey; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Wurman, Ze’ev
Subject: Group: Math, Reading Time Up at Schools (AP)

Group: Math, Reading Time Up at Schools

By NANCY ZUCI~RBROD
The Associated Press
Wednesday, July 25, 2007; 12:36 AM

WASH~GTON -- U.S. students are spending more time on math and reading and less on other
subgects, an apparent consequence of the No Child Left Behind law.

Roughly two-thirds of elementary schools surveyed by the nonpartisan Center on Education

Policy reported increasing math and reading time since the law was passed in 2001.

The law requires annual testing in reading and math in grades three through eight and once
in high school.
Schools face sanctions if they miss testing benchmarks.
"Clearly what this is showing is, what schools are held accortntable for is what they put
the emphasis on," said Jack Jennings, president of the Washington-based center.

The report, being released Wednesday, says that of the districts reporting an increase,
elementary schools are spending on average 97 minutes more per day on reading, math or
both since the law was passed.

Nearly half of the districts said they have cut time in elementary schools for non-tested
subjects such as social studies, science, art, musis and gym. The cuts across these
various subjects totaled about 90 minutes a day, according to the report.
About a quarter of middle schools reported increasing time spent on reading or English.
One in five said they increased time spent on math. They didn’t report cuts in other
subgects.

In some cases, schools appear to be adding math and reading time to lessons in other
subjects, meaning they might be teaching both reading and history at the same time,
Jennings said.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, in response to the study, said: "If children can’t
read, they can’t learn history. Before No Child Left Behind, little was done to hold
schools accountable for teaching our children basic, critical skills."
In the Tigard-Tualatin school district, outside Bortland, Ore., things like assel~blies and
special pro~ects have been cut, said Susan Stark Haydon, the district’s director of
co~n~]ity relations.

"Being able to read is key. If you can’t read, you have very little chance of being
successful in life,"
Haydon said. But she added, "I think that it’s too bad that some of the things that made
school fun aren’t there anymore."

The latter is a sentiment echoed by many No Child Left Behind critics, including teachers
t~ions, la~m~akers and several of the current presidential candidates.
The report out Wednesday is likely to add to the debate over how the law is influencing
 Page 1255
classroom practices.

The report found at the high school level, students ~mve been taking more math and science
coursework, which may be driven by state graduation requirements.

The report doesn’t address whether that added time is coming at the expense of other
subjects. However, A separate federal study found declines in time spent on vocational
education ~mong high schoolers.
A recent Education Department study of first through fourth grades showed that between
1999 and 2003 more time was spent on reading. The study showed a slight drop during that
period in time spent on math, science and social studies.

The report out Wednesday, however, is based on more recent data. The surveys were all
conducted during the
2006-2007 academic year.
Schools are facing tougher consequences tinder the No Child Left Behind law, which could
explain the recent spikes in time spent on math and reading in the new report.

It showed that districts with at least one school identified as needing improvement under
the education law were more likely to add additional math and reading time to the school
day than other districts.

"It shows that the stronger the threat of sanctions, the more the curricultm~ narrows,"
said Brian Stecher, a senior social scientist at the Rand Corp.

Park yourself in front of a world of choices in alternative vehicles. Visit the Yahoo!
Auto Green Center.
http://autos.yahoo.com/green_center/
 Page 1 of 1
Page 1256

I~Nonresponsiv
From: Ditto, Trey
Sent: July 24, 2007 9:01 AM
To: Neale, Rebecca; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad;
Dorfrnan, Cynthia; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble,
Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; Maddox, Lauren; Private -
Spellings, Margaret; MeGrath, John; MeLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar,
Doug; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Mare; Tada, Wendy;
Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara
Martinez; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Spellings Gets A Lesson From Letty (Examinees Yea’s and Nay’s)

Spellings Gets A Lesson From Lefty

July 24, 1:58 AM

Two-time Masters champion Phil

Mickelson gave Secretmy of Education
Margaret Spellings a putting lesson
Monday mnid 200 teachers fi’om around
the cotmtry who had coine to the
Mickelson ExxonMobil Teachers
Academy in Fairfax for a week of
training. (We wonder if he’d have made
it on time had he not missed the cut at the
British Open and had to play this
weekend.)
Mickelson and his wife, Amy, fotmded
the academy in 2005 to assist elementaly
school teachers in developing theft
teaching methods in math and science.

°%mployers today need workers with

’pocket-protector’ sldlls," Spellings said.

It’s the latest of a number of visits to our

area by Mickelson this year. Earlier tttis
~.xmrf:e~,," photo ~nonth, he played in the inaugttml AT&T
National at Congressional Country Club (he ~nissed the cut there, too, thanks to an injtned
wrist). And in May, again at Congressional, he conducted a clinic for employees of Beming
Point, one of his sponsors.

06/05/2008
 Page 1257

[Nonresponsi
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: July 24, 2007 8:15 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerd; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: Ma,,~rick Leads Charge For Charter Schools (NYT)

Maverick Leads Charge For Charter Schools (NYT)

By Sam Dillon
The NewYork Times,, July 24, 2007
LOS ANGELES - Steve Barr, a major organizer of charter schools, has been waging what otten seems like a guerrilla war
for control of this city’s chronically failing high schools.
In just seven years, Mr. Barf’s Green Dot Public Schools organization has founded 10 charter high schools and has won
approval to open 10 more. Now, in his most aggressive challenge to the public school system, he is fighting to seize control of
Locke Senior High, a gang-ridden school in Watts known as one of the city’s worst. A 15-year-old girl was killed by gunfire there
in 2005.
In the process, Mr. Barr has fomented a teachers revolt against the Los Angeles Unified School District. He has driven a
wedge through the city’s teachers union by welcoming organized labor - in contrast to other charter operators - and signing a
contract with an upstart union. And he has mobilized thousands of black and Hispanic parents to demand better schools.
Educators and policy makers from Sacramento to Washington are watching closely because many believe Green Dot’s
audacious tactics have the potential to strengthen and expand the charter school movement nationwide.
’He’s got a take-no-prisoners style," said Jaime Regalado, the director of the Edmund G. "Pat" Brown Institute of Public
Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles. "He’s channeled the outrage of African-American and Latino parents into the
public space in a way that’s new."
Charter schools are publicly financed but managed by groups separate from school districts. Most other major charter
organizations have focused on opening easier-to-run elementary and middle schools, not taking over devastated high schools.
Mr. Barr says, "We want systemic change, not to create oases in a desert."
And while most charters have nonunion teachers and are often called union busters by opponents, Mr. Barr, a former fund-
raiser for the California Democratic Party and co-founder of Rock the Vote, prefers to work with organized labor. Teachers at
Green Dot schools have a contract, though one less rigid than at other Los Angeles schools.
Mr. Barr’s posture, as well as promising results at some of his schools, has attracted teachers to his side, even while
splitting the larger teachers union, some of whose officials have been fighting him tooth and nail. Randi Weingarten, the
president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City, is working with him to put a Green Dot school in the South
Bronx.
That alliance embarrassed United Teachers Los Angeles, which represents some 40,000 teachers. A. J. Duffy, its
president, said in an interview that his union had allowed work rule waivers for some schools, but had erred several years ago by
ruling out an arrangement with Green Dot.
’We could have and probably should have organized the Green Dot schools," Mr. Dully said. "They started with one charter
school, now have 10, and in short order they’ll have 20 schools in Los Angeles, with all the teachers paying dues to a different
union. And that’s a problem."
The union representing Green Dot teachers, Association de Maestros Unidos, has a 33-page contract that offers
competitive salaries but no tenure, and it allows class schedule and other instructional flexibility outlawed by the 330-page
contract governing most Los Angeles schools.
Andrew J. Rotherham, who worked in the Clinton White House and is co-director of Education Sector, a research group in
Washington, said, "Green Dot is mobilizing parents in poor neighborhoods and offering an alternative for frustrated teachers, and
that’s scrambling the cozy power arrangements between the school district and the union to a degree not seen anywhere else."
 Page 1258
Mr. Barr has not just used his charters to challenge the district. He is also an ally of Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, a
Democrat who has also battled the Los Angeles school district, seeking mayoral control.
The distdct superintendent, David L. Brewer III, met with Mr. Barr several times last spring to discuss his proposals for
Locke, but those talks broke down.
’Mr. Brewer has said he continues to be interested in partnering with Green Dot," said Greg McNair, who leads the district’s
charter school division.
Green Dot is part of a new wave of nonprofit, high-performing charter chains that have grown rapidly with philanthropic
financing, in Green Dot’s case especially from the Broad and the Bill & Melinda Gates foundations. Others include the Kipp
Schools, in 18 states, and Achievement First, with 12 schools in New York and New Haven, said Ted Mitchell, head of the
NewSchools Venture Fund, a San Francisco group that works with several chains.
Mr. Mitchell said that only Green Dot was mounting such an aggressive challenge to the local school board. "lVlany charter
organizations try to induce different behavior by providing examples of good new schools," he said. "But only Green Dot is trying
to provoke a school district to behave in radically different ways."
Some people voice skepticism about Green Dot’s methods. Clint Bolick, a lawyer who has represented many charter
schools, said: "If union bosses start patrolling their hallways, that’ll be the death knell of charters, as it has been for public
schools. There has to be a genuine perestroika for Green Do[’s approach to work."
Tactics aside, the chain has had promising results. An early high school that Green Dot founded, Animo Inglewood, has
raised the percent of students proficient in math by 40 points since 2003, and 79 percent of its students from the class of 2006
went on to college. Green Dot keeps enrollment in its high schools below 525. Incoming freshmen who need it remedial tutoring
receive it, and thereatter pursue a college-prep curriculum.
Three years ago, Mr. Ban negotiated with district officials about overhauling Jefferson High School, a dropout factory in
downtown Los Angeles. When the talks bogged down, Mr. Barr concluded he needed clout.
Green Dot organized a parents union, and its members, buttonholing neighbors in supermarkets and churches, collected
10,000 signatures endorsing Jefferson’s division into several smaller charter schools.
Mr. Barr marched from Jefferson High with neady 1,000 parents to deliver the petition to district headquarters. The
authorities refi.~sed to relinquish Jefferson, but the school board approved five new charters, which Green Dot inaugurated last
fall, all near Jefferson and drawing students from it.
Green Dot’s recent organizing suggests that many teachers are as frustrated as parents.
Locke, designated a failing school for much of a decade, is awaiting its fourth principal in five years. This spring, Mr. Barr
drew up a charter plan and began meeting with teachers to explain it. He envisioned using the Locke campus for smaller schools
that emphasize college prep and give teachers more decision-making authority.
He invited Frank Wells, Locke’s principal, to tour a Green Dot charter in May, a day on which Education Secretary Margaret
Spellings would be visiting. Before parents, teachers and the secretary, Mr. Wells denounced the district as using Locke as a
dumping ground for incompetent teachers.
’1 went to Locke thinking I could turn it around, but I ran into a brick wall," Mr. Wells said.
On May 7, teachers began circulating a petition endorsing Green Dot’s plan for Locke, and more than half of Locke’s 73-
member tenured staff members signed. Bruce Smith, an English teacher who gathered signatures, said most young teachers
were eager to sign; older teachers were reluctant.
"Among the people who opposed us, nobody said, ’The district is doing a great job here,’ "Mr. Smith recalled. "It was
mostly, ’What about our job security?’ "
The district authorities accused Mr. Wells of fomenting the revolt, dispatched guards to escort him from the building, and
dismissed him, Mr. Wells said. Binti Harvey, a district spokeswoman, declined to discuss Mr. Wells.
A decision by Locke’s teachers to break with the district would be an embarrassment for the school district and the teachers
union. Both began lobbying the teachers. Last month, the district rejected Green Dot’s petition, saying 17 teachers had
withdrawn their endorsement, leaving it without the majority necessary to comply with a charter conversion law.
But a newly elected board of education is to reconsider the petition in August.
Mr. Barr says that if he does not win the chance to use the Locke campus for his new charter schools, he will surround it
with Green Dot’s next 10 charter schools, which are to open nearby in 2008, supported by a $7.8 million donation from the Gates
Foundation.
’lfthe district doesn’t work with me, I’ll compete with them and take their kids," Mr. Barr said.
 Page 1259

[Nonresponsiv
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: July 23, 2007 8:29 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angeta; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: First Lady, Education Secretary To Visit Waterbury (WtrbryRA CT)

First Lady, Education Secretary To Visit Waterbury (WtrbryRA CT)

By Randy James
Waterbury Republican-American (CT), July 21, 2007
WATERBURY --The city will roll out the red carpet for first lady Laura Bush and the nation’s top education official next
week. Bush and U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings will visit Driggs School on Tuesday to announce a grant to improve
school libraries. The event at Driggs, 77 Woodlawn Terrace, is scheduled for 10:45 a.m.
"It’s a real boost to the psyche of the city," Mayor Michael J. Jarjura said.
Logistical details have not been announced, but no road closures are expected. A school leader said the grant will give the
schod system $299,000 to improve libraries.
 Page 1260

lNonresponsiv
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: July 20, 2007 8:19 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerd; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angeta; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: The Battle Over "No Child Left Behind" (TOWNHALL)

The Battle Over "No Child Left Behind" (TOWNHALL)

By John Hanlon
Town Hall~ July 20, 2007
More than five years after the far-reaching education reform legislation became law, Congressman Scott Garrett (R-N J) is
fighting back over renewal of the bill to ensure that no child is really left behind.
Garrett, who noted in a recent interview with me that a blanket renewal of the "No Child Lef~ Behind" law "as is"would be a
"disservice", is gearing up for a possible fight with the leader of his own party in this major domestic debate.
In January of 2002, President Bush, then twelve months into his first term in office, signed into law the sweeping education
reform bill, "No Child Left Behind". The White House fact sheet called it "the most sweeping reform of federal education policy in
a generation" noting that "[T]he legislation, which closely followe the Presidents agenda to improve America’s public schools,
passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan majorities" The bill, NCLB for short, ultimately created a federal power for those
in Washington D.C. to set education standards and accountability for the entire country. Now, less than eighteen months before
a new president will be sworn in, the "No Child Left Behind Act" is coming up for renewal in the Congress, where members of
both parties have taken issue with the law.
Congressman Garrett, currently in his third term from the 5th District of New Jersey, says the bill takes control away from
parents and teachers in defining education policies and standards, and gives that power to bureaucrats in Washington D.C. The
criticism of NCLB, he stated in a recent interview, is universal with all fifty states having taken some action against the original
bill. But instead of eliminating the bill, Congressman Garrett has endorsed what he refers to as a "modest proposal." That modest
proposal, entitled the LEARN Act, an amendment to NCLB that Garrett is sponsoring, would give states a chance to opt out of
NCLB and set education standards and policy on a state level, while still receiving federal funds from the government in the form
of a tax credit.
According to a statement from Garrett’s office, "[T]he LEARN Act... gives states the ability to opt out of NCLB and provides
residents of those states a tax credit equal to the amount that they would have otherwise received in federal funding. This gives
control back to the states, allowing them to pursue local and state educational initiatives based on what they believe will best
help their students." (It should be noted that another proposed amendment to the NCLB bill titled the A-plus Act would work in a
similar fashion, although that bill weuld give states funding through block grants while the LEARN Act would give individuals back
the money through tax credits.)
The benefits associated with Garrett’s amendment are "totally optional," Garrett stated in his office, as states could
nevertheless decide to stay with the NCLB formula if they so choose. With Garrett’s amendment, however, the Governor and the
state legislature of a state would be given great decision-making power in choosing whether or not to opt out of NCLB. Such an
amendment would give more power and authority to those individuals to have an influence over the education policies of their
own state, which as Garrett stated is more in line with the "democratic process" and which, should be noted, is also more in line
with conservative thinking on the subject.
Thus far, over two dozen members of Congress have signed on to cosponsor the bill from Republican Presidential
candidate Ron Paul of Texas to California Congressman John Campbell to Florida Congressman Tom Feeney.
Congressman Garrett, who was recently honored by the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste as a taxpayer
advocate, is a strong supporter of a limited federal government. In the earmark battle, Garrett describes the battle over pork
spending as a battle while the ultimate war lies in the debate over what the federal government should be doing in the first place.
In the NCLB debate, Garrett is facing off against the status quo and the federal government’s power over education policies, a
 Page 1261
challenging conflict for any Congressman, let alone one who may be going up against the leader of his own party.
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has not reacted to Garrett’s Amendment, though Secretary Spellings has
previously discussed NCLB and its renewal with members of Congress.
Nor is Congressman Garrett assured that the state of New Jersey would use the amendment, if passed into law, to get out
of its current NCLB obligations. However, in this debate, Congressman Garrett is working to allow New Jersey the chance to
make its own decision on the subject.
NCLB stands to be a landmark domestic achievement on Bush’s record and its renewal would only cement its reputation.
However, in this time of debate, the White House should focus its intentions on howthis bill can be renewed with the suppo~ of
conservatives like Congressman Garrett.
As the battle over renewal of NCLB continues -- and the war between federal powers versus state powers continues to
wage - Congressman Garrett continues to fight against Washington bureaucrats for state powers over federal ones, not a
"modest proposal" by any means.
John Hanlon is the Operations Manager at Townhall.com
 Page 1262

INonresponsive
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: July 17, 2007 8:54 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; Maddo×, Lauren; Private - Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: NCLB-Renewal Ideas Circulate On Capitol Hill (EDWEEK)

NCLB-Renewal Ideas Circulate On Capitol Hill (EDWEEK)

By Alyson Klein And David J Hoff
Education Week, July 17, 2007
Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, has signaled to freshmen in
Congress that he’ll propose some major changes to the 5½-year-old No Child Lett BehindAct when he releases his
reauthorization bill, possibly in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, two Senate Republicans last week introduced their own NCLB reauthodzation bill, which would also add more
flexibility to the law while retaining its core accountability principles.
Rep. Miller’s anticipated revisions include ideas that have been popular in a number of recent NCLB reauthorization
proposals, such as allowing "growth models" as a gauge of student progress and instituting a more tailored range of
consequences for schools that don’t meet achievement goals.
Rep. Miller outlined his thinking in a memo distributed last month to freshman House members.
Under the outline, schools could get credit for individual student gains in proficiency--using so-called growth models--and
not just for gains by cohorts of students compared with those in previous years. Schools struggling to meet the law’s goals would
be subject to interventions appropriate to their needs, according to the outline. And those that continually missed achievement
targets would receive more intensive support.
The outline also calls for changes to assessments and accountability systems for English-language learners and students
in special education, although it doesn’t offer specifics.
Rep. Miller, who was a key architect of the NCLB bill that President Bush signed into law in 2002 and has strongly
supported federal accountability measures, also wrote that he would like to allow states to use "more than test scores" to
determine whether students are making progress under the law. He suggested such measures could include "real-time
classroom tests that allow teachers to adjust their instruction as necessary."
That recommendation drew criticism from Amy Wilkins, a vice president of the Education Trust, a Washington-based
research and advocacy group that promotes policies to serve low-income students. She said the recommendation would allow
schools to use so-called formative assessments, which are designed to be a diagnostic and teaching tool, for accountability.
She said such tests--while beneficial for instruction--don’t provide a clear, comparable measure of student gains for
accountability.
’l’m surprised and disappointed," Ms. Wilkins said of Mr. Miller’s outline. She said that in the past, Rep. Miller "has been
clear as a bell on the need for transparent, straightforward [accountability]. This seems to back away from that."
Aaron K. Albright, a spokesman for Rep. Miller, took issue with Ms. Wilkins’ criticisms.
’These complaints are a misrepresentation," he said. "We strongly believe in accountability."
Joel Packer, the chief NCLB lobbyist for the National Education Association, said he was "generally pleased" with the list of
ideas Mr. Miller presented.
’The broad outline closely matches what we’ve advocated for," he said, noting that the 3.2 million-member teachers’ union
had pushed for growth models and allowing schools to use multiple measures to show student gains.
Mr. Packer also noted that Rep. Miller’s memo, which uses the word "interventions" rather than "sanctions" to refer to
measures to help struggling schools, appears to reflect a shitt in tone from "negative consequences and mandates" to "helpful,
supportive assistance."
Rep. Miller has yet to release a comprehensive reauthorization bill, although several education lobbyists said his staff is
 Page 1263
aiming to unveil such legislation before Congress adjourns at the end of the month for its August recess.
The Senate bill was introduced July 12 by Sen. Judd Gregg, R-NH., a former Senate education committee chairman and
another architect of the NCLB law.
The measure, which is co-sponsored by Sen. Richard M Burr, R-N.C., would echo some of Rep. Miller’s ideas by
introducing more flexibility into the accountability system at the center of the law.
It would permit all 50 states to participate in the Department of Education’s growth-model pilot.
The legislation would revise accountability rules for English-language learners, by allowing them two years to learn English
before becoming a part of a school’s accountability system, rather than one year, as under the current law.
The bill would also place a new emphasis on high schools, calling for supports to help identify students at risk of dropping
out and resources for accelerated "catch-up" programs for students who are struggling academically. But it would not require
additional testing in high schools, unlike a blue-print for reauthorization the White House released in January.
The bill would retain the deadline of the 2013-14 school year for bringing all students to proficiency.
Differing Consequences
Rep. Miller is likely to receive widespread support for his proposal to differentiate interventions based on how far schools
fall short of goals for adequate yearly progress, or AYP, under the federal law, one expert on the law said.
Jack Jennings, the president of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington-based research and advocacy organization,
noted that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings endorsed the idea last month in a meeting with the USA Today editorial
board.
’lt’s dawning on people ... that so many schools are being identified for improvement and states don’t have the resources
to adequately deal with them," said Mr. Jennings, a former House Democratic aide.
But, Mr. Jennings added, Congress is out of touch with the field when it comes to Reading First--a $1 billion-a-year
program under the NCLB law that is intended to improve reading instruction in the primary grades. Appropriators have
recommended significant cuts to the program for fiscal 2008, citing audits that suggested federal officials improperly influenced
states’ decisions about instructional materials to be purchased under the program.
Still, the program is popular with education officials around the country, says a newreport from Mr. Jennings’ center.
The Center on Education Policy found in a recent study that 42 states use professional development paid for by the reading
program to help schools failing to meet AYP goals. Forty states said they used curriculum materials purchased under Reading
First in schools in need of improvement.
’We have a real disconnect between the Congress and what’s happening in local school districts and the states," Mr.
Jennings said.
 Page 1264
Nonresponsive

From: Neale, Rebecca

Sent: July 17, 2007 8:54 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, C~nthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Angela; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: NCLB Seen As Curbing Low, High Achievers’ Gains (EDWEEK)

NCLB Seen As Curbing Low, High Achievers’ Gains (EDWEEK)

By Debra Viadero
Education Week, July 17, 2007
Washington
A new study of Chicago students suggests that the federal No Child Left Behind Act may indeed be leaving behind
students at the far ends of the academic ability spectrum--the least able students and those who are gitted.
The study by University of Chicago economists Derek A. Neal and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach lends some empirical
support to the common perception that schools are focusing on students in the middle--the so-called "bubble kids"--in order to
boost scores on the state exams used to determine whether schools are meeting their proficiency targets.
’3he whole point is that the details of how you calculate "adequate yearly progress’ matter for how teachers will allocate
their effort across students," said Mr. Neal, who presented his paper today at a conference hosted by the American Enterprise
Institute, a think tank based here. "Anytime you keep score by looking at the number of kids who pass some proficiency
standard, that will shape whom teachers teach."
But Doug Mesecar, the acting assistant secretary in the Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development at the U.S.
Department of Education, said it’s too soon to conclude that the laws accountability mechanisms aren’t working as they were
intended.
’1 don’t think it tells enough of the whole story to support the generalizations that were made," said Mr. Mesecar, who was
part of a panel formed by the AEI to discuss the report. "We need to know more, to continue to study, and have more data to do
these kinds of analyses, and then, if we do ~nd it is a problem, we need to go in and rectify it."
’The Irony’
For their study, the Chicago researchers zeroed in on two time periods during which the 421,000-student school system
was changing its testing-and-accountability system. The most recent period was 2002, when the school system, seeing that
passage of the NCLB law was imminent, made the Illinois Standards Achievement Test a high-stakes exam and set proficiency
cutoffs that students would be expected to meet.
The earlier period was 1998, after city school officials tried much the same approach with the Iowa Test of Basic Skills.
While the ITBS cutoff points were considered lower, the 1998 accountability system also upped the stakes in a slightly different
way by requiring 8th graders who did not pass the tests to attend summer school.
To measure the impact of the new systems, the researchers compared reading and mathematics scores for students in 5th,
6th, or 8th grades in the year, or years, after the changes had taken place with those made by similar cohorts of students a few
years earlier. The idea was to determine whether the changes in students’ tests scores were larger or smaller than what might
have been expected had the school system conducted business as usual.
The post-reform pattern, in all cases, was consistent: Students in the middle of the pack made the largest test-score gains,
compared with students in previous years. The bottom 20 percent of students made the least progress and, in some cases, even
lost ground. The top 10 percent of students made either no academic gains or improvements that were smaller than those of
students in the middle, depending on the subject matter.
For the least-able students, the situation was only slightly better in the post-1998 reform period. Those students’ scores
improved more then, the researchers believe, because the standards had been set at lower levels. They speculated that
teachers may be more likely to write off low-achieving students when the likelihood that [hey will ever meet the achievement
target is more distant.
 Page 1265
Also, while the federal law mandates that schools ensure that all students reach proficiency levels by the 2013-14 school
year, ’there’s no evidence to showthat schools are taking that seriously," Mr. Neal said.
"This is the irony of the "so~ bigotry of low expectations,’" he added, quoting a line from President Bush. "Having lower
standards is actually beneficial to low-advantage children."
Teaching to the Middle
Another panelist, Charles Murray, AEI’s W.H. Brady scholar, said he found Mr. Neal’s finding "persuasive."
’This strikes, I hope, a major blowto the chest of proficiency counts as a measure of progress in education," added Mr.
Murray, who recently published studies suggesting that achievement gaps between children of different races may be immutable.
’qo ask children to perform at levels at which they are incapable is one of the cruelest things you could ask a child to do."
A more pointed critique of the study, however, came from Susan L. Traiman, the director of education and workforce policy
at the Washington-based Business Roundtable and a supporter of the NCLB law. Like Mr. Mesecar, she said more years of data
are needed to determine if the pa~erns Mr. Neal found in the early years of testing-and-accountability changes are consistent.
’Teaching to the middle is nothing new," she added. "It’s what most beginning teachers do."
While the law requires most states to gauge students’ academic progress by counting the number of students who reach
proficiency targets, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings in recent years began to allow some states and districts to
experiment with other accountability models. Currently, for example, nine states have waivers to try so-called "growth models,"
which typically give schools credit for gains that students make toward proficiency.
A be~ter variant on that model, Mr. Neal said, might be one that takes into account previous achievement differences
among students, their peers, and other factors in the same way that golfers are assigned handicaps to account for differences in
golf courses or in their ability levels.
’You need some handicapping system that allows you to say that teacher A had a bad year or teacher B had a good year,
regardless of whether they taught in New Trier, II1., or sore e inner-city school in New Jersey," he said.
The new study, "Le~ Behind by Design: Proficiency Counts and Test-Based Accountability," has not yet been published in
a peer-reviewed journal.
 Page 1266

N=onresponsi J

From: Neale, Rebecca

Sent: July 17, 2007 8:54 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gare, Cassie; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell;
Kuzmich, Holly; Landers, Ange~a; Maddo×, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath,
John; McLane, Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts,
Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tad& Wendy; Talbert, Kent;
Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara MaRine.z; Young, Tracy;
Yudof, Samara
Subject: No Child Is Worth Congress Amending, Keeping (DMN)

No Child Is Worth Congress Amending, Keeping (DMN)

By WILLIAM McKENZIE
The Dallas Mominq News, July 17, 2007
Practical fixes can spare bill an immigration-like fate
A Dallas principal lamented this spring that her high school probably wouldn’t earn one of the top notches on Texas’ school
ranking system. The reason, she told me, was that her school had "inherited" some AYP students #ore other schools.
In the education world, AYP is like catching the dreaded hantavirus. Your school gets it, and you can die.
AYP - or "adequate yearly progress" - also is one of the most important elements of the federal No Child Lef~ Behind Act.
Students in schools that show little or no progress over a two-year period on a state’s achievement exam can transfer to a school
that is progressing faster. (Under No Child’s rules, a low-performing school is even at risk of being shut down.)
The AYP standard draws a fair amount of criticism, especially from educators who ~ind it too onerous. But it’s not fair to
stick any of our children in a school that’s doing a lousy job educating them. They wont get the skills they need for a world that
prizes those who solve problems and think imaginatively.
Nor is it fair to the rest of us to keep students in lackluster schools. These are the kids who easily become the next gang
member who stands zero chance of contributing to society.
This is why I’m all in favor of Congress sticking to requiring schools to show progress as it rewrites No Child this year.
But the principal I interviewed has a point. Her campus shouldn’t suffer because another school didnt do its job.
The students who came to her high school from lower-performing schools probably would drag down how well her campus
did on the state’s annual achievement exam, the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills - the dreaded TAKS. If the AYP
transfers were behind when they showed up, it’s hard to imagine they could get caught up in a few months. Realistically, it could
take a year or more to make up deficits in math, science or olher subjects.
The AYP inheritance issue is one of the sticking points the Bush administration and education reformers in Congress need
to work out as they race to rewrite the No Child Le~t Behind Act. They are up against it because the education lobby and some
conservative lawmakers fiercely oppose keeping the tough standards in the revolutionary law that President Bush and Sen. Ted
Kennedy largely produced in 2001.
But we need a strong federal education law now more than ever because of the Supreme Court ruling last month limiting
the role race can play in deciding where students go to school.
I’ll spare you the details, but the decision could return America to a place where white students routinely end up in better
schools than Latinos and African-Americans. If there isn’t a way to ensure that every child has a fair shot at a good education,
today’s income and achievement gaps will only grow.
Fortunately, No Child’s fundamental thrust is making sure that no student - as the title says - is lef~ behind. Mr. Bush has
rightly.championed the bill’s reforms since his first year in office, as have Mr. Kennedy and Democratic Rep. George Miller. Mr.
Kennedy and Mr. Miller are under enormous pressure to weaken the bill, but at least they remain in talks with Education
Secretary Margaret Spellings about how to rewrite it for several more years.
Here’s a suggestion to resolve the AYP problem: Good schools that inherit AYP transfers could receive credit for how much
a transfer student improves on their watch. That compromise would maintain high goals and deal with the reality the better
schools face.
What we don’t need is for No Child to collapse the way immigration reform did. Getting our kids ready for a complex world
is the nation’s second-most impo[tant challenge, behind controlling terrorism. The education challenge grows even more
 Page 1267
important when you factor in the large - and irreversible - wave of Latino immigrants enrolling in schools across America.
Trite as it may sound, we really can’t afford to leave any child behind. With enough practicality, Washington should be able
to make sure we don’t.
William McKenzie is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist. His e-mail address is wmckenzie@dallasnews.com.
 Page 1268

Nonresponsiv,
Neale, Rebecca
Sent: July 16, 2007 8:49 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, Cynthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Kuzmich, Holly;
Landers, Angela; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; McLane,
Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich,
Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey,
Liam; Tracy Young (E-m ail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: Student Loan System Needs Major Overhaul (AAS TX)

Student Loan System Needs Major Overhaul (AAS TX)

Austin American-Statesman, July 13, 2007
While college financial aid administrators dined, partied and golfed at fancy resorts, all paid for by student loan companies,
many students who borrowed money for their education from those private lenders were drowning in debt.
Loan companies lavished favors on college financial aid officers and placed them on their advisory boards because the
lenders stood to make millions of dollars in profits. Financial aid officers such as Lawrence Burt at the University of Texas could
help the lenders obtain business that guaranteed them that nice profit. Burr was fired in May after it was revealed he had
invested in a company and then placed its student loan subsidiary on a preferred lender list.
American-Statesman staff writer Ralph Haurwitz has detailed the gifts and favors given to Burr and his office by student
loan companies. Burt and other college financial officers also received white glove treatment at posh resorts as members of
advisory boards for the lenders.
It was an incestuous system designed to gain lenders profitable business from students needing to borrow money for a
college education. But lost in the relationship between the colleges and the lenders were the students, who piled up sometimes
crushing debts to pay for an increasingly costly education. And the power Congress gave the lenders to collect on that debt
would embarrass a loan shark.
For the private lenders, student borrowers are low-hanging fruit. Interest on many of the loans accrues the minute they are
accepted by the students, and the interest rates are adjustable so they can be raised without notice. The lenders can penalize
the borrower for missing even one payment. If a borrower defaults, a collection agency -- otten part of the same company that
issued the loan --is authorized to collect payment any way possible, including garnishing wages and Social Security payments.
And if the loan could not be repaid by the borrower, the government repays the lender. It was a sweet deal all the way
around for the lenders, so it’s no wonder they threw ethics out the window to pay for resort trips and golf outings for the financial
aid officials.
It was not so sweet for the s~udents, who now leave college with an average debt of $20,000 and face a 12 percent default
rate. Horror stories abound about students and parents whose monthly loan payments are more than $2,000 a month, whose
payments are more than half their income or who owe three and four times the amount they borrowed.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings defined the situation succinctly when she said the student loan system is
"redundant, it’s Byzantine and it’s broken." Anyone who has tried to navigate the student loan maze understands what Spellings
means.
Since the scandal with college financial aid officials and student lenders was revealed this year, the landscape is changing
for them as a more ethical system is being imposed. Many students, however, are still saddled with huge debts, and student
borrowers face the same daunting loan system
In Congress, the House passed a bill this week that will help future borrowers -- if it survives. President Bush has
threatened to veto it. The House bill chops subsidies to student lenders by $19 billion and uses part of that money to increase
Pell Grants for low-income students. It also cuts the annual interest rate to student borrowers in half, to 3.4 percent, and caps
their monthly loan repayments at 15 percent of their discretionary income.
Those are positive steps that could help college graduates just starting out in their careers.
They are welcome changes for a broken system, changes the president should support in the name of helping students
obtain an education without assuming a punishing amount of debt.
 Page 1269

Nonresponsive
From: Neale, Rebecca
Sent: July 16, 2007 8:49 AM
To: Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Williams, Cynthia; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dorfman, C~nthia;
Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Kuzmich, Holly;
Landers, Angela; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; McLane,
Katherine; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich,
Heidi; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey,
Liam; Tracy Young (E-mail); Tucker, Sara Martinez; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: GOP bill could star reauthorization rush (Education Daily)

GOP bill could start reauthorization rush (Education Daily)

By Kris Kitto
Education Daily, July 16, 2007
Sens. Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Judd Gregg, R-N.H., quietly introduced the first comprehensive NCLB revision bill last
week, kicking offwhat could be a flurry of congressional activity to get the reauthorization process underway before the August
recess.
The legislation leaves several of the original laws overarching goals in place and draws on many of President Bush’s
recommended changes. It sidesteps many controversial issues, like private school vouchers and the definition of highly qualified
teachers, but does include flexibility for limited-English-proficient students and an option for districts and principals to renegotiate
collective bargaining agreements.
The two Republican senators, both members of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, worked with
recommendations from the Education Department, The Education Trust, Council of the Great City Schools, the Hispanic
Education Coalition, the Business Coalition for Student Achievement and the Commission on No Child Left Behind to craft the
legislation.
In a statement, Gregg, one of the original authors of NCLB, said, ’While the bill preserves the NCLB accountability system,
it also provides additional flexibility to help schools target resources and interventions to students and schools most in need of
assistance.’
One of the bill’s more significant changes would be to LEP student accountability, allowing schools to wait two years before
counting test scores of new immigrant students with limited-English proficiency towards their adequate yearly progress.
Aligning with the Bush administration, the bill proposes a greater focus on high schools, though it doesn’t include the
president’s desire to augment testing at the secondary level.
Melissa Wagoner, a spokeswoman for HELP Committee Chairman Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., acknowledged many
’good ideas’ in the Burr-Gregg bill.
qhe goal is to mark-up a strong, bipartisan bill in September,’ she said in an e-mail.
Others questioned the value of the legislation and called it a maneuver by the Republicans to nudge the Democrats to
consider their views on reauthorization.
Bruce Hunter, the associate executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, said Gregg’s
involvement will be the main reason for any attention the bill attracts.
’1 don’t see this as making much of a contribution to the conversation, because the things they have added are the things
that the committees are already going to do,’ he said.
Two of the widely accepted changes the bill calls for are expanding ED’s growth-model pilot program to all states and
allowing parents to choose between supplemental education services and public school transfers when their child’s school enters
the first year of improvement.
The legislation was received warmly by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who said in a statement, ’The NCLB Act of
2007 strikes a strong balance between preserving the fundamental accountability that is helping students improve, and
responding to legitimate concerns raised by parents and educators.’
Though no comprehensive reauthorization legislation has yet been introduced in the House, the bill Rep. Lee Terry, R-
Neb., submitted in late June to amend the laws accountability provisions has garnered early attention.
Hunter said these bills signify that Congress is inching closer to NCLB’s reauthoriza~ion.
’1 just think members are finally engaging,’ he said. ’And as members engage, we will see more of this.
Page 1270
 Page 1271

Nonresponsi
From: Yudof, Samara
Sent: September 25, 2007 1:18 AM
To: Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn, Kristine; Colby, Chad;
Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah; Gribble, Emily;
Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private -
Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica;
Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele,
Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy
Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Williams, C~thia; Young, Tracy; Anderson, Christy; Tucker,
Sara (Restricted); Schray, Vickie; Oldham, Cheryl
Subject: Names in the Game (AP)

Associated Press

Mort Septe~mber 24, 2007 19:02 EDT

Names in the G~e

WASHINGTON (AP) It’s another Ol!~pics for Miche!le Kwan.

The five-time world figure skating champion will be part of the U.S. delegation for the
opening ceremonies at the Special Olympics World Sum~er Games next month in Shanghai,
China. The 10-person delegation was annot~ced Monday by President George W. Bush, and
includes American baseball Hall of F~ne mender Ernie Banks.
Also na~ed to the delegation were Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founder of the Special Olympics;
Timothy P. Shriver, chairman of the Special Ol~npics; Clark T. Randt, U.S. ambassador to
China; and John H. Hager, former assistant secretary of education. U.S. Education
Secretary Mmrgaret Spellings will lead the delegation.

Kwan, %~ho won a silver medal at the 1998 Ol~nnpics and a bronze in 2002, makes occasional
diplomatic trips as the country’s first "’special sports envoy,’’ a position created to
improve the U.S. in~ge abroad. She visited China in January, and was in Russia in early
June.
Support C~’ows For Teacher Bonuses (W[~)age ] 272 Page 1 of 2

L
N,~onresponsi
From: Anderson, Christy
Sent: September 25, 2007 8:14 AM
To." Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Ditto, Trey; Dunckel, Denise; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Flowers,
Sarah; @ibble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; MacGuidwin,
Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private -Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend
L.; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Neale, Rebecca; Pitts, Elizabeth; Reich, Heidi;
Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Tada, Wendy;
Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy Young; Tucker, Sara Martinez;
Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: The Reliable Source (WP)

The Reliable Source (WP)

By Amy Argetsinger And Roxanne Roberts
The Washington Post, September 25, 2007
Tackling Troy? Nah, Just Joshin’ With the Old Cowboy
Note to Troy Aikman: If you showyour face around D.C., especially during football season, you’d better
be ready for some hazing. Though, in fact, the former Dallas QB turned corporate pitchman seemed
eerily well prepared when some Redskins fans tried to yank his chain this weekend.
First, when he spoke Friday evening about his lifelong struggle with migraines at a physicians
conference sponsored by drug giant GlaxoSmithKline at the Arlington Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, one
doc in the audience raised his hand with a personal question: "Did you ever have to say, ’Honey, not
tonight, I have a headache’?"
Ha-ha! But Aikman didn’t get it and forged ahead with a sober answer about how his migraines affected
his football game.., and then someone explained the joke. Aikman’s snappy comeback "Honey, I
have Imitrex tonight!" (Yes, he’s the paid spokesman for the migraine drug.)
A couple hours later, rabid Skins fans Jennifer and Paul Tyler of Germantown were celebrating their
anniversary at Ocemaire downtown when who should walk by but their IonglJme Texan nemesis (in
town for his color-commentary duties at Sunday’s Giants game). Both had long been perplexed why the
onetime Cowboys star appeared in ads for the Wing Stop, a tiny fast-food joint near their home "in the
heart of Redskins territory!" Jennifer notes. Paul seized the moment: "Hey, Troy, why the Wing Stop?!"
Aikman, to their amazement, stopped at their table. He told them that it’s a Texas-based chain, that he
and his fellow Cowboys always hung out at one near their stadium, that it’s where he took his wife’s
"really country" grandma the first time they met, and so on.
Just another word from his sponsors? No matter, says Jennifer. "From now on we are big Troy Aikman
fans."HEY, ISN’T THAT... ?
Biz Markie posing for cameras on a glass elevator in Silver Spring, apparently filming some TV spot for
the CW. The old-school rapper wore a green golf shirt, jeans and one of those ever-attractive Bluetooth
earpieces.
Fran Drescher, "The Nanny" star turned cancer activist, walking through the Dulles baggage claim
wearing all black, talking on a cell and carrying one of those tiny dogs everyone’s required to own in
L.A.Yo, Drew-- What’s Jenna Ever Done to You?
We always thought Drew Carey was a Republican, but the comedian took a potshot at Jenna Bush
during CBS’s "Power of 10" game show Sunday night. Carey, who performed at the White House
Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2002, asked a contestant to guess what percentage of American
men would not want to be the president’s son-in-law. The upside, said Carey: Free rides on Air Force
One, dinner at the White House, great networking. "But then, you have to be married to Jenna Bush,"
he sharked.

06/05/2008
Support Grows For Teacher Bonuses (W~)age ] 273 Page 2 of 2

Henry Hager, bali’s in your court! (The answer to the game show question? Seventy-seven percent.)
THIS JUST IN...
Mike Tyson pleaded guilty to cocaine possession and DUI yesterday and faces four years in prison.
The former heavyweight champ, 41, was arrested in December after leaving an Arizona nightclub; his
attorney says Tyson has been sober since then.
Sweet in-law perks! President Bush has appointed John Hager-- daughter Jenna’s future father-in-law -
- to the delegation for the Special Olympics Summer Games in Shanghai next month. Hager joins
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, skater Mchelle Kwan and Eunice Kennedy Shriver on the
official junket.
Atter months of cooling her heels, Nancy Brinker is officially U.S. chief of protocol. Brinker -- Race for
the Cure founder and former ambassador to Hungary -- was quietly sworn in this month and will
oversee state dinners and other diplomatic visits.
Satma Hayek and her businessman fiance, Francois-Henri Pinault, are parents of a baby girl born late
last week. The 41 -year-old "Ugly Betty" actress named her first child Valentina Paloma Pinault.

06/05/2008
 Page 1274

Ie
Nonresponsiv

From: Yudof, Samara

Sent: April 13, 2008 12:48 PM
To: Cadello, Dennis; Aud, Susan; Davis, Jim; Tracy Young; Skandera, Hanna; Dunn, David;
Terrell, Julie; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ridgway, Marcie; Pitts, Elizabeth; Earling, Eric; Tucker, Sara
Martinez; MacGuidwin, Katie; Wurman, Ze’ev; Smith, Valarie (SRR); McGrath, John; Kuzmich,
Holly; Monroe, Stephanie; Scheessele, Marc; Mcnitt, To,~nsend L.; Flowers, Sarah; Young,
Tracy; Mesecar, Doug; Truong, Anh-Chau; Lepore, Kristen; Eitel, Robert S.; Zoellick, Todd;
Jones, Diane; Colvin, Kelly; Toomey, Liam; Tada, Wendy; Gartland, Lavin; Cohn, Kristine;
Hatada, Tori; Talbert, Kent; Colby, Chad; Warder, Larry; Robb, Carly; Sentance, Michael;
Chlouber, Patdcia; Briggs, Ken1; Evans, Wendy; Private- Spellings, Margaret; Casarona,
Emily; Morffi, Jessica; Hancock, Anne; Foxley, Donna; Evers, Bill; Dmytrenko, Orysia;
Maddox, Lauren; Beaton, Meredith; Anderson, Christy; Yudof, Samara; Oldham, Cheryl;
Gribble, Emily
Subject: 04.13.08 In the News

Attachments: 0413081ntheNews.doc

0413081n~eNews.
doc (~4 KB)
04.13.08 In the News

i) Washington Post: Bailout Nation (David Ignatius)

2) Washington Post: Horrors of a ’Crisis’ (George Will)?

3) Washington Post: Kaine Touts Legislative Reforms for Mentally Ill (Michael Alison
Chandler)

4) Washington Post: Commando Performance; A~ the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Teoh
rampage approaches, students all over the ootu~try are storming campuses with (toy) guns.
What kind of game is this? (Laura Wexler)

5) Louisville Courier-Journal: Editorial: Confronting the rising dropout rates

6) Chattanooga Times Free Press: Tennessee seeking standard grad rate (Kelli Gauthier)

7) Jackson Clarion Ledger: State to change way it computes grad rates? (Rebecca Melmes)
8) Associated Press; Educators work to boost East High School’s graduation rate (Ben
Fulton)
9) Nashua Telegraph: Nation deserves debates on failing schools (Morton Kondracke)

i0) The New York Times: When Strings Are Attached, Quirky Gifts Can Limit Universities
(Karen Arenson)
ii) The Oakland Press: Michigan needs to encourage the charter school movement (Glenn
Gilbert)
12) Washington Post: For Younger Generations, First Lesson In Inflation (Kirstin Downey)

Washington Post

Bailout Nation

By David Ignatius
 Page 1275
Sunday, April 13, 2008; B07

As every parent knows, the danger of cutting a special break for one child is that all the
other children will demand the s~me thing. "It’s not fair," goes the inevitable refrain.
"You said Susie could eat ice cream and watch TV until midnight, so why can’t I?" The
parents start caving, and family discipline is shot.
We’re now in a comparable cycle of bestowing special economic favors on members of the
national family who ]lave been hurt by the credit market crisis. "It’s not fair," argue the
housing interests and consumer advocacy groups. "Bear Stearns got a financial bailout, so
why shouldn’t we?" And they’re right, by the simplest schoolyard definition of fairness.
So the line grows of people demanding breaks on financial obligations they can’t afford.
Last week, the Bush administration agreed to rescue 1OO, 0O0 homeowners who are at risk of
foreclosure on their mortgages. Congressional Democrats promptly announced that this
wasn’t fair enough and that they intended to expand the bailout to as many as 2 million
distressed borrowers.
But why stop there? What about onerous commercial mortgages? P~]d credit card debt? And
student loans? Why should anyone have to pay back anything? It’s not fair.
Economists talk about avoiding "moral hazard" -- the danger that by insuring people too
generously against risks you may encourage them to take even greater risks. ~o are they
kidding? We are now so deep into this hazard that we ought to invent a new n~e for it.
Moral myopia, perhaps.
As these special breaks proliferate, we are implicitly creating a system of transfer
payments that shifts money from the smart to the stupid, from the lucky to the unlucky.
Well-managed banks that controlled their risk levels will subsidize poorly managed ones
that didn’t; prudent homeo~~ners who decided not to take the interest-only refinancing
loans will subsidize imprudent ones who did.
There could be so ~ny other, better ways to spend our tax dollars on housing subsidies:
Make loans directly to poor people so they can buy homes, say, or to needy veterans coming
back from Iraq or Afghanistan, or to people who’ve lost their ~obs.
The other response to the financial crisis, in addition to the ever-widening circle of
bailouts, is increased regulation. And here, too, some argue that the cure might be nearly
as dangerous as the disease. The Economist magazine made that argument this month when it
warned that "bold re-regulation could damage the very economies it is desi~]ed to
protect." Certainly the last round of crisis-driven regulation -- the Sarbanes-Oxley
legislation that followed the Enron scandal -- created more busywork for accountants than
real protection against abuses.
But in this case, regulation is the right course -- and the plan for consolidated
supervision proposed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is a good start. I’d favor going
even further and creating a super-regulator -- on the model of the British Financial
Services Authority, which regulates all providers of financial services. Congress likes
the current jumble of Balkanized mini-agencies, but that’s a mistake. As boundaries
dissolve among financial institutions and technology creates new kinds of financial
instruments, regulation needs to keep pace -- and that’s best done with a big, modern
institution that can attract the best and the brightest to the task of monitoring the
markets.
The world’s financial elites are pondering the wreckage as they gather in Washington this
weekend for the spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The
IMF has released a scary new "Global Financial Stability Report" that reckons U.S.
residential mortgage losses at about $565 billion and total credit market losses at a
stupendous $945 billion. The IP~ warns against a " ’rush to regulate,’ especially in ways
that unduly stifle innovation or that could exacerbate the effects of the current credit
squeeze." But the report also includes a long list of reform measures to improve the
stability and transparency of the markets.
Among the financial titans these days, what one mainly hears are sighs of relief. They’ve
gotten their bailout from the Federal Reserve, and they’re hoping that the worst is over.
Now, inevitably, come the cries for equal treatment -- the "me, too" bailouts for folks on
Main Street who are lucky enough to have a lobbyist.
Congress will say yes -- it would be manifestly unfair to do otherwise. But after
shredding the moral hazard barriers, we should understand that the next financial crisis,
when it comes, is bound to be even worse.

Washington Post

Horrors of a ’Crisis’
 Page 1276
By George £. Will?

Sunday, April 13, 2008; B07

During presidential elections, when candidates postulate this or thmt "crisis" for which
each is the indispensable and sufficient cure, economic hypochondria is encouraged, so a
sense of suffering is ranlpant. Recently the Wall Street Journal, like Joseph Conrad
contemplating the Congo, surveyed today’s economic jungle and cried, "The horror~ The
horror !"
Declines in housing values and the stock market are causing some A~ericans to delay
retirement. A Kansas City man hmd been eager to retire to Arizona but now, the Journal
says, "figures he’ll stay put for another couple of years." He is 59.
So, this is a facet of today’s hydra-headed "crisis" -- the man must linger in the labor
force until, say, 62. That is the earliest age at which a person can, and most recipients
do, begin collecting Social Security.
The proportion of people aged 55 to 64 who are working rose 1.5 percentage points from
April 2007 to February 2008, during which the percentage of working Americans older than
65 rose two-tenths of one percentage point. The Journal grimly reported, "The prospect of
millions of grandparents toiling away in their golden years doesn’t square with the
American dream. "
Oh? The idea that protracted golden years of idleness are a universal right is a delusion
of recent vintage. Deranged by the entitlement mentality fostered by a metastasizing
welfare state, A~ericans now have such low pain thresholds that suffering is defined as a
slight delay in beginning a subsidized retirement often lasting one-third of the retiree’s
adult lifetime.
In 1935, when Congress enacted Social Security, protracted retirement was a luxury enjoyed
by a tiny sliver of the population. Back then, Congress did its arithmetic ruthlessly:
When it set the retirement age at 65, the life expectancy of an adult American male was
65. If in 1935 Congress had indexed the retirement age to life expectancy, today’s
retirement age would be 75.
The standard definition of a recession -- two consecutive quarters of contraction -- means
we still are probably several months short of being in one. The 9.9 percent first-quarter
decline of the Standard & Poor 500 barely ranks among the 40 worst quarterly losses in the
index’s history. Leave aside the 39.4 percent decline in the second quarter of 1932. The
economy experienced no long-term trauma because of the declines of 10.3 percent, 14.5
percent and 23.2 percent in the third quarter of 1998, the third quarter of 1990 and the
fourth quarter of 1987, respectively.
Yes, in January single-fmnily homes in major metropolitan areas lost 10.7 percent of their
value from last January. To find such a large decline in a year you must peer back into
the mists of prehistory, all the way back to . the 1990s. Furthermore, the vast
nmjority of homeowners will renmin well ahead, even after the nmrket corrects for housing
inflation.
By one measure, between the beginning of 2000 and the middle of 2006, as the consumer
price index was rising 21 percent, average housing prices rose 93 percent -- and much more
in some markets (Miami, 180 percent; Los Angeles, 175 percent; Washington, D.C., 150
percent).
Not long ago there was broad agreement that too much of Americans’ wealth was tied up in
the rmtion’s housing stock and that the principal impediment to homeownership was not a
scarcity of cheap mortgages but the prevalence of high housing prices. Hence deflation of
housing prices would be desirable.
So far during this "crisis," the homeownership rate has declined just three-tenths of 1
percent since it peaked in 2004. At 67.8 percent, it remains higher than it was when
President Bill Clinton left office.
Subprime mortgages are a small minority of mortgages, and only a minority of subprime
borrowers are not l~mking their palnnents. Casting this minority of a minority as victims of
"predatory" lending fits the liberal narrative that most Americans are victims of this or
that sinister elite or impersonal force and are not competent to cope with life’s
complexities without government supervision.
The politics of this may, however, be more complex than the compassion chorus supposes.
The 96 percent of mortgage borrowers who are fulfilling their commitments, often by
scrimping, may be grumpy bystanders if many of the other 4 percent -- those who fot~d the
phrase "variable rate" impenetrably mysterious -- are eligible for ameliorations of their
obligations.
What next? Adults still burdened with student loans have not yet announced their
entitlement to relief, but as they watch this subprime dranm, they might.
 Page 1277

Washington Post

Kaine Touts Legislative Reforms for Mentally Ill

By Michael Alison Chandler?, Washington Post Staff Writer

?Sunday, April 13, 2008; C07

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) told Northern Virginia residents yesterday that the state has
taken steps to correct many of the problems in its mental health system that might have
contributed to Seung Hui Cho’s shooting rampage nearly a year ago at Virginia Tech.
The governor highlighted several reforms in a package of bills he signed last week, which
expand servioes and monitoring for those with mental illness, to an audience of more than
200 residents and local officials in Falls Church, an area close to home for f~nilies of
many of the victims and Cho.
Wednesday 1~rks the anniversary of the rampage by Cho, who took 32 lives and then his own
on the Blacksburg campus. Two years earlier, a judge had ordered Cho to seek treatment,
saying he was an imminent danger to himself, but neither the court, the university nor any
other agenoy followed up to see that he received it.
A state panel appointed by Kaine to investigate the massacre offered "a real indictment of
this state’s lack of oommitment to colmmunity mental health service," Kaine said yesterday.
"We did not fund it well. We did not expect much from it," he said.
So in January, the governor and General Assembly set out to improve services for more
people. They lowered the oriteria for someone to be involuntarily sent into treatment, and
they added $42 million to the state’s community health-oare budget to add caseworkers and
psychiatrists to offer services to more people, "so they don’t have to be seriously
mentally ill to get in and see someone," Kaine said.
The elected officials also developed measures to increase accot~tability in the system so
there will be more oversight if someone is ordered into treatment.
The town hall meeting at Luther Jackson Middle Sohool in Falls Churoh was the last in a
series of suoh gatherings the governor has held since the General Assembly adjourned
nearly four weeks ago.
The governor also highlighted other laws passed this year, including one that pushes back
the time that foreclosure prooeedings will begin for those in danger of losing their
homes. He also pointed out goals he did not accomplish, including olosing a loophole that
permits unlicensed vendors to sell guns at gun shows without requiring a background oheok
and identifying new funding sources for transportation maintenance and new construction.
Many in the audience wore green stickers that read "FUND TRANSPORTATION NOW." They
applauded when he said he is planning to oall for a special session this spring to come up
with solutions for gridlook and aging infrastructure. Many Republicans oppose tax
increases for transportation, so it is not olear that a solution is possible this year.
Del. Vivian E. Watts (D-Fairfax), who attended the meeting, said reforming the mental
health system was a "wonderful, constructive experience" because it brought Republicans
and Democrats together in what she described as an increasingly polarized environment in
Richmond. "Wouldn’t it be nice if we could extend" that cooperation to the state’s
transportation needs, she said.
Dozens of people turned out to oppose oonstruction of a proposed coal-fire power plant in
southwest Virginia, which Kaine supports, and encourage the governor to promote greener
forms of energy.

Washington Post

Commando Performance

As the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech r~npage approaches, students all over the
country are storming campuses with (toy) guns. What kind of game is this?

By Laura Wexler?

Sunday, April 13, 2008; W16

ON A THURSDAY MORNING LAST FALL, MAX TEMKIN STOOD IN HIS DOB}{ ROOM at Goucher College and
 Page 1278
took inventory of his arsenal.
"This is the Nerf Maverick," he said, brandishing a bright blue-and-yellow plastic
revolver. "It’s reliable, the bread and butter of guns. It goes everywhere with me when
I’m playing." He filled each of the gun’s six chambers with a soft foam dart and fired at
the wall opposite him. Some of the darts stuck to the wall; some bounced off and fell to
the floor.
Next, he demonstrated the Neff Atom Blaster, which shoots fo~ balls, and the Nerf
Firefly, a contraption that emits a light flash each time it releases a dart. Last, he
brought out his newest gull, the Neff Longshot. "Other than the Maverick, this is probably
the coolest gun ever made," he said. "This has a collapsing stock, bipeds so you can snipe
with it and legitizLmte bolt action. I never had a toy this cool when I was a kid."
Temkin was dressed in a white Oxford shirt, a l~mroon necktie, gray sweater, jeans and
black Chuck Taylor sneakers. At 21, he is baby-faced and boyish. The Longshot-- a three-
foot-long Rube Goldberg marvel of fluorescent blue, yellow and orange hard-molded plastic
-- looks nearly as tall as he is.
In all, Temkin owns 10 Neff guns, but the Maverick and the Longshot (designed for ages 6
and up) were the two he planned to rely on when the game of Hrm~ns vs. Zo~mbies began for
the fifth time at Goucher, a small liberal arts college north of Baltimore. At its most
basic, H~ans vs. Zombies (also known as H v. Z, or Zombies) is an i~mmersive g~ne of tag
based upon the archetypal zombie narrative: All players except for the "original zol~bie,"
or O.Z., begin the game as h~ans. The O.Z. feeds on the h~nans one by one, converting
them to zo~bies who, in turn, "feed on" other humans by tagging them -- and must make a
kill every 48 hours or starve to death. Meanwhile, the hrmlans avoid being eaten by the
zo~bies either by hiding -- holing up in their dorm rooms or sleeping in the library -- or
stttnring the zombies for 15 minutes with Neff darts and balled-up sock "grenades." The
game, which ]]as fall and spring versions, is played all over campus 24 hours a day for
days, and sometimes weeks, on end. It’s over when all of the humans have perished or all
of the zombies have starved.
The 2005 inaugural Zombies game drew about 70 Goucher students. Since then, as many as 200
have played, making it one of the most popular student activities -- even though it’s not
an official student activity -- ~ong the school’s roughly 1,500 students. The g~e has
spread to other campuses, with thousands of students playing this month at Cornell
University, Penn State University, Bowling Green State University and the University of
Maryland, among others.
But as Zo~bies’ popularity has grown, criticism of it has gro~n, too -- especially since
last April, when a severely disturbed English l~9or named Seung Hui Cho armed himself with
two semiautomatic handguns and killed 33 people, including himself, at Virginia Tech
University. In the immediate wake of that shooting, Humans vs. Zombies became
controversial, raising a collegiate version of the prevailing question of our time: What
is the balance between security and freedom? And it prompts another fascinating question:
What can a group of young people learn about one another -- and themselves -- by running
around campus with Neff guns for days on end?
Temkin, a ~rulior, is a philosophy ma~or who likes nothing more than to chew on such
issues. Two years after first playing the game, he’s become one of its most vocal
evangelists on campus, speaking out from the pages of the student newspaper. He writes
with a fountain pen; he started Goucher’s debate team. But on that Thursday morning last
fall, he wasn’t interested in ruminating; he was preparing for war. He had read How to
Stay Alive in the Woods, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and Rommel’s Infantry Attacks. He had a
police scarzner tuned to Goucher’s security frequency. He had a dorm room chosen for its
tactical advantages -- quick exit via two doors and the window (as long as he removed his
air- conditioning unit, which he is not supposed to have). He had a pair of steel-toed
"zombie-stomping boots" in the closet. And he had his new Neff Longshot. "I really want to
do well during this game," said Temkin, aiming at the wall and firing. "I’ve never had a
stupid early death. " ~
TEN DAYS LATER, JUST FOUR DAYS BEFORE HUMANS VS. ~0MBIES WAS TO BEGIN AT MIDNIGHT, 50
students waited in one of Goucher’s residence hal! lounges. W]]en senior Chris Weed walked
in ~ust after 9 p.m., they chanted, "Speech[ Speech[ Speech[ Speech!"
In 2005, Weed and his then-roo~nate Brad Sappington invented Humans vs. Zombies to amuse
themselves and their friends. When Sappington graduated in 2006, he left Weed as the
unlikely figure at the center of the burgeoning Zombies phenomenon. Weed is tall and thin,
with deep brown eyes and apple-red cheeks. At 22, he’s a dreamer who speaks softly, gently
and infrequently. In his fall semester philosophy class, he didn’t participate once, while
Temkin talked so often that on at least one occasion the professor sighed and said, "Let’s
hear from someone besides }4ax, please." But this night, in response to the crowd’s chant,
Weed yelled back, "You’re all nerds!"
It was not an insult. At Goucher, which prides itself on encouraging students to be
individuals, a label such as "herd" is far less da~mging than it would be elsewhere. And,
 Page 1279
anyway, what Weed really meant was, "We’re all nerds." To play a game as in~ersive and
fantastical as Zombies is to give oneself over completely and utterly, despite how silly
it looks, despite what others might think. That is the definition of herd.
After the initial frivolity, Weed and the other game organizers, who are known as
moderators, or "mods," turned serious. They’d called this meeting to make sure each player
had signed two legal forms instituted in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting, and to
emphasize the most important rules of the game: Don’t shoot nonplayers; don’t use or carry
guns visibly in academic buildings; and don’t use cars during game play. "No cars, no
cars, no cars," Weed said, leaning heavily on that rule because in a previous game he’d
had to kick out a player for using his car to avoid zombies. Weed warned the players that
if they dich~’t comply with the rules, they would threaten the future of Zon~ies at
Goucher. "We’ve had to deal with a lot of crap about people not liking the game, " Weed
said. "Some people are really angry about this. "
Even before the Virginia Tech shooting, Goucher’s associate dean of students, Emily Perl,
said she had received at least a dozen oral and e-mail complaints about the game. On April
16 last year, as soon as she heard about the shooting at Virginia Tech, Perl called Temkin
and told him to immediately i%~it the Zombies game that had been running for about a week.
"We don’t want students running around with quns today, " Perl said she told him. "There
was a heightened sense of fragility. "
Ultimately, however, Goucher president Sanford Ungar allowed the game to continue after
meeting with the Zombies organizers, who presented administrators with a gift-wrapped Neff
gun addressed to his or her "inner child. " The gift of the toy guns was an attempt to
reinforce the idea that Hrumans vs. Zol~bies is a game, rather than an "issue, " said Temkin,
who came up with the idea. Ungar saw his decision as part of a larger refusal to overreact
to what he called the "horrific aberration" at Virginia Tech. As he wrote in Goucher’s
alumni quarterly last spring: "We will not sign on to trendy, but unproven, electronic
alert systems . . We will not engage in tawdry one-upsn~nship to try to claim that we
are safer-than-thou . And we will not seek to label as ’dangerous’ every student who
is merely different . We must make our decisions with an eye toward striking a
delicate balance between security and personal freedom."
Even so, Goucher administrators wanted to provide everyone on campus the chance to voice
their thoughts about the g~]~e. So Goucher’s chaplain scheduled a highly structured public
meeting on the eve of the fall games. That day, nearly i00 people crowded into a classroom
to listen as Weed explained the game’s ability to bring together disparate groups of kids
and Temkin waxed poetic. "I know the Zon~bies game is a really weird, freaky thing," he
said. "It’s, like, not socially acceptable . . But we’re weird kids with weird pastimes,
and we’re part of a group. That’s a really incredible feeling."
While the opponents acknowledged the game’s benefits, they criticized its representation
of killing and violence. Jenifer Jennings-Shaud, a member of the graduate education
faculty, spoke of arriving on campus one evening and seeing a man with a gun rru~ over the
hill. "I was terrified," she said. "Guns scare me. Neff gnns, reqular guns. All quns."
Then she began to cry. English professor Jeff Myers raised questions about the ethics of
"playing war" while an actual war is happening in Iraq. Peace studies instructor Fran
Donelan theorized about the possible link between fantasy violence and actual violence.
"There have been many studies done about how a society’s games reflect the society," she
said. "Most of the games in this country revolve around hunting people down and killing
them."
A similar conversation -- or argument, in some cases -- continues at several c~u~puses
where the game is played. At Maryland and Bowling Green, letters in the student newspapers
hmve criticized Zol~ies players for their insensitivity to the Virginia Tech victims. At
Whitl~n College in Washington state, game achninistrators decided toy weapons were too
sensitive on a college campus in light of the Virginia Tech shooting and banned Neff guns
during their fall game. Bowling Green will not use the guns this spring. At Butler
University in Indiana, administrators have banned Zombies outright. "People are a little
edgy," said Butler’s dean of student life, Irene Stevens. "Given the Virginia Tech
incident, we didn’t feel it was appropriate for them to be going around campus 24/7
carrying toy gtuls. " Perl continues to wonder whether she and the other administrators are
doing right by allowing the game to continue. "My worst fear is that an outsider will walk
onto campus and pull a real gun, not knowing the kids are using fake guns, " she said.
Wq~en concerns about the game first surfaced last year, Weed took it personally. And even
as he’s come to tu%derstand that students running around on campus with weapons can scare
some people, he stands fast in the belief that fear should not prevent frnn. "Nerf guns are
so innocuous," he said. "It’s the s!nJoolism of it that scares people. It’s people letting
fear run their lives."
Weed was 14 when the April 1999 Coltu~bine High Schoo! shooting occurred. In the wake of
the Colorado massacre, administrators at the private school Weed attended n~ndated that
one door in each set of double doors be locked. "I guess it was to prevent a big group of
6
 Page 1280
arlaed people from coming through the door, but it was ridiculous," he said. "I think they
realized they couldm’t do anything, so it ~s a symbolic action to make parents feel
better."
Temkin’s public school instituted lockdown drills after Columbine, in which the students
would turn off the lights and sit against the wall where the door was, so if a shooter
looked through the window of the door, he’d think the classroom was empty. When Weed and
Temkin recall these measures, it’s almost as if they view the adults’ attempts to ensure
their total safety as I~ive, sensationalist and a bit silly -- even childish. They and the
other moderators say they are tulwilling to allow what they see as a knee-jerk reaction to
a terrible event impinge on their personal freedom. "How has the Virginia Tech shooting
affected me personally?" Temkin asked. "It’s reduced my individual liberty as a student
because of the reaction to it. I obviously think that school shootings are a tragedy .
But I just don’t see how they cor~nect to our game of tag. Making that kind of connection
is pure political correctness -- the elevation of feeling good over doing right."
Coincidentally, Goucher’s spring 2008 game begins on April 16, the one-year anniversary of
the rampage at Virginia Tech. Despite their re~ection of a link between the game and
campus violence, the organizers have decided to make the first day gun-free, out of
deference to those who were killed.
AT APPROXIMATELY 10 A.M. ON OPENING GA~E DAY LAST NOVEMBER, the first of 160 h~~ans at
Goucher perished when sophomore Erika Cardona rushed up to one of her friends saying,
"Dude, I know who the O.Z. is!" When the guy said, "Who?" she said, "Me!" and tagged him.
Then she took his ID number to record her kill at the Web site the mods had created.
Cardona had the most kills of any zombie during the previous spring’s game, and she’s a
dedicated player, which is why the mods chose her to be the O.Z. (in general, women l~ake
up about one-third of the Zombies players). During two summers in high school, she
participated in roving games of Capture the Flag on the streets of Manhattan, and she once
attended a mass pillow fight in Union Square. "I realized early on that it was kind of
important to have a sense of play outside work and schoolwork," said Cardona.
For the two nights before the game began, she dreamed of rttnning around and tagging kids.
"Zt’s definitely taking me over," she said. After tagging her first victim, she continued
to stalk the campus disg~lised as a h~an, with a blue bandanna on her leg and her Nerf
Reactor in her hand.
A few hours later, the 15 or so hummns holed up in Van Meter H~ll, one of Goucher’s main
classroom buildings, checked the Web site and were alarmed to discover that the O.Z. had
already recorded seven kills. It was only the first day of play, but these humans were
already in full game mode. Sutton Asliby was dressed all in black, wearing leg and shoulder
holsters that hold four of the seven guns he owns. (Because game rules state that weapons
can’t be visible in academic buildings, Ashby’s ~_lns were stowed in a plastic garbage bag
next to his backpack.) He had his student ID card taped to his wrist so he could wave it
in front of the card readers and quickly unlock doors. Jon Simon was wearing a black
hunting vest and cargo pants, and he carried a mirror that he could extend around corners
to spot zombies lying in wait. Peter Danilcht~ had stocked rip on granola, fruit bars,
raisins and V-8 -- dining halls are not "safe zones," he said. All wore bandannas tied
around their arms or legs that identified them as humans; if they got tagged and became
zombies, they’d transfer the bandannas to their heads.
By 2:30 p.m. the next day, the human population was do~Tn from 150 to 10O and Van Meter was
surrounded by zombies, including O.Z. Cardona, who was lying on her stomach outside the
basement door, hoping to catch unsuspecting humans leaving class.
On the one hand, Cardona was feeling pretty good -- she’d bagged a record 18 kills the
first day, and she was ready to devote her entire weekend to eradicating the human
population. On the other hand, the humans who’d perished were the low-hanging fruit. She
wanted Temkin and a few other key players, who were holed up inside Van Meter. Through the
windows, Cardonm saw them chatting and checking e-mail. "I don’t want to move from here, "
she said after waiting 30 minutes in the Novei~ber chill. "It’s a hostage situation. We’re
psyching them out. "
One of the h~@an militia comananders, Boman Modine, a husky senior with a disheveled mop of
curly hair and a penchant for fantasy games, c~e up with an escape plan for the 40-odd
humans scattered throughout Van Meter. And although Temkin had reservations, he agreed to
follow orders, because Modine was the ranking officer and Temkin is a firm believer in
chain of commmnd. According to the plan, all the freshman and inexperienced players would
run out the front of Van Meter and draw the zombies’ attention. The more experienced
militia mel~bers would go out the back and take on the zombies there. Then the humans would
reconvene in an open field behind the building.
On cue, a group of humans charged out the front door with their guns blazing, and Temkin
and two others ran out the main back door. One of Temkin’s comrades died before Modine
arrived with backup, but it wasn’t a bad showing, considering that the building was
surrounded. The fres~nen who ran out the front suffered no losses at all.
7
 Page 1281
l~odine split the humans into three platoons, with Temkin at the helm of one as they
m~rched through the middle of campus. Later, Temkin would bask in the glory of t]~t
moment. "I col~mnded 40 people," he said. "I feel like I did something big."
Temkin has no military training and no pla~ to join the military. But he and the others
mmrching with him seemed hungry for at least part of the soldier’s experience -- the
friendships forged under fire, the intensity of life-or-death situations, the chance to be
tested. As one militia member said: "You get to be Arnold Schwarzenegger. You get to go
blazing into a pack of people and save the day."
It’s exactly this viewlooint that disturbs l~yers, the English professor who spoke out
during the co~mmunity conversation. "I don’t have anything specifically against the g~me as
a game," he said. "What sort of troubled me was seeing young men walking around c~pus in
camouflage and doing a kind of walk I would characterize as a swagger or aggressive pose.
It’s clearly role-playing, but, as Shakespeare would say, ’All the world’s a stage.’ So
the roles say a lot about who people are. The game perhaps gives some insight into why war
is so attractive to young men."
SEVERAL HOURS AFTER THE STANDOFF OUTSIDE VAN METER THAT FRIDAY AFTERNOON -- which was far
from the bloodbath Cardona had hoped for -- Cardona and a pack of zombies had gathere~ on
the hill next to the student parking lot, awaiting the htm~ans, whom they’d learned were
marching through the woods that ring ®oucher’s c~m~pus, headed their way. When the h~ans
realized the zombies were lying in wait, Modine and fellow militia co~mmnder Matt Sabine
huddled to decide whether the troops should press deeper into the woods or rush the
zombies. The decision was to rush, so the hLm~ans made a quarter-turn and charged up the
hill, shooting and yelling. In the ensuing melee all the zombies were stunned by Nerf
darts before they could tag anyone, and the humans ran off to the safety of their dorm
rooms.
"We didn’t get anyone?" O.Z. Cardona said, her chest rising and falling from exertion. "We
failed miserably."
A few hours later, the zombies attacked in Tuttle House, a dorm, but the humans
co~mna~deered the stairwells, knocking the zombies back every time they attempted to
advance. After the 90-minute siege ended, Temkin and the other ht~ans ordered Chinese food
and asked the delivery guy to pass it through the window.
When Cardona finally went to bed at ~ a.m., she dreamt of zombies for the third night in a
row.
By 4 p.m. Saturday, half the hmnans had perished, tagged here and there on the way to
class or to a friend’s dorm or to the bathroom. But Temkin remained at large. He was due
any moment to return from a field trip, and the zombies had gathered at Van Meter to
~bush him as he stepped off the bus. "I w~nt ~x to die so bad," said Cardona.
Suddenly Cardonm yelled, "There’s the bus!" But instead of coming toward Van Meter, the
bus was traveling along the opposite side of c~mpus to the student parking lot where the
melee had occurred the night before. Cardorm and the rest of the horde raced off in that
direction, rrtnning past a group of perplexed groomsmen and bridesmaids gathered outside
the chapel. But before she and her crew reached the edge of c~mpus, a zombie who was on
the bus with Temkin ran up to them and said, "Max got in his car and went off campus" --
which could be a violation of the game rules.
Weed, who had come out from his dorm room to watch what he supposed would be Temkin’s
demise, called Temkin on his cellphone. "Are you in the car?" Weed asked. When Temkin said
yes, Weed said, "We have to talk about this."
The previous night, during the march through the woods, Weed had gazed at the dancing and
singing humans and said, "I could die a happy man right now." But now, Weed was quietly
and powerfully angry. Weed’s phone kept ringing -- Temkin calling back -- but he didn’t
answer it. He wanted to delay the possibility of having to eject Temkin, the g~e’s most
ardent fan and most recognizable spokesman, for breaking one of the key rules of the game:
Don’t use your car to escape zombies.
A half-hour later, Cardona raced up the stairs in Tuttle House to discover the glass in
the fire extinguisher case had been shattered: A zombie collided with it in the heat of
battle. He suffered only a minor cut, but the word went out that someone was hurt, and
Temkin, parking his car, heard and rushed to Tuttle. As he entered the building, his
defenses down, a freshman zombie simply reached out and tagged him, and that was the end
of Temkin’s career as a human.
Later, Temkin explained that he’d worried during the entire field trip until he got the
idea to ask the bus driver to switch the drop-off spot. When he stepped off the bus at the
student parking lot, he shot one zombie to stun her then told the other zombie who’d been
on the bus: "I’m leaving. Do you want to fight me?" After that zombie walked away, Temkin
got into his car and drove to the store on an errand.
"If I had known people were coming toward me, I wouldn’t have gotten in the car," he said.
"I would have died."
Though some players believed him, some didn’t, and their doubt would leave Temkin torn and
 Page 1282
troubled -- and rn~characteristically tongue-tied -- for weeks afterward. In the meantime,
he checked the Web site. The tally stood at 86 zombies, 64 humans. He took a shower,
changed his clothes and ran around with the zombies <~til 2
BY S~IDAY AFTERNOON, CAP~DONA HAD LOGGED 29 KILLS AND AT LEAST ONE IMPORTANT ASSIST: She
helped kill Modine. She hadn’t slept much, and every few minutes a zombie called to report
inform~ation (or rumors) and ask her what to do. "It’s a little exhausting," she said. "I’m
not schooled in military strategy like some of the guys. I don’t prepare for this game
like they do."
Later, as the zombies were walking en masse toward the residential quad, Modine got a call
on his cellphone. He hung up, then quieted the crowd before issuing a proclamation.
"Jonathan Suss just killed Matt Sabine!"
The crowd chanted, "Suss~ Suss! Suss!" Even on a campus full of eccentric students, Suss,
a freshman, stands out. He is the polar opposite of senior Sabine, a militia com~mnder
Temkin describes as "an alpha herd. "
When someone asked how Suss nmde his glorious kill, Modine replied: "He was waiting in the
shower stall in the bathroom for eight hours. He tagged Sabine on his way out of the
bathroom."
Fueled by the news that one of their weakest players had killed one of the strongest h~nan
players, the zombies prepared to charge the 20 or so remaining htmlans, who were gathered
on the stone patio outside at the student center. After the zol~bies’ initial rush, only
four humans were left standing. Then the zombies charged again, and ~ust one human
remained.
Even though a few more humans were hiding in their dorm rooms, the game felt effectively
finished: The zol~bies won. Emotions had run high and low. Alliances had been made and
broken. People had revealed themselves to one another more fully in the previous few days
than in a semester or year of sitting next to one another in a class.
Everyone was tired. Everyone was h~gry. Everyone had homework to do.
In the days afterward, as players caught up on sleep and ate their first full meals in
while, Weed and the other mods pledged to create a centralized Web site that would make it
easy for anyone anywhere to start a game of H~-~ns vs. Zombies. They considered forming
limited liability company and incorporating new technology to make the game more
i~ersive. And Weed daydreamed of buying a van and driving from campus to campus, an
itinerant preacher spreading the gospel of Zombies to yot~g people everywhere.
"We’re never truly safe," he’d tell them. "And since we’re not safe, let’s have fun."
Laura Wexler is the author of Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Llrnching in America and
writer in Baltimore. She can be reached at laura@laurawexler.com. She will be fielding
questions and co~ents about this article Monday at noon at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.

Louisville Courier-Journal, KY

April 13, 2008

Confronting the rising dropout rates

It’s a lot later than we think. We’re raising an illiterate and ~]educated generation, and
there’s more to come. On April 1, ~nerica’s Promise Alliance released a detailed study
revealing that fewer than half of the teenagers in 17 of the largest U.S. cities drop out
of high school before they graduate -- more than 1.2 million of them. The cost of this is
enormous: billions of dollars in lost productivity for expensive social services and
(because ignorance begets crime) to build more prisons. This report so~]ded like an April
Fool’s ~oke on the growing nr~Joer of fools, meaning all of us.
The high school dropout resembles the fool depicted on Tarot cards -- standing at the edge
of a precipice, with no idea how far he’ll fall, when fall he wil!. It’s no coincidence
that the number symbol for the fool is a zero. A hundred times zero is still zero.
"When more than 1 million students a year drop out of high school, it’s more than a
problem, it’s a catastrophe," says Colin Powell, the former secretary of State and
founding chair~n of America’s Promise Alliance. His wife, Alma, chairs the Alliance now.
Speaking as the old soldier he is, he describes these statistics as "a call to arms." The
Powells are joining Margaret Spellings, secretary of Education, to call for stm~its in
every state to figure out how to halt the decline in graduation rates, as well as to
better prepare pt~lic school graduates for work and college.
But do we really need more meetings to talk endlessly (and tediously) about shopworn
educational ideas and stale theories? All~a Powell answers the question before someone asks
it: The summits won’t be jabber-~abber sessions. "They will be about action," and demand
9
 Page 1283
that local, state and federal policymakers, grass roots co~unities, parents, students and
advocates confront the reality now.
The statistics show what seems obvious to everybody: City kids are far more likely to live
on the precipice than kids from the suburbs. The Editorial Projects in Education Research
Center finds that graduation rates in city schools are 15 percentage points lower than
those in the suburbs. In some cities, the disparity is as wide as 35 percent. It’s the
kids in the largest cities who can’t see the value of an education. Life on the street and
the grunt jobs found there ought to make even homework look attractive.
I<nowledge is power, and this is the lesson we have to find a way to teach. Only by
identifying horrific statistical disparities can we begin to demand change. But, we must
be careful about what kind of change to make.
No Child Left Behind legislation has left troublesome, unintended consequences. When the
legislation imposed rigid standards, teachers began to "teach to the test" instead of
imparting actual knowledge. Secretary Spellings wants to require states to provide more
uniform graduation data, but this will require careful monitoring, too. States sometimes
inflate graduation rates, so they won’t invite sanctions from the federal bureaucrats who
dole out the money.
Solutions to the education crisis cannot be determined on a one-size-fits- all basis.
We’ve learned a lot about the different ways different children learn. Older children in
kindergarten, for example, generally do better than younger children, so parents have
learned to put their kids in schools where the cut-off age puts them in classes with
slightly younger classmates. Charter schools offer a choice to parents eager to rescue
their children from failing schools and put them in schools emphasizing math, science,
arts and languages. Unfortunately, the good charters usually have long waiting lists. The
charter movement needs more public support.
Parents who participate in their children’s schools, who pay attention to what and how
their children perform, are likely to raise achievers. We don’t need another study to tell
us that. Children who grow up in poor single-parent families, without fathers to help
guide them, start out behind the proverbial eight ball. We don’t need another study to
tell us that, either.
The catechism of liberalism inevitably prescribes more money as the key to changing all
this, but the real key is how the money is spent. The pt~lic schools in the nation’s
capital spend about $25,000 per student per year, considerably more than a good private
school education. Nevertheless, Washington’s schools are among the worst in the country.
That’s why few congressmen send their kids to public schools. In some years, none do.
Dropping out is a fool’s errand, but getting children to stay in school requires
encouragement from all of us. "A knowledgeable fool," as Moliere observed, "is a greater
fool than an ignorant fool." We’ve been forewarned.
Suzanne Fields is a col~ist with The Washington Times. Her e-mail address is sfieldslO00
@aol.com.

Chattanooga Times Free Press, TN

Tennessee seeking standard grad rate

Sunday, April 13, 2008

By Kelli Gauthier

Tennessee and the federal government disagree on the state’s high-school graduation rates
and it’s hurting Tennessee’s students, education officials say.
"There is no question that having an accurate measure of student success is vitally
important for every high school in America," said Dan Challener, president of the Public
Education Foruldation, "and we’ ve never been clear. "
But everything will be squared up by next year, officials promise, and not just because
the federal government is trying to make them.
There’s widespread confusion over the way Tennessee and the rest of the country calculate
high school graduation rates. But officials with the state Department of Education say by
2009 they will have an accurate and nationally comparable count of high school graduates
in the Volunteer State.
Until all states are "comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges, " no one will
grasp the gravity of a national graduation crisis, where one-fourth of high school
students never earn a diploma, said Mr. Challener, who has studied state and local
graduation rates through the foundation’s work with high school reform efforts in Hamilton
10
 Page 1284
CoL~ty.
Using 2004 numbers, Tennessee says it graduates 75.7 percent of its high school students.
No, says the U.S. Department of Education, it’s actually 66.1 percent. Although the
figures are four years old, 2004 is the most recent year that the Department of Education
used to calculate its figures.
Other states have reported different -- and usually higher -- graduation rates than the
federal goverr~ent. Because school systems that don’t reach federal guidelines under No
Child Left Behind can face penalties up to state takeover, states are being accused of
artificially inflating their graduation n~ers to meet those standards. In turn,
Tennessee says federal figures don’t take into consideration such factors as students who
have not dropped out but transferred out of the system or started homeschooling
Discrepancies expected
Becar~e federal data didn’t take into account such students, the U.S. Department of
Education said there would be fairly wide discrepancies between its numbers and the
states’, said Rachel Woods, spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Education.
"They told us we should expect a 10 percentage-point discrepancy give or take between what
they report and what we report," she said.
Either way, both of Tennessee’s numbers are a healthy distance from its set goal of
graduating 90 percent by 2014, one of the most ambitious in the country.
To clear up the confusion nationwide, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings
recently ar~nounced that, as part of the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, all
states must move toward a single method of calculating high school graduation rates.
Hr. Challener said consistency in measuring graduation rates is critical.
"I believe you can’t solve a problem until you understand it and have a good measure of
it," he said.
Step ahead
In the move to standardize calculations, Tennessee already may be a step ahead of the
game, state education officials say. Two years ago, the state began moving toward a 2009
implementation of the calculation method endorsed by the National Governor’s Association.
Louisiana, North Carolina, Massachusetts and Texas are using a similar method, and a
handful of other states are gathering student data needed to use the same plan.
Although Elaine Quesinberry, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Education, would not
confirm the specific method Ms. Spellings would request, Tennessee education officials
think it is likely the governor’s association method will become the national standard.
Ms. Quesinberry said an armor, cement about the new method would come soon on the Federal
Register, the Washington, D.C.-based daily publication that lists federal rules, proposed
rules and notices.
Like all states across the country, Tennessee was charged with determining its own
graduation rate calculation after the No Child Left Behind Act was signed into law in
2001. The result was a confusing patchwork of statistics from across the country, with no
accurate way to compare states with each other.
U.S. Department of Education officials insist their recent graduation figures shouldn’t be
used as the be-all end-all, but merely are an estimate that states can use to compare
themselves with other states.
"The (calculation) provides a standard estimate of the on-time high school graduation
rate," David Thol~as, spokesman at the U.S. Department of Education, said. "The numbers are
used for statistical purposes such as estimating the national on-time gradr~tion rate or
examining changes in graduation rates over time."

Jackson Clarion Ledger, MS

April 13, 2008

State to change way it computes grad rates??

By Rebecca Helmes?rhelmes@jackson. gannett, com

The way one set of numbers reads, Mississippi’s 2006 graduation rate was 87 percent. By
another figuring method, it was 63 percent.
One set is artificially high, while the other is artificially low, said Mississippi’s
education chief, because until now the state’s data-collecting system has been ur~ble to
accurately pinpoint graduation rates.
Superintendent of Education Hank Bounds and other education officials said the state’s
 Page 1285
more precise student data-tracking system took a few years to get up and running - which
is why Mississippi’s education department h~s kept two sets of gradwation rates in recent
years. The state will soon abandon the traditional method in favor of the new one.
Changing to the new method would mean Mississippi’s graduation rate would go down in the
eyes of the federal government and, therefore, could mean sanctions under the federal No
Child Left Behind program for improving schools. Bounds said he doesn’t want schools to be
penalized for appearing as if graduation rates have dropped, when actually the state is
keeping more accurate numbers.
"We are at a point now where we can completely follow the (National Governors Association)
rate, except that we’re going to have to get the U.S.D.E. (U.S. Department of Education
to reset our numbers," Bounds said. He was referring to the state’s graduation rate
be nc ixaar ks.
The graduation rate change comes just in time for the recent announcement that U.S.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings will require all states to use a uniform graduation
rate formula.
Bounds said he expects 2007 graduation rates, which will be finalized and announced later
this spring, to be slightly higher than 2006’s 63 percent but much lower than 87 percent.
The higher accuracy of the state’s new figuring method is a product of how the data is
collected.
The traditional graduation rate calculation overestimates districts’ graduation rates by
comparing the number of students who start ninth-grade, plus those who transfer in and
minus those who transfer out or die, to those who graduate four years later. The
graduation rate has been figured the same ~~y since No Child Left Behind took effect in
2002.
The second set of numbers is more accurate because individual students rather than just
the total number of students each year are accounted for in the data system. But this set
of nLmlbers is artificially low, said Steve Hebbler, director of the state education
department’s Office of Research and Statistics, because this set of 2006 numbers does not
differentiate between first time and repeat ninth-graders. Once the 2007 graduation rate
information is available, that wil! no longer be a problem.
Because of that ninth-grade issue, Hebbler and other education officials actually expect
the 2007 graduation rate to improve a little, but not much, over the 63 percent rate for
2006.

Associated Press

Sat April 12, 2008 00:07 EDT

Educators work to boost East High School’s graduation rate

BEN FULTON

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) His mother cares for him and his three siblings on a cashier’s
salary. One of his s~sters, he said, has already left high school.
But Ricardo Medina, a 15-year-old freslmman at Salt Lake City’s East High School, is
holding fast to his goal of becoming a psychologist.
"’So many kids’ parents can’t be there because they’re at work putting food on the
table, ’ ’ Medina said.
As for his teachers, Medina recognizes they’re plenty busy with the workloads they’ve got
as well.
He therefore is grateful East High participates in the federal Gaining Early Awareness and
Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP) after-school tutoring progra!n.
"" (Progr~ mentors) help us with anything, ’’ he said. "’It’s an influence for us to stay
on track. ’ ’
Helping students stay on track, especially freshmen, has become a priority at East. That
the school has turned after-school tutoring from a mark of failure into a mark of
motivation is only a start.
With 72 percent of students graduating in the 2006-2007 school year, according to Adeqt~te
Yearly Progress (AYP) reports, few if any Salt Lake County high schools posted a lower
rate of graduation than East. The average graduation rate among state high schools for the
prior school year, according to the Utah State Office of Education figures, is 83 percent.
East High achninistrators have launched a vigorous response. In addition to GEAR UP, which
offers 15 tutors’ and two counselors’ help to more than 300 students, the school also has
enlisted Westminster College students to tutor in math, teamed with the University of
Utah’s Pacific Islander Club to provide academic support, and instituted the Advancement
Via Individual Determination (AVID) prograu~ to prepare students for graduation and future
~2
 Page 1286
college careers. To make sure students’ parents know about these services, East High
launched an outreach program that involves visits to students’ homes.
At East, a large part of the challenge is learning how to best serve refugee students from
Somalia, Burma and Liberia.
For any high school looking to reduce its number of dropouts, ninth grade is the make-or-
break year. Studies show high school freshmen who fail math and reading requirements
rarely graduate. Sagers estimates slightly more than 150 ninth-graders "’don’t finish with
us,’’ either dropping out, or finishing schooling at the alternative Horizonte Instruction
& Training School.
East High’s most far-reaching attempt at i~provement is its "’Concentrated Classrooms’’
program, which allots all the school’s 600 fresl~~en into "’teaching teams’’ of four to
eight teachers who monitor students’ progress as a group and across all academic subgects,
rather than teachers’ individual specialties. Assistant principal John Hsmm~il said this
model cultivates a greater sense of connection between students and teachers, a crucial
element of success in ninth grade.
The program doesn’t segregate students by achievement level, a fact that may surprise.
"’If we surround students with others who are performing poorly, then they don’t know what
it looks like to perform well,’’ said science teacher Michael Lloyd, East High’s point
person for the program. "’It almost establishes a culture of failure.’’ Lloyd said the
program’s already allowed teachers to spot problems, and intervene with students before
those problems become patterns. "’We’ve almost taken on a counseling role within the
teaching team,’’ he said.
"’I definitely am not trying to minimize this at all,’’ Paul S. Sagers, who took the job
of East High principal last July, said of his school’s graduation rate. "’We’re doing
whatever we can, basically, to keep these kids in school. It’s one of my major
initiatives.’’
East High’s effort under Sagers comes at a time when Secretary of Education Margaret
Spellings, tired of dealing with states’ myriad graduation rates, announced in early April
a plan to bring all the nation’s high schools t~der the same formula for calculating
gradumtion rates. Utah does not count dropouts who later earn ®EDs among its gradumte
rate, but will count students who complete high school despite three failed attempts at
passing an exit exam.
Although Utah’s high school graduation rate far exceeds the national average, the State
Office of Education assigned students individual numbers four years ago to track their
movement through the state school system. That made state graduation rates more accurate.

Nashua Telegraph, NH

Published: Sunday, April 13, 2008

Nation deserves debates on failing schools

By Morton Kondracke

How nmny wake-up calls does ~erica need before we make our failing public schools fit for
the competitive challenges of the 21st century? ??

This month marks the 25th anniversary of the first loud gong - the 1983 report "A Nation
at Risk," which famously warned that "if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to
impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well
have viewed it as an act of war." ??

That was Cold War talk, but the same report anticipated the world we live in today. "Our
once unchallenged pre-eminence in colmmerce, industry, science and technological innovation
is being overtaken by competition throughout the world. 97hat was unimaginable a
generation ago has begun to occur - others are matching and surpassing our educational
attai~ments." ??

Are they ever. In the latest Program for International Student Assessment, U.S. 15-year-
olds ranked 28th out of 41 countries in mathematics literacy, 16th in reading, 22nd in
science and 29th in problem-solving, far behind not only Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong
and most of Western Europe, but behind even Poland and the Slovak Republic. ??
 Page 1287
As Microsoft Chairnmn Bill Gates told a House committee last month: "The United States
today has one of the lowest high school graduation rates in the industrialized world.
Three out of every l0 ninth-graders - and nearly half of all African-American and Hispanic
ninth-graders - do not graduate on time. ??

"Of those who do graduate and continue on to college, over a quarter must take remedial
courses on material they should have learned in high school." ??

Gates anticipated one of the most dismal reports yet - issued April i by the America’s
Promise Alliance (full disclosure: my wife is its president) showing that only 52 percent
of students in the nation’s 50 biggest cities graduate from high school, compared with 75
percent in their suburbs. ??

In the worst cases, Baltimore city schools graduated less than 35 percent of their
students, compared with 81 percent in the suburbs; Columbus, Ohio, graduated 41 percent in
the city, 83 percent in the suburbs; Cleveland graduated 42 percent in the city, 78
percent in its suburbs; and New York graduated 47 percent in the city, 83 percent in the
suburbs. ??

At a press conference unveiling the new findings, the alliance’s founder, former Secretary
of State Colin Powell, pronounced them "a catastrophe," especially in view of the
emergence of new international competitors such as China, India and former Soviet
satellites. ??

Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., declared, "If tl~s were a health crisis = a disease - we’d call
it an epidemic and would throw whatever resources we could at it. But nobody seems as
outraged by it as they ought to be." ??

Burr and Sen. Jeff Bing~an, D-N.M., are co-sponsors of the Graduation Promise Act, which
would authorize $2 billion over five years to surround the country’s 2,000 most dropout-
prone schools with tutoring, health and parent-mentoring resources to ease the problem, a
plan America’s Promise is promoting on its own with 100 "dropout summits" around the
country over the next two years. ??

Bingaman acknowledged to me in an interview that the bill had little chance of passing
this year because it will need to be folded into reauthorization of President Bush’s No
Child Left Behind law - a measure that is going nowhere this election year. ??

NCLB was a pioneering, bipartisan step on the road to improving American education -
requiring states to adopt measurable perfon~ance standards, test children regularly,
report results based on race and income groups, and take remedial action when schools fall
short. ??

Yet, NCLB is regularly denorulced on the campai~l trail by Democratic candidates Barack
Oba~a and Hillary Clinton in a nod to teachers unions, which object to accountability
requirements, and it’s also opposed by right-wing Republicans as a federal "takeover" of
state primacy over education. ??

To his credit, Obama occasionally has hinted that he supports merit pay for teachers based
on their performance in improving student outcomes, but he was hissed for it at last
year’s National Education Association convention and has retreated to reco~nending higher
"battle pay" for teachers taking on difficult assigr~@ents in science, math and poverty-
area schools. ??

In a recent speech, John McCain eloquently backed NCLB and pay-for-performance, but he has
yet to make education a top-tier issue in the campaign]. ??

As a measure of how low education stands as campai~ priority, only 27 of about 500
questions asked during presidential debates this year have concerned schools, according to
former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, now head of Ed in ’08, a group funded by the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation to raise education’s profile. ??

In the audience at the alliance event was Dr. Milt Goldberg, executive director of the
1983 contmission that produced the "Nation At Risk" report. I asked him how far we’ve come
since then. ??
 Page 1288

"We’ve made some incremental gains," he said, "but on the basics, not much." ??

Before the alliance event, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings told me she plans to
issue a report later this month comm~emorating the 25th anniversary of "A Nation At Risk."
The gist of it? ??

"We continue to be at risk," she said. ??

That’s an understatement.

Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.

The New York Times

April 13, 2008

When Strings Are Attached, Quirky Gifts Can Limit Universities

By KAREN W. ARENSON

When Stanley J. Seeger gave Princeton $2 million for Hellenic studies nearly three decades
ago, the gift’s income paid for two courses in modern Greek and trips to Greece for five.
But the Seeger money, which must be spent only on matters Greek, is now worth $33 million,
multiplying through aggressive investing like the rest of Princeton’s endo}~nent. So the
university offers Greek, Greek and more Greek -- 13 courses this semester, including "The
Image of Greece in European Cinema" and "Problems in Greek History: Greek Democracy," as
well as trips to Greece and nearby areas for more than 90 students and faculty members
last year. The history department recently hired its second Byzantine specialist. And the
fund paid half the cost of a collection of 800 rare coins from medieval Greece.
"Institutions do get shaped by the interests of donors," said Robert K. Durkee, vice
president and secretary of Princeton.
As the nation’s ~~ealthiest colleges and universities report on their finances to Congress,
seeking to head off federal requirements that they spend at least 5 percent of their ever-
growing endowment income, new attention is being paid to how endownnents are structured,
and on the restrictions imposed by donors.
Aides to the Senate Finance Committee, which sent out a query in January about endo~Tment
practices to the 136 wealthiest colleges and universities, say they have received 131
responses and have begun to scrutinize them. The responses, some of which rmiversities
have made public, show that at some, including Harvard and the University of Texas, 80
percent or more of the endown~ent is constrained by donors’ wishes. But the responses do
not begin to detail the variety of these restrictions.
Recent intervie~{s with college officials show that while many restrictions are for broad
uses like faculty chairs and student aid, others are less central to the fttnctioning of a
modern university. Some are outright quirky.
"Endownnent funds are in some ways like a musetmb" said Mark G. Yudof, the chancellor of
the University of Texas System, recently tapped to take over the California system.
"Sometimes they are visionary. Sometimes they aren’t. Land titles was a big business in
another era; now, professors and students are not that interested in the subject."
Critics of universities say that while sizable portions of university endo~anents may be
restricted, the wealthiest universities still could use more of their endo~nents to reduce
tuition. "It is simply false to claim that donor restrictions prevent increased
spending," said Lynne Mttnson, an adjtunct research fellow at the Center for College
Affordability and Productivity. "Almost half of endowment funds at private institutions
are unrestricted, as are nearly a quarter of endowment dollars at wealthy public
institutions."
Restrictions on endo~ents can create tensions between donors and universities. Princeton,
for example, faces trial in a case brought by the heirs of a supermarket fortune over
whether a gift to help pay for program, s at its Woodrow Wilson School was used as intended.
Frederic J. Fransen created the Center for Excellence in Higher Education in Indiana last
year to help donors ensure that colleges respect their %~ishes when they give money.
Mr. Yudof recalled that when he was dean of the law school at the University of Texas,
Austin, from 1984 to 1994, "I had more oil and gas professorships than I had oil and gas
 Page 1289
law faculty."
He said he asked one donor for permission to use the money temporarily for a professor in
another field, while he searched for an oil and gas faculty member. (The donor said yes.)
"’Sometimes they consent," he said. "Sometimes they don’t. Usually you don’t go to court."
Going to court is an option if a university finds it can no longer comply with the terms
of a gift. The Virginia Tech Foundation took this step when it could not grant a
scholarship for students from Warwick County, because the county no longer existed.
Gifts can become unworkable in many ways. Consider the Dudley Professorship of Railroad
Engineering at Yale. The chair was created in 1923 with a $152,679 gift from Pli~non H.
Dudley, an engineer who worked for the New York Central Rail. His express desire, he said,
was that his research into railway safety be continued, "in particular the work in
connection with the development and improvement of designs of rails, roadbeds and
crossties."
But over the years, railway engineering lost its luster as a hot academic topic. And the
professorship sat vacant for more than 70 years.
"I was kind of stumped as to what to do with this chair," Yale’s president, Richard C.
Levin, a~nitted.
Then Yale realized that the steam engines and wood ties of yesterday had been replaced by
today’s ~gnetic levitation and superconductivity. So since 2002, A. Stephen Morse, an
engineer who has studied urban transportation and switching strategies for the control of
uninh~bited vehicles, has been the Dudley Professor of Engineering at Yale.
It is not just professorships that look different as decades go by.
Take the $1,000 bequest to Dartmouth in 1945, from a soldier who had died in Burma, which
his parents suggested be used to keep the Dartmouth president’s fireplace stocked with
wood. The president still has a fireplace, but it no longer burns wood; the money is used
for general expenses in the office.
A $10,000 gift from Dartmouth’s class of 1879 was directed to pay for trumpeters at
graduation. The trumpets still blare in June. But the endo}rment, now valued at more than a
quarter of a million dollars, also pays for the music director.
Edwin Webster Sanborn, a Dartmouth graduate, gave the college money to build Sanborn House
for the English department, hoping to foster the kind of close student associations his
father had had as a popular English professor. As a condition of the gift, the department
was to serve tea daily to its faculty and students at a nominal charge.
Tea is served in Sa~mborn today, daily at 4 p.m., for 10 cents a cup, open to anyone.
Sophia Yuan, the sophomore who hands out the tea as part of work-study, said the practice
was charming but drew few takers.
"I think it used to be a big tradition," Ms. Yuan said. "But as it got more modern, it got
washed out."
College officials say they try to be receptive to donor wishes, even when they sometimes
seem strange. That happened at Wellesley College, when Leonie Faroll, a 1949 graduate,
asked the college to use her gifts for the college’s power plant. When she died in 2003,
those gifts totaled $860,000.
"It ~ras about giving for something that makes the place run," said Lynn C. Miles, acting
vice president for resources at Wellesley. "Once a year she would come to campus, and we
would sit and have lemonade and Pepperidge Farm cookies at the power plant."
"If she had given money to feed the swans in Lake Waban," Ms. Miles added, referring to a
small lake on campus, "we might have tried to talk her out of it."
Ms. Faroll later left the college more than $27 million in her will, the largest bequest
the college ever received. Some could be used for the science center; the rest was for the
power plant.

The Oakland Press

Michigan needs to encourage the charter school movement

By GLENN GILBERT Of The Oakland Press

The public will hear increasing discussion about what to do with failing public schools in
the coming months as districts seek to meet the requirements of the six-year-old federal
No Ct~ld Left Behind Act.

The law promises sanctions up to and including closing schools. But no schools have been
closed yet as a result of NCLB.

One alternative that clearly is working is charter schools. These are ptJolic schools open
~6
 Page 1290
to all students. If the nrm~er of applicants exceeds capacity, lotteries are held to
determine enrollment.

Under Michigan law, charter schools can be formed under the umbrella of a college or
university, local or intermediate school district.

Basically, parties interested in forming a school must apply to an authorizer.

Of 230 such institutions in the state, iSO are authorized by universities. They are capped
at tl~t n~~~er by law.

Co1~mlunity colleges authorized 37 charter schools -- or public school academies, as they

are often referred to -- in the 2006-07 school year. Thirty were authorized by
intermediate districts and 13 by local districts.

"Charter schools crop up where there are unmet needs," said Stephanie Van Koevering,
executive director of the Michigan Council of Charter School Authorizers. "That’s why you
see so many in the Detroit area."

Often they are formed around specific purposes. For instance, they may offer a Montessori
method of teaching, an emphasis on fine arts, technical or vocational training or a back-
to-basics approach.
This is reflected in the n~nes of two of the four charter schools in Pontiac. The Arts and
Technology Academy is located at 48980 Woo~~ard Ave. and the Life Skills Center is located
at 142 Auburn Ave. These two institutions were authorized by Bay Mills Community College,
which is in northern Michigan.

There are three other charter schools in Pontiac. Great Lakes Academy, 46312 Woodward
Ave., was authorized by Eastern Michigan University; Walton Charter Academy, 744 East
Walton Blvd, was authorized by Northern Michigan University; and the Pontiac Academy for
Excellence, 196 Oakland Ave., was authorized by Saginaw Valley State University.

There are 17 charter schools in Oakland County. Across the state, they are
disproportionately located in urban areas. Five percent of Michigan’s public school
students attend charter schools.
This has steadily grown. The fall 2006 count of 98,667 represented a 7.7-percent gain over
fall 2005 figures, according to the latest report on charter schools put out by the
Michigan Department of Education.

Central Michigan University is the largest authorizer of charter schools in Michigan’s

higher education conu~unity with 57. After Michigan adopted its law enabling formation of
charter schools in 1993, then CMU President Leonard Plachta encouraged the university to
become the state’s first authorizer of charter public schools. He thought they could
provide a link to grades K-12 and enhance CMU’s role as a leading trainer of teachers,
according to James Goenner, executive director of what is now the Center for Charter
Schools at CHU.

Goenner thinks charter schools can provide an alternative to schools that fail to meet
standards of No Child Left Behind. He sees a resemblance to charter schools in Coy.
Jerznifer Granholm’s push for small high schools to replace problematic large ones.

In her state-of-the-state message in January, Granholm said breaking up large high schools
into several smaller ones would help high-risk students achieve higher academic goals if
such schools emphasized strong personal relationships, consistent discipline and real-
world relevance.

"These are charters by a different name," Goenner said, but without the performance
contract and consequences for failure that are part of the charter concept.

Charter schools have been criticized for failing to consistently outperform their local
K-12 peers. But that is not necessarily their goal. Their purpose is to reach students in
ways that conventional schools may not, according to Goenner and Van Koevering. Their
purpose is to offer a choice, competition ~]d innovation.

Michigan established charter schools because previously, only affluent fa~ilies with
access to private schools could make decisions about where and how their children would be
~7
 Page 1291
educated. Charter schools were designed to make free, public educational options available
to all children.

The Michigan Council of Charter School Authorizers says charters save Michigan taxpayers
$i billion over a five-year period and achieve better outcomes for many of the students.
This is because the state has capped their expenses at $7,175 per student, $2,612 less
than the average spent per student in Michigan. Generally, such schools are staffed by
non-union employees.

State Rep. Tim Melton, an Auburn Hills Democrat who chairs the House Education Committee,
said he would like to find a way to encourage charter schools to open more high schools.
Typically, high schools are more expensive to operate, but students who attend a K-8
charter school are left without an alternative when they reach ninth-grade, he says.
Perhaps the problem can be solved by encouraging such schools to form partnerships with
charter schools offering higher grades, Melton says.

In Pontiac, the Life Skills Center serves only grades nine to 12 while only the Pontiac
Academy for Excellence covers K-12.

Melton also is concerned about the lack of transportation to and from charter schools.

Van Koevering points out, however, that while Michigan law does not require public school
districts to offer transportation, if they do so for one, they must do so for all. Charter
schools, meanwhile, are required to consider the whole state as their service area.
Michigan needs to encourage the charter school movement. One size does not fit all.
Students need to be matched to teaching styles that best suit their particular situations.

Glenn Gilbert is executive editor of The Oakland Press. Contact him at (248) 745-4587 or
by e-mail at glenn, gilbert@oakpress.com.

Washington Post

For Younger Generations, First Lesson In Inflation

By Kirstin Downey?Washington Post Staff Writer?
Sunday, April 13, 2008; C01
Economic theory is leaping out of the textbook and into real life for people in their
teens, 20s and 30s, who are experiencing inflation for the first time.
dulie Catan, 23, was used to her regular pizza special: two large pies delivered to her
house for $20. But when she called recently to place an order, the restaurant o~Tner told
her she would get only one large pizza and a side salad for that price.
"Why is it so much money?" Catan, a college student in New York visiting her sister in
Alexandria, recalled asking. "What happened to the deal?"
The owner blamed it on inflation: Flour costs more, he said. Catan had to think back to
remember the meaning of the word.
"I learned about it in social studies class -- I think it happened, like, during the Great
Depression," she said recently, as she strolled down an Alexandria street with her friend
~ny Mason, who has noticed prices rising as well.
"It’s, like, $3.50 for a bagel, and it used to be $1.50," Mason said.
For two decades, Americans have been spared the pain of fast-rising prices. The Federal
Reserve had effectively kept inflation at bay by carefully moderating the pace of lending,
mainly by raising and lowering interest rate to speed or slow economic activity, but the
patterns have been disrupted by easy credit, financial instability and surging demand for
commodities on the global market.
The last time prices rose marked.ly was in the 1970s and early 1980s, when dor~le-digit
inflation led to wrenching economic recessions. In 1980, inflation reached almost 14
percent, but it has been lower than 3.5 percent for a decade.
But inflation is back. Prices have risen 9.2 percent since 2006 for groceries, gasoline,
health care and other staples. It comes as wages continue to languish. The median family
income has dipped 2. 6 percent since 2000, or almost $2,00@ a year.
Across the region, parents and grandparents are sharing with their children stories about
hard times and how their relatives coped, a conunon pattern when economic eras change, said
Lisa Wise, executive director of the Center for a New American Dream, a Tako~ Park-based
18
 Page 1292
nonprofit that promotes cons~~er education and a thriftier approach to living.
"Money is very emotional," Wise said. "There is a psychological undertone in talking about
the economy. It triggers a f~ily’s sense of their o~-n history and their o~~] fa~ily’s
experience."
Rising prices might bring an end to the "i~ediate gratification" culture in the United
States, Wise said. People raised in the 1930s were highly conscious of the value of the
dollar and spent carefully, she said, but Americans have since developed careless spending
habits. Others have not had to worry about looking for ways to reduce spending.
"A lot of adults, even those who lived through inflation in the past, have become
forgetful about it," said Irene Leech, a professor of cons~ner studies at Virginia Tech.
She said her students are ~ust catching glimpses now.
Money is a frequent topic of conversation in the Kobor home in Great Falls. Samantha
Kobor, 14, of Great Falls, receives up to $20 a week, depending on how many chores she
does, but it doesn’t go as far as it once did. She recognized it as inflation, a word she
first learned about in fourth grade, then again in her eighth-grade civics class.
"Now I see I don’t have the money to buy wb~t I want," she said, noting that she is
worrying about how much gasoline costs, because she wants to get her driver’s license in
two years.
She ~ld her mother, Pat, have talked about rising prices and try to cut costs by careful
comparison shopping at the grocery store. Her mother told her that when she was a student
in England, people saved money by putting coins into a meter to pay for home heating
instead of being surprised by an unexpectedly large bill a month later.
Amber Williams, 15, the youngest of five children, is hearing a lot about inflation, too.
Her mother, who lives in D~nfries, worries about money, particularly when she is buying
gasoline.
"She’s really, really frustrated with it, 9ust exasperated," Williams said, adding that
her mother told her she thought it hadn’t been this bad since Amber’s grandfather’s
younger days, when prices rose sharply after World War II. In 1947, prices shot up almost
15 percent. During the Depression, prices dropped, falling by 10.3 percent in 1932.
Triinm Tennelo, 28, program director of a homeless shelter in Arlington County, said she
had been shocked by the change in prices in ~ust the few years since she began supporting
herself.
"The last magor inflation was in the Carter era, ~ust before I was born," said Tennelo. "I
don’t recall it ever being as big an issue in my lifetime as it is now."
The experience is also u~]precedented in what Steve Roman, 25, of Kensington, calls his
"semi-adult life."
"Everything in the grocery store goes up," said Roilmn, a marketing assistant with a think
tank in the District. "The tricky part is that people’s incomes don’t rise."
Zack Stafford, 20, a student at George Washington University, scoffed when asked about
inflation. He said he isn’t that affected by it because his parents pay most of his bills.
Then he thought some more. Milk, he said, has risen to more than $3 a gallon. "I drink a
lot of milk. I eat a lot of cereal," he said, the realization da~ning slowly on his face.

19
 Page 1293

04.13.08 In the Nexvs

1) Washington Post: Bailout Nation (David Ignatius)

2) Washington Post: Horrors of a ’Crisis’ (George Will)[2

3) Washington Post: IEaine Touts Legislative Reforms for Mentally Ill (Michael
Alison Chandler)

4) Washington Post: Commando Performance; As the one-year anniversary of the

Virginia Tech rampage approaches, students all over the country are storming
campuses with (toy) guns. What kind of game is this? (Laura Wexler)

5) Louisville Cornier-Journal: Editorial: Confronting the rising dropout rates

6) Chattanooga Times Free Press: Tennessee seeking standard grad rate (Kelli
Gauthier)

7) Jackson Clarion Ledger: State to change way it computes grad rates [2 (Rebecca
Hdmes) [2

8) Assodated Pl’ess; Educators work to boost East High School’s graduation rate
(Ben Fulton)

9) Nashua Tdegraph: Nation deserves debates on failing schools (Morton

Kondracke)

10) The New York Times: When Strings Are Attached, Quirky Gifts Can Limit
Universities (Karen Arenson)

11) The Oakland Press: Michigan needs to encourage the charter school movement
(Glenn Gilber0

12) Washington Post: For Younger Generations, First Lesson In Inflation (IcLirstin
Downey) U
 Page 1294

Washington Post
Bail ou t Na ti on

By David Ignatius

Sunday, April 13, 2008; B07

As every parent kitows, the danger of cutting a special tn’eak for one child is that all the
other children will demand the s~ne thing. "It’s not fair," goes the inevitable refrain.
"You said Susie could eat ice cream artd watch TV until ~nidnight, so why can’t I?" The
parents start caving, and family discipline is shot.

We’re now in a comparable cycle of bestowing special economic favors on members of

the national fanny who have been hint by the credit market crisis. "It’s not fair," argue
the housing interests and constraint advocacy groups. "Bear Stearns got a financial
bailout, so why shouldn’t we?" And they’re light, by the shnplest sclioolyard definition of
fahatess.

So the line grows of people demanding breaks on financial obligations they can’t afford.
Last week, the Bush adininistration agreedto rescue 100,000 homeowners who are at risk
of foreclosure on their mortgages. Congressional Democrats I~omptly mmotmced that
this wasn’t fah" enough and that they intended to expand the bailout to as many as 2
million distressed borrowers.

But why stop there? What about onerons commercM mortgages? And credit card debt?
And student looms? Why should anyone have to pay back anything? It’s not fair.

Economists talk about avoiding "moral hazard" -- the danger that byinsmfing people too
generously against risks you ~nay encourage them to take even greater risks. Who are
they kidding? We are now so deep into this hazard that we ought to invent a new nanm
for it. Moral myopia, perhaps.

As these special breaks proliferate, we are i~nplicitly creating a system of transfer

pasnnents that shifts money from the smart to the stupid, from the lucky to the tuilucky.
Well-managed banks that controlled their risk levels will subsidize poorly managed ones
that didn’t; prudent liomeowners who decided not to take the interest-oniy refinancing
loans will subsidize impradent ones who did.

There could be so many other, better ways to spend our tax dollars on housing subsidies:
Make loans directly to poor people so they can buy homes, say, or to needy veterans
coming back fiom ~ or~, orto people who’ve lost their jobs.

The other response to the financial crisis, in addition to the ever-widening circle of
bailouts, is increased regulation. And here, too, so~ne argue that the cme might be nearly
 Page 1295

as dangerons as the disease. The Economist ma~azine made that argument this month
when it warned that "bold re-regulation could damage the Vel3~ economies it is designed
to protect." Certainly the last round of crisis-&iven regulation -- file Sarbanes-Oxley
legislation that followed the Enron scandal -- created more busywork for accountants
than real protection against abuses.

But in this case, regulation is the right course -- and file plan for consolidated supervision
proposed by Treasttrv Secreta~ Henry Paulson is a good start. I’d favor going even
fitrfller and creating a super-regulator -- on the inodel of the British Financial Services
Autholity, ~vhich regulates all providers of financial services. Congress likes the cmlent
jumble of Balkanized mini-agencies, but that’s a mistake. As botmdaries dissolve among
finmlcial institutions and te cNtology creates new kinds of financial insmmlents,
regulation needs to keep pace -- and that’s best done with a big, modem institution that
can attract the best and the brightest to the task of monitoring the mm-kets.

The world’s fmmtcial elites are pondering the wreckage as they gather in Washington this
weekend for the spring meeting of the International Monetm_~ Fund and the World Banl~..
The IMF has released a scary new "Global Financial Stability Report" that reckons U.S.
residential moalcgage losses at about $565 billion and total credit ~narket losses at a
stupendous $945 billion. The IIvIF warns against a" ’rush to regulate,’ especially in ways
that unduly stifle innovation or that could exacerbate the effects of the cmlent credit
squeeze." But the report also includes along list of reform measmes to improve the
stability and transparency of tile markets.

A~nong the financial titans these days, what one mainly hears are sighs of relief. They’ve
gotten their bailout from the Federal Reserve, and they’re hoping that the worst is over.
Now, htevitably, come the cries for equal treat~nent -- the "me, too" bailouts for folks on
Main Street who are lucky enough to have a lobbyist.

Congress will say yes -- it would be ]nanifestly unfair to do otherwise. But after
shredding the moral hazmd bmaim~, we should understand t!tat the next Ntancial crisis,
when it comes, is bound to be even worse.

Washington Post

Horrors of a ’Crisis’

By George F. Will []

Sunday, April 1:3, 2008; B07

Duling presidential elections, ~vhen candidates postulate fltis or that "crisis" for which
 Page 1296

each is the indispensable and sufficient cure, economic hypochonda~a is encottraged, so a

sense of suffering is rampallt. Recently the Wall Street Joll/lafll~ like Joseph Com’ad
contemplating the Congo, surveyed todabZs economic jangle and cried, "The horror! The
horror["

Declines in housing values and the stock market are causing soine Americans to delay
retirement. A Kansas Cit2 man had been eager to retire to Arizona hit now, the Join-hal
says, "figures he’ll stay put for another couple of years." He is 59.

So, this is a facet of today’s hydra-headed "crisis" -- the man midst linger in the labor
force tmtil, say, 62. That is the earliest age at which a person can, and most recipients do,
begin collecting Social Security.

The propoltion of people aged 55 to 64 who are working rose 1.5 percentage points from
April 2007 to February 2008, during which the percentage of working Americans older
than 65 rose two-te~Iths of one percentage point. The Jotmlal grimly repolted, "The
prospect of millions of grandparents toiling away in their golden ye ms doesn’t square
with the American dream."

Oh? The idea that protracted golden years of idleness are a mfivelsal fight is a delusion of
recent vintage. Deranged by the entitlement mentahty fostered by a metastasizing welfare
state, Americans now have such low pain thresholds that suffering is defined as a slight
delay in beginning a subsidized retirement often lasting one-third of the retiree’s adult
lifetime.

In 1935, when Congress enacted Social Seculity, protl~cted retirelnent was a luxury
enjoyed by a tiny sliver of the population. Back then, Congress did its alitlmletic
rtN~lessly: When it set the retirement age at 65, the life expectancy of an adult A~nerican
male was 65. If in 1935 Congress had indexed the retirement age to life expectancy,
today’s retirement age would be 75.

The standard definition of a recession -- two consecutive quarters of contraction -- means

~ve still are probably several months sho~t of being in one. Tile 9.9 percent flrst-qumter
decline of the Standard & Poor 500 barely ranks mnong the 40 worst quarterly losses in
the index’s history. Leave aside the 39.4 percent decline in the second qualter of 1932.
The economy experienced no long-term tmunla because of the declines of 10.3 percent,
14.5 percent and 23.2 percent in the third quarter of 1998, tile third quarter of 1990 ,and
the fourth quarter of 1987, respectively.

Yes, in January single-family homes in major metropolitan areas lost 10.7 percent of their
value from last January. To find such a lalge decline in a year you must peer back into
the mists ofprehistory, all the way back to... the 1990s. Fmthermore, the vast majority
of homeowners will remain well ahead, even after the market conects for housing
inflation.
 Page 1297

By one measure, between the beginning of 2000 and the middle of 2006, as the consumer
price index was rising 21 percent, average housing l~ices rose 93 percent -- and much
more in some markets (Miami 180 percent; Los Am~eles, 175 percent; Washington,
D.C., 150 percent).

Not long ago there was broad agreement that too nmch of AJneficar~s’ wealth ~vas tied np
in the nation’s housing stock and that the principal i~npediment to homeomtexship was
not a scat’city of cheap mortgages but the prevalence of high housing prices. Hence
deflation of housing prices would be desirable.

So far dttring this "crisis," the homeowne~ship rate has declined just three-teuths of 1
percent since it peaked in 2004. At 67.8 percent, it remains higher than it was when
President Bill Clinton left office.

Subprime mortgages are a small minority of mortgages, and only a minority of subprime
borrowers ~te not malting their payments. Casting this minority of a minority as victims
of "predatory" lending fits the liberal narralive that most Americans are victi~ns of this or
that sinister elite or i~npe1~onal force and are not co~npetent to cope with life’s
complexities without government supervision.

The politics of this may; however, be more complex than the compassion chort~s
supposes. The 96 percent of mortgage bolrowers who are flflfilling their cormnitments,
often by scrimping, ~nay be grmnpy byst~ders if many of the other 4 percent -- those
who found the phrase "variable rate" impenetrably ~nystefious -- are eligible for
ameliorations of their obligations.

What next? Adults still bttrdened with student loans have not yet mmounced their
entitlement to relief, but as they watch this subprime drama, they might.

Washington Post

Kaine Touts Legislative Reforms for Mentally Ill

By Mi chad Alison C handler [~, Washington Post Staft Writer

~Nunday, April 13, 2008; C07

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) told Northern Vironia residents yesterday that the state has
taken steps to con’ect many of the problems in its inental health system that might have
contributed to Seung Hui Cho’s shooting rampage nearly a year ago at ~ia Tech.

The governor highlighted several reforms in a package of bills he signed last week, which
 Page 1298

expand selwices and monitoling for those with mental illness, to an audience of more than
200 residents and local officials in Falls Ch~n’cl’k an area close to home for fmnilies of
many of the victims and Cho.

Wednesday marks the anniversary of the rampage by Cho, ~vho took 32 lives and then his
own on the Blacksburg campus. Two yeats earlier, a judge had ordered Cho to seek
treatment, saying he ~vas an imminent clanger to hflnself, but neitlier the court, the
university nor any other agency follo~ved up to see that he received it.

A state panel appointed by Kaine to investigate the massacre offered "a real indictment of
this state’s lack of commitment to cormlnmity mental heaJth se~wice," Kaine said
yesterday.

"We did not fired it well. We did not expect much from it,"he said.

So in Januar-y, the governor and General Assembly set out to improve services for more
people. They lowered the criteria for someone to be involtmtmily sent into treatment, and
they added $42 million to the state’s comtmmity health-care budget to add caseworkers
and psychiatrists to offer services to inore people, "so they don’t have to be seriously
mentally fll to get in and see someone," Kaine said.

Tlie elected officials also developed measures to increase accotmtability in the system so
tliere will be more oversight if someone is ordered into treatment.

The to~m hall meeting at Luther Jackson Ivliddle School in Falls Charch was the last in a
series of such gatherings the governor has held since the General Assembly adj otu~ted
nearly four weeks ago.

The governor also tfighiighted other laws passed this year, including one that pushes back
the time that foreclosure proceedings will begin for those in danger of losing their hornes.
He also pointed out goals he did not accomplish, including closing a loophole ttmt
permits tmlicensed vendors to sell gtms at gun shows without reqtthing a baclcgaound
check and identifying new fimding sources for transportation ~naintenance and new
construction.

Many in the audience ~vore green stickers that read "FUND TRANSPORTATION
NOW." They applauded when he said he is platming to call for a special session this
spring to come up with solutions for gridlock and aging infrastn~cture. Many Republicans
oppose tax increases for t~anspo~tation, so it is not clear that a solution is possible this
yem’.

Del. Vivian E. Watts (D-Fahfax), who attended the meeting, said reforming the mental
health system was a "wonderfitl, constructive experience" because it brought Republicans
and Democrats together in what she described as an increasingly polarized envhoranent
in Richmond. "Wouldn’t it be 1rice if we could extend" that cooperation to the state’s
 Page 1299

transportation needs, she said.

Dozens of people tttmed out to oppose construction of a proposed coal-fire power plant in
sonthwest ~ which Kaine suppo~ts, and encourzge the governor to lnomote
greener forms of energy.

Washington Post
Commando Performance

As the one-yem" anniversary of the Virginia Tech rampage approaches, students all
over ~he count~3’ are storming campuses with (toy) guns. What ldnd of game is this?

By Laura Wexler M

Sunday, April 13, 2008; W16

ON A THURSDAY MORNING LAST FALL, MAX TEMKIN STOOD IN HIS DORM

ROOM at Goucher College and took inventory of his arsenal.

"This is the Neff Maverick," he said, brandishing a bright blne-and-yellow plastic

revolver. "It’s reliable, tile bread and butter of gtms. It goes eve13mchere with ine when I’m
playing." He filled each oftha glm’s six ctmmbers with a sot[ foam dait and fired at the
~,wall opposite him. Some of the darts stuck to the wall; some botmced offand fell to the
floor.

Next, he demonstrated the Nerf Atom Blaster, which shoots foam balls, and tile Nerf
Firefly, a contraption that emits a light flmh each time it releases a dalt. Last, he brought
out his newest gun, the Nerf Longshot. "Other than the Maverick, this is probably tile
coolest gun ever made," he said. "This has a collapsing stock, bipeds so you can snipe
with it and legitilnate bolt action. I never had a toy this cool when I was a kid."

Temldn was dressed in a white Oxford shil-t, a nmroon necMie, gray sweatel; jeans and
black Chuck Taylor sneakers. At 21, he is baby-faced and boyish. The Longshot-- a
three-foot-long Rube Goldbelg nlarvel of fluorescent blue, yellow and orange hard-
molded plastic -- looks nearly as tall as he is.

In all, Temkin owns 10 Nerfguns, but the Maverick and the Longshot (designed for ages
6 and up) were the two he plalmed to rely on when the galne of Hulnans vs. Zombies
began for the fiNl time at Goucher, a small liberal arts college nollh of Baltimore. At its
most basic, Humans vs. Zombies (also known as H v. Z, or Zombies) is an inmlersive
game of tag based upon the archetypal zombie imnative: All players except for the
 Page 1300

"original zombie," or O.Z., begin the game as hmnans. The O.Z. feeds on the hmnans one
by one, convmting them to zombies who, in turn, "feed on" other humans by tagging
theIn -- and must make a Nil every 48 hom~ or starve to death. Meanwtfile, the humans
avoid being eaten by the zombies either by biding -- holing up in their do~xn rooms or
sleeping in the litn’m3~ -- or stunning the zombies for 15 n~mtes with Neff dints and
balled-np sock "grenades." The gmne, which has fall and spring versions, is played all
over campus 24 hom-s a day for days, and sometimes weeks, on end. It’s over when all of
the humans have perished or all of the zo~nbies have starved.

The 2005 inangural Zombies game daew about 70 Goucher studeuts. Since thee as many
as 200 have played, malting it one of the most poptflar studeut activities -- even though
it’s not an official student activity -- mnong the school’s roughly 1,500 students. The
game has spread to other campuses, with fl~ottsands of students playing this month at
Cornell University, Pe~m State University, Bowling Green State University and the
University of Mind/land, an~ong others.

But as Zombies’ popularity has gown, criticism of it has grown, too -- especially since
last Atnil, ~vhen a severely distm’bed English major named Setm~ HUI Cho m-reed hi~nself
with two semiautomatic handgtms and killed 33 people, including himself, at ~
Tech University. In the immediate wake of that shooting, Humans vs. Zombies became
controvm, sial, raising a collegiate version of the prevailing question of our time: What is
the balance between secmity and fleedom? And it prompts another fascinating question:
What can a group of yotmg people learn about one another -- and themselves -- by
nmning arotmd ca~npus with Neff gtms for days on end?

Temldn, a jtmica, is a philosophy major who likes nothing more than to che~v on such
issues. Two yea’s alter first playing the game, he’s become one of its most vocal
evangelists on cantpus, speaking out fiom tlie pages of the student newspaper. He writes
with a fotmtain pen; he started Gouche~s debate teatn. But on that Thursday morning last
fall, he wasn’t interested in ruminating; he was preparing for war. He had read How to
Stay Alive in the Woods, Stm Tzu’s The Art of Wa~" and Rommel’s Infantry Attacks. He
had a police scanner tuned to Goucher’s sectaity fiequency. He had a do~n room chosen
for its tactical advantages -- quick exit via two doors and the window (as long as he
removed his air- conditioning mtit, which he is not supposed to have). He had a pair of
steel-toed "zombie-stomping boots" in the closet. And he had his new Nerf Longshot. "I
really want to do well dttring tiffs game," said Tenfidn, aiming at the ~vall and firing. "I’ve
never had a stupid emty death."

TEN DAYS LATER, JUST FOUR DAYS BEFORE HUMANS VS. ZOMBIES WAS
TO BEGIN AT MIDNIGHT, 50 students waited in one of Goucher’s residence hall
lounges. When senior Chiis Weed walkedinjnst alter 9 p.m., they chanted, "Speech!
Speech! Speech! Speech!"

In 2005, Weed and his then-roommate Brad Sappington invented Humans vs. Zombies to
amuse themselves and their fliends. When Sappington graduated in 2006, he left Weed as
the unlikely figure at the center of the burgeoning Zoinbies phenomenon. Weed is tail
 Page 1301

and thilL with deep brown eyes and apple-red cheeks. At 22, he’s a dremner ~vho speaks
softly, gently and infrequently. In his fall semester philosophy class, tie didn’t participate
once, while Temldn talked so often that on at least one occasion the professor sighed and
said, "Let’s hear from someone besides Max, please." But this night, in response to the
crowd’s chant, Weed yelled back, "You’re all nerds!"

It was not an insult. At Goucher, which prides itself on encot~raging students to be

individuals, a label such as "herd" is far less dmnaging than it ‘,vouldbe elsewhere. And,
any~vay, what Weed really meant was, "We’re all nerds." To play a game as iruntersive
and fantastical as Zombies is to give oneself over completely and utterly, despite how
silly it looks, despite what otheIs might ttfink. That is the definition of herd.

After the initial fiivolity, Weed and the other game orgmtizers, who are knowq~ as
moderators, or "mods," tinned serious. They’d called this meeting to make sure each
player had signed two legal romans instituted in the wake of the Vhginia Tech shooting,
and to emphasize the most impoltant rules of the gan~e: Don’t shoot nonplayers; don’t use
or cm13~ guns visibly in academic bttildings; ~td don’t use cars dating game play. "No
cars, no cars, no cars," Weed said, leaning heavily on that rale because in a previous
ga~ne he’d had to kick out a player for using his cat to avoid zombies. Weed watned the
players that if they didn’t comply with the roles, they would tineaten the futttre of
Zombies at Goueher. "We’ve had to deal with alot of crap about people not liking the
gmue," Weed said. "Some people are really angry about this."

Even before the Vh’ginia Tech shooting, Goucher’s associate dean of students, E~nily
Per, said she had received at least a dozen o~ul and e-mail complaints about the game.
On April 16 last year, as soon as she heard about the shooting at Vhginia Tech, Per
called Temldn and told hhn to immediately halt the Zombies game that had been rtuming
for about a ‘,veek. "We don’t want students running around with guns today," Per said she
told hhn. "There ,,was a heightened sense of fragility."

Ultimately, however, Goucher president Sanford Ungar allowed the game to continue
after meeting with the Zolnbies orgmfize~, who presented administrators with a gift-
wrapped Neff grin addressed to his or her "inner child." The gitl of the toy gtms was an
attempt to reinforce the idea that Hurmans vs. Zombies is a gan~e, rather than an "issue,"
said Tenfldn, who catne up with the idea. Ungar saw his decision as part of a larger
refi~sal to oveneact to what he called the "ho~rific abenation" at Virginia Tech. As he
reore in Goucher’s aiarmti quatlefly last sp~ing: "We ‘,viii not sign on to trendy, but
unproven, electronic ale~ systems... We w~ not engage in tawdry one-ups~nanship to
try to claim that we are safer-than-thou... And we will not seek to label as ’dangerous’
every student who is merely different... We ~nust make our decisions with an eye
toward strildng a delicate balance between secmity and personal freedom."

Even so, Goucher adininistrators wanted to provide everyone on campus the chance to
voice their thoughts about the gmne. So Goucher’s chaplain scheduled a highly structured
public meeting onthe eve of the fall games. That day, nearly 100 people crowded into a
classa-ooln to listen as Weed explained the gatne’s ability to bring together disparate
 Page 1302

groups of ldds and Ter!!tin waxed poetic. "I kno~v the Zombies gmne is a really weird,
freaky thing," he said. "It’s, like, not socMly acceptable... But we’re ~vehd kids with
weird pastimes, and we’re part of a group. That’s a really incredible feeling."

While the opponents acknowledged the ga~ne’s benefits, tlrey cx~ticized its representation
ofldlling and violence. Jenifer Jennings-Shaud, a member of the graduate education
faculty, spoke of ,arriving on campus one evening ,’rod seeing a manwith a gun nm over
the hill. "I was tenified," she said. "Guns scate me. Neffgnns, regt~u¯ guns. All gusts."
Then she began to cry. English professor JeffMyers raised questions about the ethics of
"playing war" while an actual war" is happeifing in ~. Peace studies instructor Fran
Donelan theorized about the possible link between fantasy violence and actual violence.
"There have been ~nany studies done about how a society’s gaines reflect the society," she
said. "Most of the games in this country revolve around htmting people down and killing
them."

A similar conversation -- or atgument, in some cases -- continues at several c~rtpnses

where the game is played. At Maryland and Bowlin~ letters in the student
newspapers have criticized Zombies players for their insensitivity to the Virginia Tech
victiins. At Whitman College in Washington state, game administrators decided toy
we apons were to o s ensifive on a college campus in light of the Virginia T e ch shooting
and banned Neff guns dus~ng their fall game. Bowling Green will not use the guns this
spring. At Bntler University in Indiana, administrators have banned Zombies outright.
"People are a little edgy," said Butler’s dean of student life, Irene Stevens. "Given the
Virginia Tech incident, we didn’t feel it was appropriate for them to be going around
campus 24/7 carrying toy gusts." Pet continues to wonder whether she and the other
administrators are doing right by allowing the game to continue. "My ~vorst featis that an
ontsider will walk onto cantpns and pull areal gun, not knowing the kids are using Nke
guns," she said.

When concerns about the gmne fn~t surfaced last year, Weed took it personally. And
even as he’s come to tusderstand that students ranning around on campus With weapons
can scare some people, he stands fast in the belief that fear should not prevent fun. "Nerf
gtms are so innocuous," he said. "It’s the symbolisln of it that scares people. It’s people
letting feat" mn their lives."

We ed was 14 when the Aplil 1999 Colusnbine High School shooting occmxed. In the
wake of the Coloa,-ado inassacre, administrators at the private school Weed attended
mandated that one door in each set of double doors be locked. "I guess it was to prevent a
big group of armed people from coming through the door, but it was ridiculous," he said.
"I thiikk they realized they couldn’t do anything, so it was a symbolic action to make
parents feel better."

Tenfldn’s public school instituted lockdown drills after Colusnbine, in which the students
would tmn offthe lights artd sit against the wall where the door was, so if a shooter
looked through the ,,vindow of the door, he’d think the classroom was empty. When Weed
and Temldn recall these measures, it’s almost as if they view the adults’ attempts to
 Page 1303

ensure their total safety as naive, sensatioimlist and abit silly -- even childish. They and
the other inode~utors say they are unwilling to allow what they see as a knee-jerk reaction
to a tmrible event intpinge on their personal freedom. "How has the Virginia Tech
shooting affected me personally?" Temldn asked. "It’s reduced my individual liberty as a
student because of the reaction to it. I obviously think that school shootings are a tragedy
¯.. But I just don’t see how they connect to our game of tag. Making that kind of
connection is pure political correctness -- the elevation of feeling good over doing fight."

Coincidentally, Goucher’s spring 2008 game begins on Aplil 16, the one-year annivel~ary
of the ratnpage at Vh-ginia Tech. Despite their rejection of a link between the game and
cmnpus violence, the organizers have decided to make the flint day gan-fiee, out of
deference to those who were killed.

AT APPROXIMATELY 10 A.M. ON OPENING GAME DAY LAST NOVEMBER, the

fnst of 160 humans at Goucher perished when sophomore E~ika Cagtona lX~shad up to
one of her friends saying, "Dude, I know who the O.Z. is!" When the guy said, "Who?"
she said, "Me!" and tagged him. Then she took his ID number to record her kill at the
Web site the roods had created.

Cardona had the most kills of any zombie during the previous spring’s game, and she’s a
dedicated player, which is why the mods chose her to be the O.Z. (in general, women
make up about one-thh’d of the Zombies players). During t~vo smnmers in high school,
she participated in roving gmnes of Capture the Flag on the streets of Manhattan, and she
once attended amass pillow fight in Union Square. "I realized early on tha it was kind of
important to have a sense of play outside work and schoolwork," said Cardona.

For the two nights before the game begins, she dreamed ofnmning ~uound and tagging
kids. "It’s definitely taking me ove~;" she said. After tagging her fh’st victhn, she
continued to stalk the campus disguised as a human, with a blue bandanna on her leg and
her NeffReactor in her hand.

A few hours later, the 15 or so htmaaus holed up in Van Meter Hall, one of Goucher’s
main classroom buildings, checked the Web site and were alauned to discover that the
O.Z. had already recorded seven kills. It was only the N’st day of play, but these htnnans
were already in full game mode. Sutton Ashby was dressed all in black, wearing leg and
shoulder holsters ttmt hold four of the seven gtms he owns. (Because gmne rifles state that
weapons can’t be visible in academic buildings, Ashby’s guns were stowed in aplastic
gmbage bag next to his backpack.) He had his student ID card tapedto his w~ist so he
could wave it in fiont of the card readers and quicldy unlock dools. Jon Simon was
wearing a black hunting vest and cargo pants, and he canied a mha’or that he could
extend around comers to spot zombies lying in wait. Peter D auilchttk had stocked up on
granola, fruit bars, ~aisins and V-8 -- dining hails are not "safe zones," he said. All wore
bandannas tied arotmd their rams or legs fl~at identified them as httmans; if they got
tagged and became zombies, they’d transfer the bandamkas to their heads.

By 2:30 p.m. the next day, the htnnan population was down fi’om 150 to 100 and Van
 Page 1304

Meter was smloanded by zoinbies, including O.Z. Cardona, who was lying on her
stomach outside the basement door, hoping to catch anSl~specting humans leaving class.

On the one hand, Cardona was feeling pretty good -- she’d bagged arecord 18 kills the
first day, and she was ready to devote her entire weekend to eradicating file human
population. On the other hand, the htunans who’d perished were the low-hanging fi’tlit.
She wanted Temldn and a few other key players, who were holed tip inside Van Meter.
Thiough the windo~vs, Cardona saw them chatting and checking e-inail. "I don’t want to
move from here," she said after waiting 30 minutes in the November chill. "It’s a hostage
situation. We’re psyching them out."

One of the hlmtan militia coimnanders, Boman Modine, a huslcy senior with a disheveled
mop of cm’ly hair and a penchant for fantasy games, came up with an escape plan for the
40-odd hnmans scattered throughout Van Meter. And although Temkin had reservations,
he agreed to follow orders, because Modine was the imaldng officer and Temldn is a film
believer in chain of coImnand. According to the plan, all the freshinan and inexperienced
players wottld run out the front of Van Meter and draw the zombies’ attention. The Inore
experienced militia members would go out the back and take on the zombies there. Then
the humans would reconvene in an open field behind the building.

On cue, a group of humans charged out the front door with their guns blazing, and
Telnkin mid two others ran out the main back door. One of Temlcin’s corarades died
before Modine anived with backllp, but it wasn’t a bad showing, considel~ng that the
building was ma~’olmded. The freshmen who ran out the front suffered no losses at all.

Modine split file tmmans into thi’ee platoons, with Telnkin at the hehn of one as they
marched thi’ough the middle of campus. Later, Temkin would bask in the glory of that
moment. "I commanded 40 people," he said. "I feel like I did something big."

Temkin has no militm-y training and no plans to join the military. But lie and file others
marching with tim seemed hlmgry for at least part of the soldiel~s e~cpelience -- the
friendships forged trader ilre, the intensity of life-or-death situations, the chance to be
tested. As one militiameinber said: "You get to be Arnold Schwarzene~g_~. You get to
go blazing into a pack of people and save the day."

It’s exactly this viewpoint that distlubs Myers, the English professor who spoke out
dining the comlmmity conversation. "I don’t have anything specifically against the game
as a game," he said. "What sort of troubled lne was seeing young men walking around
campus in camouflage and doing a kind of walk I would chm~cterize as a swagger or
aggressive pose. It’s clearly role-playing, but, as Shakespeare would say, ’All the world’s
a stage,’ So the roles say a lot about who people are. The ganle perhaps gives some
insight into why war is so attractive to young men."

SEVERAL HOURS AFTER THE STANDOFF OUTSIDE VAN IVIETER THAT

FRIDAY AFTERNOON -- which yeas l~ar from the bloodbath Cardona had hoped for --
 Page 1305

Cardona and a pack of zomloies had gathered on the trill next to the student pat’king lot,
awaiting the humans, whom they’d learned were marching tl~ongh the woods that ring
Goucher’s campus, headed their way. When the humans reaiized the zombies were lying
in wait, Modine and fellow inilitia coimnender Matt Sabine huddled to decide whether
the troops should press deeper into the woods or rush the zombies. The decision was to
rush, so the humans made a quarter-turn ~md charged up the hill, shooting and yelling. In
the ensuing melee all the zombies were stanned by Neff darts before they could tag
anyone, and the hmnans ran offto the safety of their doixn rooms.

"We didn’t get mlyone?" O.Z. Cardona said, her chest rising and l~alling from exmtion.
"We failed miserably."

A few hours later, the zombies attacked hi Tutfle House, a dorm, but the htmlans
comtnandeered the stairwells, kJloc!dng the zombies back every time they attempted to
advance. Aller the 90-minute siege ended, Temldn and the other hurm~tns ordered Chinese
food and asked the delivery guy to pass it through the window.

When Cm’dona finally went to bed at 3 a.m., she cheamt of zombies for the third night in
a rosY.

By 4 p.m. Satttrday, half the tnunans had perished, tagged here and there on the way to
class or to a friend’s dorm or to the bathroom. But Temldn remained at large. He was due
any moment to rett~l from a field t~ip, and the zombies had gathered at Van Meter to
atnbush him as he stepped offthe bus. "I want Max to die so bad," said Cmdona.

Suddenly Cardona yelled, "There’s the bus!" But iustead of coining toward Van Meter,
the bus ~vas traveling along the opposite side of campus to the student p~rking lot where
the melee had occurred the night before. Cardona and the rest of the horde raced offin
that directioiL i~mning past a group ofpelplexed groomslnen and biideslru~ids gathered
outside the chapel. But before she and her crew reached the edge ofcanlpus, azombie
who ~vas on the bus with Telnkin ran up to them and said, "Max got in his ca and ~vent
off campus" --which could be a violation of the gmne rules.

Weed, ~vho had come out fiom his doixa moIn to watch what he supposed would be
Temldn’s demise, called Temldn on his cellphone. "Are you in the car?." Weed asked.
When Temlcin said yes, Weed said, "We have to talk about this."

The previous night, daring the ~nmch thi’ough the woods, Weed had gazed at the dancing
mid singing hmnm~s mid said, "I could die a happy man fight now." But now, Weed was
quietly and powm~kflly angry. Weed’s phone kept tinging -- Temldn calling back -- but he
didn’t answer it. He wanted to delay the possibility of having to eject Temkin, the game’s
most atdent fan and ~nost recognizable spokesinan, for breaking one of the key rtfles of
the gmne: Don’t use your cat" to escape zombies.

A haif-hour later, Cardona raced tip the stai~s in Tnttle House to discover the glass in the
 Page 1306

fh’e extingnisha" case had been shattered: A zombie collided with it in the heat of battle.
He suffered only a ~ninor cut, but the word,,vent out that so~neone was hurt, and Te~nkin,
parldng his cm, heard and rushed to Tutfle. As he entered the building, his defenses
down, a ffeshlrnan zombie simply reached out and tagged lfim, and that ‘‘~as the end of
Temkin’s career as a httmml.

Later, Tenfldn explained that he’d wonied during rite entire field trip tmtil he got the idea
to askthe bus driver to switch the &’op-offspot. When he stepped offthe bus at the
student parking lot, he shot one zombie to stun her then told the other zombie who’d been
on file bus: "I’~n leaving. Do you want to fight me?" Alter that zombie walked away,
Temldn got into his car and ~kove to the store on an errand.

"IfI had Nlovcn people were coming toward me, I wouldn’t have gotten in the car," he
said. "I would have died."

Thot~gh some players believed hitrk some didn’t, and their doubt would leave Temkin
tom and troubled -- and uncharacteristically tongue-tied -- for weeks altei~,vard. In the
meantime, he checked the Web site. The taIly stood at 86 zombies, 64 humans. He took a
shower, changed his clothes and ran around with tile zombies until 2 a.m.

BY SUNDAY AFTERNOON, CARDONA HAD LOGGED 23 KILLS AND AT

LEAST ONE IMPORTANT ASSIST: She helped kill Modine. She hadn’t slept ~nuch,
and eve15~ few minutes a zombie called to report infolrnafion (or rumors) and ask her
what to do. "It’s a little exhausting," she said. "I’m not schooled in military strategy like
so~ne of the guys. I don’t prepare for this gmne like they do."

Later, as the zombies were walking en masse toward the residential quad, Modine got a
call on his cellphone. He hung up, then quieted the crowd before issuing a l~’oclamation.
"Jonathan Suss just killed Matt Sabine!"

The crowd chanted, "Suss! Suss! Suss[" Even on a campus full of eccentric students,
Suss, a ffeshinan, stands out. He is the polar opposite of senior Sabine, a nfflitia
co~mnander Temldn describes as "an alpha nerd."

When someone asked how Suss made his glorious ldll, Modine replied: "He was waiting
in the shower stall in the bathi’oom for eight horns. He tagged Sabine on iris way out of
the bathioom."

Fueled by the news that one of their weakest players had killed one of the strongest
human players, the zombies prepared to charge the 20 or so remaining hmnans, who were
gathered on file stone patio outside at the student center. Alter the zo~nbies’ initial n~sh,
only fore" httmans were left standing. Then the zombies charged again, and just one
htmmn remained.

Even though a few more humans were hiding in their dot:m rooms, the game felt
 Page 1307

effectively finished: The zombies won. Emotions had run high and low. Alliances had
been made and broken. People had revealed themselves to one another more fully in the
previous few days than in a semester or year of sitting next to one another in a class.

Everyone was th’ed. Everyone was hungry. Everyone had homeworkto do.

In the days aftelward, as players caught up on sleep and ate their fh’st fifll meals in a
while, Weed and the other mods pledged to create a centralized Web site that would
make it easy for anyone anywhere to start a game of Hmnans vs. Zombies. They
considered forming a limited liability company and incorporating new technology to
make the gmne more intmersive. And Weed daydreamed of buying a van and driving
from campus to campus, an itinerant tneacher spreading the gospel of Zombies to yotmg
people evel3~vhere.

"We’re never truly safe," he’d tell them. "And since we’re not safe, let’s have tim."

Laura Wexler is the author of Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America
and a writer in Baltimore. She can be reached at laura@laurawexler.com. She will be
fielding questions and comments about this article Jklonday at noon at
washingtonpost, com/liveonline.

Louisville Courier~Journal, KY

April 13, 2008

Confronting the rising dropout rates

It’s a lot later than we think. We’re raising an illiterate and uneducated genelntion, and
there’s inore to colne. On AInil 1, America’s Promise Alliance released a detailed study
revealing that fewer than half of the teenagel~ in 17 of the largest U.S. cities drop out of
high school before they graduate -- more than 1.2 million of them. The cost of this is
enolmous: billions of dollars in lost productivity for expensive social services and
(because ignorance begets crime) to build more prisons. Tiffs report solmded like an April
Fool’s joke on the grooving number of fools, meaning all of us.
Tile ttigh schod dropout resembles the fool depicted on Tarot cards -- standing at the
edge of a precipice, with no idea how fat-he’ll fall, when fall he will. It’s no coincidence
that the number symbol for the fool is a zero. A hlmdred times zero is still zero.
"When more than 1 million students a yea" drop out of high school, it’s more than a
problem, it’s a catastrophe," says Colin Powell, the former secretaty of State and
fo~mding ctminnat~ of America’s Promise Alliance. His wife, Al~na, chairs the Alliance
 Page 1308

now. Speaking as the old soldier he is, he describes these statistics ~ "a call to arms."
The Po~vells are joining Margaret Spellings, secretat7 of Education, to call for summits in
every state to figme out how to halt the decline in graduation rates, as well as to better
prepare public school graduates for ~vork and college.
Bm do we really need more meetings to talk endlessly (and tediously) about shopworn
educational ideas and stale theories? Alma Powell answers the question before someone
asks it: The summits ~von’t be jabber-jabber sessions. "They will be about action," and
demand that local, state and federal policymakers, grass roots conu~m,uities, parents,
students and advocates confiont the reality now.
The statistics show what see~ns obvious to everybody: City kids are far more likely to
live on the precipice than kids frown the subttrbs. The Editorial Projects in Education
Research Ceuter finds that graduation rates in city schools are 15 percentage points lower
than those in the subm-bs. In some cities, the disparity is as wide as 35 percent. It’s the
kids in the largest cities who can’t see the value of an education. Life on the street and the
gnmt jobs found there ought to make even homework look attractive.
Knowledge is power, and this is the lesson we have to find a way to teach. O~fly by
identifying hordfic statistical disparities can we begin to demand change. But, we mnst
be careful about what kind of change to make.
No Child Left Behind legislation has left troublesome, unintended consequences. When
the legislation imposed rigid standards, teachers began to "teach to the test" instead of
hnpatting actual knowledge. Secretary Spellings wants to require states to provide more
uniform graduation data, but this will requhe careful 1nonito~ig, too. States sometimes
inflate graduation l~eS, so they ~von’t invite sanctions from the federal bm’eanclNs ~vho
dole out the money.
Solutions to the education cl:isis cannot be determined on a one-size-fits- all basis. We’ve
learned a lot about the different ways different children lemn. Older children in
kindelgarten, for example, generally do better than yotmger children, so parents have
lemned to put their kids in schools where the cut-off age puts them in classes with
slightly yolmger classmates. Chatter schools offer a choice to patents eager to rescue
their children titan failing schools and put them in schools emphasizing math, science,
atts and languages. Unfortttmately, the good charters usually have long waiting lists. The
charter movement needs more public support.
Parents who patticipate in theh" children’s schools, ~vho pay attention to what attd how
their children perfot~n, are likely to raise achievers. We don’t need another stndy to tell us
that. Children who grow np in poor single-parent fatnilies, without fathers to help guide
them, start out behind the proverbial eigi~t ball. We don’t need another study to tell us
that, either.
The catechism of liberalism inevitably prescribes 1note money as the key to changing all
this, but the real key is ho~v the inoney is spent. The public schools in the nation’s capital
spend about $25,000 per student per year, considerably more than a good private school
 Page 1309

education. Nevertheless, Washington’s schools are among the worst in the country. That’s
why few congressmen send their kids to public schools. In some years, none do.
Dropping out is a fool’s e::t~md, but getthtg children to stay in school requires
encouragement fi’om all of us. ’% knowledgeable fool," as Moliere observed, "is a greater
fool titan an ignomut fool." We’ve been forewarned.
Suzamm Fields is a columnist with The Washington Times. Her e-mall address is
sfields 1000@aol.com.

Chattanooga Times Free Press, TN

Tennessee seeldng standard grad rate

Sunday, April 13, 2008

By Kelli Gauthier

Tennessee and the federal govermnent disagree on the state’s high-school graduation
rates and it’s tnuIing Tennessee’s students, education officials say.
"There is no question that having m~ acctmate measure of student success is vitally
i~npoltant for every tfigh school in America," said Dan Challener, president of the Public
Education Fotmdation, "and we’ve never been clear."

But everything ~ be squared up by next year; officials promise, and not just because
the federal govermnent is trying to make them.
There’s widesl~’ead confusion over the way Tennessee and the rest of the com~try
calculate high school graduation rotes. But officials with the state Department of
Education say by 2009 they Gill have an accm~te and nationally compm’able count of
high school graduates in the Volnnteer State.

Until all states are "comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges," no one will
grasp the gravity of a national graduation crisis, where one-fomIh of high school students
never emrt a diploma, said Mr. Challener, who has studied state andlocal graduation rates
titrough the foundation’s work with high school reform effo,ts in Hamilton Cotmty.

Using 2004 numbers, Tennessee says it graduates 75.7 percent of its high school students.
No, says the U.S. Depaltment of Education, it’s actually 66.1 percent. Although the
figures are fore years old, 2004 is the most recent year ttmt the Department of Education
used to calculate its figmes.
 Page 1310

Other states have repolted different -- and usually higher -- graduation rates than the
federal government. Because school syste~ns that don’t reach federal guidelines trader No
Child Lell Behind can face penalties up to state takeover, states are being accused of
artificially inflating their graduation mnnbers to meet those standards. In tmn, Tennessee
says federal figures don’t take into consideration such l~actors as students who have not
dropped out but taausfened out of the system or stm’ted homeschooling
Discrepancies expected

Because federal data didn’t take into accom~t such students, the U.S. Depm~nent of
Edncafion s~d there would be fafi’ly ‘~vide discrepancies between its numbers and the
states’, said Rachel Woods, spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Education.
"They told us ‘‘ve should expect a 10 percentage-point discrepancy give or take between
what they report mid what we repoit," she said.

Either ,,my, both ofTelmessee’s ntnnbers are a healthy distance ffomits set goal of
graduating 90 percent by 2014, one of the most ambitious in the country.

To clear up the confusion nation,vide, U.S. Secretary of Edncation Margaret Spellings

recently announced tttat, as put of the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, all states
must move toward a single method of calculating high school graduation rates.

Mr. Challener said consistency in ineasming graduation rates is cl4tical.

"I believe you can’t solve a problem until you undelstand it and have a good measme of
it," he said.
Step ahead
In the inove to standardize calculations, Telmessee already may be astep ahead of the
game, state education officials say. Two yem’s ago, the state began moving toward a 2009
implementation of the calculation method endoi~sed by the National Governor’s
Association.
Lotfisiana, North Carolina, Mass~husetts and Texas are using a similar method, and a
hmldful of other states are gathering stndent data needed to use the same plan.

Although Elaine Qucsinben% spokeswoman for the U.S. Depat~unent of Education,

would not confiun the specific ~nethod Ms. Spellings wotfld reqt~est, Te~messee education
officials think it is likely the governor’s association method roll become the national
standard.

Ms. Quesinberry said an annotmcement about the ne~v method would co~ne soon on the
Federal Register, the Washington, D.C.-based daily publication that lists federal rides,
 Page 1311

proposed rules and notices.

Like all states across the country, Tennessee was charged with deteimining its own
graduation rate calculation after the No Child Left Behind Act was signed into law in
2001. The result was a confusing patch~vork of statistics from across the country, with no
accurate way to colnpare states with each other.

U.S. Depaltment of Education officials insist their recent graduation figttres shouldn’t be
used as the be-all end-all, but merely are an estinlate that states can use to compare
themselves with other states.

"The (c,-dculation) provides a standard estimate of the on-time high school graduation
rate," David Thomas, spokesman at the U.S. Department of Education, said. "The
numbers are used for statistical purposes such as estimating the national on-time
graduation rate or ex~ changes in gnaduation rates over time."

Jackson Clarion Ledger, MS

April 13, 2008

State to change xvay it computes grad r ares LI LI

By Rebecca HelmesIdrhdmes@jttclrson.gmmetL corn

The way one set of numbers reads, Mississippi’s 2006 gradnation rate was 87 percent. By
another figming method, it veits 63 percent.
One set is artificially high, while the otheris artificially low, said ~vlississippi’s education
chief, because until now the state’s data-collecting system has been rulable to accm’ately
pinpoint gradlmtion rates.
Superintendent of Education Hank Bounds and other education offidals said the state’s
more precise student data-tracldng system took a few years to get up and runnklg - which
is why Mississippi’s education department has kept two sets of graduation rates in recent
yem~. The state will soon abandon the traditional method in favor of the new one.
Changing to the new ~nethod would mean Mississippi’s gi~dtmtion 1,rite would go down in
the eyes of the federal govermnent and, therefore, could mean sanctions trader the federal
No Child Left Behind proglmn for improving schools. Botmds saidhe doesn’t want
schools to be penalized for appealfl-lg as if graduation rates have dropped, when actually
the state is keeping more accurate numbers.

"We, are at a point now where we can completely follow the (National Governors
 Page 1312

Association) rate, except that we’re going to have to get the U.S.D.E. (U.S. Department of
Education) to reset our numbers," Bounds said. He was referring to the state’s graduation
rate benchmarks.
The graduation rate ct~mge comes just in time for the re cent announcement that U.S.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings will require all states to use a artifo~n gradt~ation
rate formula.
Bomlds said he expects 2007 graduation rates, ~vhich will be finalized and announced
later this spNlg to be slightly higher than 2006’s 63 percent but inuch lower than 87
percent.

The higher accm’acy of the state’s new figuring method is a product of how the data is
collected.

The traditional graduation rate calculation overesthnates districts’ graduation rotes by

compming the number of students who start ninth-grade, plus those who taansfer in and
minus those who transfer out or die, to those who graduate four years later. The
graduation rate has been figured the stone way since No Child Left Behind took effect in
2002.

The second set of nttmbei~ is more accm-ate because individual students i~her than just
the total number of students each yea" are accounted for in the data system. But this set of
m~mbers is mtificially low, said Steve Hebbler, director of the state education
department’s Office of Research and Statistics, because this set of 2006 nmnbers does not
differentiate between first time and repeat ninth-graders. Once the 2007 graduation rate
information is available, that will no longer be a problem.
Because of that ninth-grade issue, Hebbler and other education officials actually expect
tile 2007 graduation rote to hnprove a little, but not much, over the 63 percent rate for
2006.

Assodated Press

Strt Aprit 12, 2008 O0:07 EDT

Educators work to boost East High School’s graduation rate

BEN FULTON
 Page 1313

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) _ His mother cares for him and his three siblings on a cashier’s salary. One of his s:

But Ricardo Medina, a 15-yem’-old freshman at Salt Lake City’s East High School, is holding fast to his goal

"So many ldds’ parents can’t be there because they’re at work putting food on the table," Medina said.

As for his teachers, Medina recognizes they’re plenty busy with the worldoads they’ve got.as well.

He therefore is grateful East High participates in the federal Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Un~

"(Program inentors) help us with anything," he said. "It’s an influence for us to stay on track."

Helping students stay on track, especially freshmelL has become a l~iority at East. That the school has turne~
motivation is only a start.

With 72 percent of students graduating inthe 2006-2007 school year, according to Adequate Yearly Progress,
lower rate of g~tduation than East. The average graduation rate among state high schools for the p~ior school
percent.

East High admitfistrators have latmched a vigorous response. In addition to GEAR UP, which offers 15 tutor;
also has enlisted Westminster College students to tutor in math, teamed with the University of Utah’s Pacific
Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program to prepare stndents for graduation and futtue c
se~Mces, East High launched an outreach l~ogram that involves visits to students’ homes.

At East, a large pint of the challenge is lem-ning ho~v to best serve refugee students fi’om Som,qlia, Burma and

For any high school looldng to reduce its ntmtber of dropouts, ninth grade is the make-or-break year. Studies
reqttirements rarely graduate. Sagers estimates slightly more than 150 ninth-graders "" don’t finish with us," eJ
Horizonte Instruction & Training School.

East High’s inost far-reaching attelnpt at hnprovement is its "Concentrated Classrooms" prog~nm, which allc
eight teachers who moltitor students’ progress as a group and across all academic subjects, rather than teache:
model cultivates a greater sel~se of cormection between students and teachers, a crucial elelnent of success in

The progrmn doesn’t segregate students by achievement level, a fact that may sml~ise. "If~ve sunolmd stud~
what it looks like to perfo~n well," said science teacher Michael Lloyd, East High’s point person for the prog
program’s already allowed teachers to spot l~-oblems, and intervene with students before those problems bec(
teaching team," he said.

"’I definitely amnot trying to ~nini~nize this at all," Paul S. Sage,s, who took the job of East High principal
we can, basically, to keep these kids in school. It’s one ofiny maj or initiatives."

East High’s effort trader Sagers comes at atime when Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, th’ed ofc~
a plan to bring all the nation’s high schools under the stone fornmla for calculating graduationrates. Utah do~
 Page 1314

but will count students who complete high school despite three failed atte~npts at passing an exit exatn.

Although Utah’s high school graduation rate fat" exceeds the ~vational average, the State Office of Education ~
,novement through the state school system. That made state graduation rates more accurate.

Nashua Telegraph, NH

PuNished: Sunday, April 13, 2008

Nation deserves debates on failing schools

By Morton Kondracke

How many wake-up calls does Paneaica need before ~ve make out" failing public schools
fit for the competitive challenges of the 21st ceutut~]? [] []

This month ~maLkS the 25th anniversary of the fhst loud gong - the 1983 report "A Nation
at Risk." which famously warned that "if an tmfiSendly foreign power had attempted to
impose on America the ~nediocre educational perfoianance that exists today, we ~night
well have viewed it as an act of war." []B

Ttmt was Cold War talk, but the same report anticipated the world we live in today. "Our
once unchallenged pre-eminence in connnerce, industry, science and tectmological
innovation is being overtaken by competition throughout the world .... What was
unimaginable a goneration ago has begun to occur - others ~re matching and sut:passing
out educational attabunents." [] []

Pae they ever. In the latest l:)roglarn for International Studeut Assessment, U.S. 15-year-
olds ranked 28th out of 41 com~tlies in mathematics litei~y, 16th in reading, 22nd in
science and 29th in N’oblem-solving, fat" behind not only Japan, South Korea at~d Hong
Kong and most of Western Europe, but behind even Poland ,and the Slovak Republic.

As Microsoft Chahanan Bill Gates told aHouse conunittee last month: "The United
States today has one of the lowest high school graduation rates in the industrialized
world. Three out of evei~ 10 ninth-gradeis - and nem-ly half of all Aliican-Panerican and
Hispanic ninth-gradels - do not graduate on time. [] []
 Page 1315

"Of those who do graduate ,and continue on to college, over a quarter must take remedial
courses on ~nateiia1 they should have lem-ned in high school." [] []

Gates anticipated one of the most dismal reports yet - issued April 1 by the A~nerica’s
Promise Alliance (full disclosure: my wife is its president) shriving that only 52 percent
of students in the nation’s 50 biggest cities graduate fiom high school, compared with 75
percent in their suburbs. [] []

In the worst cases, Baltimore city schools graduated less than 35 percent of their students,
compared with 81 percent in the suburbs; Columbus, Ohio, graduated 41 percent in the
city, 83 percent in the suburbs; Cleveland graduated 42 percent in the city, 78 percent in
its suburbs; and New York graduated 47 percent in the city, 83 percent in the suburbs.

At apress conference unveiling the new findings, the alliance’s fomKter, former Secretary
of State Colin Powell, pronounced them "a catastrophe," especially in view of the
emergence of new international competitors such as China, India and former Soviet
satellites. [] []

Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., declared, "If this were a health crisis - a disease - we’d call it
an epidemic and would throw whatever resources we conld at it. But nobody seems as
outraged by it as riley ought to be." [] []

Burr attd Sen. JeffBingaman, D-N.M., are co-sponsors of the Gradtmtion Promise Act,
which wotfld authorize $2 billion over five yeats to stm’otmd the co~mtry’s 2,000 most
diopout-prone schools with tutoring, health and parent-mentofing resources to ease the
problem, a plan America’s Promise is promoting on its own with 100 "diopont summits"
arotmd the cottnt~?z over the next two yeats. [] []

Bingaman actmowledged to me in an interview that tile hill had little chance of passing
this yeat because it ~vill need to be folded into reauthofization of President Bush’s No
Child Lell Behind law- a measure that is going nowhere tiffs election year. [] []

NCLB was a pioneering, bipmtisan step on the road to improving American education -
requiring states to adopt measurable peffonn,-mce standatds, test childien regularly, report
results based onl~ace ,-rod inco~ne groups, and take remedial action when schools fall
sho~t, kJ 1~

Yet, NCLB is regularly denotmced on rite campaign t~ffl by Democratic candidates

 Page 1316

B arack Obmna and Hillary Clinton in a nod to teachers unions, which object to
accountability reqttirements, mid it’s also opposed by right-wing Republicans a~s a federal
"takeover" of state primacy over education. [] []

To his credit, Obama occasionally has hinted that he supports merit pay for teachers
based on their performance in improving student outcomes, bnt he was hissed for it at last
years National Education Association convention and has retreated to recommending
higher "battle pay" for teachers taking on difficnlt assignments in science, math and
poverty-mea schools. [] []

hi arecent speech, Johil McCain eloquently backed NCLB and pay-for-perfolmance, but
he has yet to make education a top-tier issue in tile c,-unpaign. [] []

As a ineasttre of how low education stands as campaign priority, only 27 of about 500
questions asked ditring presidential debates this year have concerned schools, according
to foi~ner Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, nowhead of Ed in ’08, a group funded by the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation to raise education’s profile. [] []

In the audience at the alliance event was Dr. Milt Goldberg, executive director of the
1983 conunission that produced the "Nation At Risk" repolt. I asked him how ~ar we’ve
come since theft t~ U

"We’ve made some incremental gains," he said, "but on the basics, not much." [3 []

Before the alliance event, Education Secretary Malgaret Spellings told me she plans to
issue a repolt later this month conunemol~ting the 25th anniversalN of "A Nation At
Risk." The gist of it? [] []

"We continue tobe at risk," she said. [] []

That’s an tmderstatement.

Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the new,Taper of Capitol Hill.

The New York Times

April 13, 2008

When Strings Are Attached, Quirky Gifts Can Limit Universities

 Page 1317

By IOkREN W. ARlgNSON
When Stanley J. Seeger gave Princeton $2 million for Hellenic studies nearly three
decades ago, the gift’s income paid for two courses in modem Greek and trips to Greece
for five.

But the Seeger ~noney, which must be spent only on matters Greek, is now worth $33
million, ~ntfltiplying through aggressive investing like the rest of Princeton’s endovcment.
So the university offers Greek, Greek m~d ~nore Greek- 13 com~es this semester,
including "The Image of Greece in European Cinema’’ and "Problems in Greek History:
Greek Democracy," as well as trips to Greece and nearby meas for more than 90 students
and factflty members last year. The history department recently hired its second
Byzantine specialist. And the fund paid half the cost of a collection of 800 rare coins
from medieval Greece.

"Institutions do get shaped by the interests of donors," said Robert K. Durkee, vice
president ,-rod secret,u-] of Princeton.

As the nation’s wealthiest colleges and m/versifies repoxt on their finances to Congress,
seeking to head off federal requirements that they spend at least 5 percent of their ever-
growing endowment income, new attention is being paid to ho~v endowments are
structured, and on the restrictions imposed by donors.

Aides to the Senate Finance Committee, which sent out a query in J~muary about
endowment pl~aCfices to the 136 ~vealthiest colleges and ttniversifies, say they have
received 131 responses and have begun to scrutinize them. The respo~tses, some of which
universities have inade public, show ttrat at some, including Hmarard and the University
of Texas, 80 percent or ~nore of the endowment is constrained by donors’ "~vishes. But the
responses do not begin to detail the variety of these restrictions.
 Page 1318

Recent intelwiews with college officials show that while many restrictions are for broad
uses like faculty chairs and student aid, others are less central to the flmctiolting of a
1nodern mliversity. Solne are outright quirky.

"Endowlnent funds are in some ~vays like a nmselun," said Mark G. Yudof, the
chancellor of the University of Texas System, recently tapped to take over the California
system. "Sometimes they are visionary. Sometimes they aren’t. Lm~d titles was a big
business in another era; now, professors and students are not that interested in the
subject."

Critics of universities say that wbile sizable poltions of university endowments ~nay be
restricted, the wealthiest tmiversities still conid use more of their endowments to reduce
tuition. ’°It is simply false to clailn that donor restrictions prevent increased spending,"
said Lym~e Munson, an adjunct research fellow at the Center for College Affordability
and Productivity. "Almost half of endowlnent funds at private institutions are
lmrestficted, as are nearly a qualter of endowment dollars at wealthy public institutions."

Restlicfions on endowments can create ter~sions between donors and Ulfiversities.

P~inceton, for exmnple, face~ trial in a case brottght by the heirs of a supermarket fmtune
over whether a gift to help pay for progratns at its Woodrow Wilson School was used as
intended. Frederic J. Fransen created the Center for Excellence in Higher Education in
Indiana last year to help donors ensure that colleges respect their wishes when they give
inoney.

Mr. Yudofrecalled that when he was dean of the law school at the University of Texas,
Austin, from 1984 to 1994, "I had more oil and gas professorships than I had oil and gas
law faculty."
 Page 1319

He said he asked one donor for permission to use the money tempomlily for a professor
in another field, while he searched for an oil and gas faculty member. (The donor said
yes.) "Sometimes they consent," he said. "Sometimes they don’t. Usually you don’t go to
COlllt ?’

Going to comt is an option ifa university finds it can no longer comply with the terms of
a gift. The Vir~a Tech Fotmdation tookthis step when it could not grant a scholarship
for students flom Warwick Cotmty, because the county no longer existed.

Gilts can become unworkable in many ways. Consider the Dudley Professorship of
Raihoad Engineering at Yale. The chair was created in 1923 with a $152,679 gift fi’om
Plirmnon H. Dudley, an engineer ~vho worked for the New York Centrai Rail. His
express desfi’e, he said, was that his research into railway safety be continned, "in
particular the woil~ in connection with the development and improvement of designs of
rails, roadbeds and crossties."

But over the years, railway engineel:h~g lost its luster as a hot academic topic, iMtd the
professorstdp sat vacant for more than 70 years.

°’I was kind of sttunped as to ~vhat to do with this chair," Yale’s president, Richard C.
Levi~ adufitted.

Then Yale realized that the steam engines and wood ties of yesterday had been replaced
by today’s magnetic levitation and superconductivity. So since 2002, A. Stephen Morse,
an engineer who has studied urban transportation and switching strategies for the control
of nninhabited vehicles, has been the Dudley Professor of Engineering at Yale.

It is not jnst professorships that look different as decades go by.

 Page 1320

Take the $1,000 bequest to Dartmouth in 1945, from a soldier ~vho had died in Bm-ma,
which his parents suggested be used to keep the Dmtmouth president’s fneplace stocked
with wood. The president still has a fireplace, but it no longer burns wood; the money is
used for general expenses in the office.

A $10,000 gilt fi’om Dmtmouth’s class of 1879 was directed to pay for tntmpeters at
graduation. The trumpets still blare in June. But the endowment, no~v valued at more than
a qumter of a million dollar, also pays for the music director.

Edwin Webster Sanborn, a Dmtmouth graduate, gave the college money to build Sanborn
House for the English department, hoping to foster the kind of close student associations
his father hadhad as a popttlar English professor. As a condition of the gift, the
depmlanent was to selve tea daily to its facttlty and students at a nominal charge.

Tea is sm~ced in Sanborn today, daily at 4 p.m., for 10 cents a cup, open to anyone.
Sophia Ytmn, the sopho~nore who l~mds out the tea as pm-t of work-study, said the

practice was charming but drew few takers.

"I think it usedto be a big tradition," Ms. Yuan said. "BUt as it got more moderrk it got
washed out."

College officials say they try to be receptive to donor wishes, even when they so]netimes
seem strange. That happened at Wellesley College, when LeoNe Faroll, a 1949 graduate,
asked the college to use her gilts for the college’s power plant. When she died in 2003,
those gilts totaled $860,000.

"It was about giving for something that ]nakes the place ~n," said Lynn C. Miles, acting
vice president for resomces at Wellesley. "Once a yea she wotfld come to campus, and
we wotfld sit and have lemonade and Peppefidge Farm cookies at the power plant."
 Page 1321

"If she had given money to feed the swans in Lake Waban," Ms. Miles added, referring
to a small lake on campus, "we might have tried to talk her out of it:’

Ms. Faroll later left the college more than $27 milhon in her will, tim largest bequest the
college ever received. Some could be used for the science center, the rest was for the
power plant.

The Oakland Pl’ess

Michigan neects to encourage the charter school movement

By GLENN GILBERT Of The Oaldand Press

The public will hem increasing discussion about what to do with failing public schools in
the coming mo~NlS as districts seek to meet the requirements of the sLx-yem’-old federal
No Child Left Behind Act.

The law l~’Onfises sanctions up to and including closing schools. But no schools have
been closed yet as a result ofNCLB.
One alternative that clearly is worldng is chmter schools. These are public schools open
to all students. If the nmnber of applicants exceeds capacity, lotteries are held to
determine enrollment.

Under Michigan law, chmter schools canbe formed trader the ttmbrella of a college or
university, local or intermediate school district.

Basically, parties interested in forming a school must apply to an authorizer.

Of 230 such iustitutior~s in the state, 150 are authorized by tmiversities. They are capped
at that munber by law.
Commtmity colleges authorized 37 charter schools -- or public school academies, as they
are often referred to -- in the 2006-07 school year. ThJ~ly were authorized by intemtediate
districts and 13 loy local districts.

"Charter schools crop up where there are unmet needs," said Stephanie Vmt Koevering,
executive d.h’ector of the Michigan Coundl of Chmter School Anthorizers. "That’s why
you see so many in the Detroit area."
 Page 1322 ~i~’ ,.

Often they are formed around specific purposes. For instance, they may offer a
Montessori method of teaching, an emphasis on fine arts, tectmical or vocational tinning
or a back-to-basics approach.
Tiffs is reflected in the names of two of the fore" chatter schools in Pontiac. The Arts and
Techitology Acade~ny is located at 48980 Woodward Ave. andthe Life Skills Center is
located at 142 Aulom-n Ave. These two institutions were antholized by Bay Mills
Conwnunity College, which is in no~thern Michigan.
There are three other chaxter schools in Pontiac. Great Lakes Academy, 46312
Woodward Ave., was antho~ized by Eastern Mictfigan University; Walton Charter
Academy, 744 East Walton Blvd, was authorized by Northern Mictfigan University; and
the Pontiac Academy for Excellence, 196 Oakland Ave., wa~s authoiized by Saginaw
Valley State University.

There are 17 chmter schools in Oaldand County. Across the state, they are
distnopoltionately located in in:ban areas. Five percent of Mictfigan’s public school
students attend chatter schools.

Tiffs has steadily grown. The fall 2006 count of 98,667 represented a 7.7-percent gain
over fall 2005 figmes, according to the latest repolt on charter schools put out by the
Michigan Department of Education.

Cen~al Michigan University is the largest autholizer of charter schools in Michigan’s

higher education cormnunity with 57. After Michigan adopted its law enabling fo~xnation
of charter schools in 1993, then CMU President L eoruqrd Plachta encoreaged the
tmivmsity to become the state’s filet authorizer of charter public schools. He thought they
could provide alink to grades K-12 and enhance CMU’s role as a leading trainer of
teachers, according to James Goenner, executive director of what is now the Center for
Chatter Schools at CMU.

Goenner thinks charter schools can provide an alternative to schools that fail to meet
standards of No Child Lell Behind. He sees a rese~nblance to charier schools in Gov.
Jennifer Gmnholm’s push for small high schools to replace problematic large ones.
In her state-of-the-state message in January, Granholm said brealdng up large high
schools into several smaller ones would help high-iisk students achieve higher academic
goals if such schools emphasized strong personal relationships, co, Nstent discipline and
real-world relevance.

"These are charters by a different nmne," Goenner said, but without the perfo~xnance
contract and consequences for failme that are part of the charter concept.

Chmter schools have been criticized for failing to consistently outperform their local K-
12 peers. But that is not necessatily their goal. Theh" ptkrpose is to reach students in ways
that conventional schools may not, according to Goe~mer and Van Koeveling. Their
 Page 1323

propose is to offer a choice, co~npefition mid im~ovation.

Michigan established charter schools because previously, only affluent families with
access to private schools could 1nake decisions about where and how their children ‘’vould
be educated. Chmter schools were designed to make free, public educational options
available to all children.

The Michigan Cotmcil of Charter School Authofizem says chmters save Michigan
taxpayers $1 billion over a five-year period and achieve better outcomes for many of the
students. This is because the state has capped their expenses at $7,175 per student, $2,612
less than the average spent per student in Michigan. Generally, such schools are staffed
by non-nnion employees.

State Rep. TimMelton, an Auburn Hills Democrat who chairs the House Education
Committee, saidhe would like to find a ,,vay to encottrage charter schools to open more
high schools. Typically, high schools are more expensive to operate, but students who
attend a K-8 chmter school are left without an alternative when they reach ninth-grade, he
says. Perhaps the problem can be solved by encore-aging such schools to fo~Tn
pmtnerships with chmter schools offering higher grades, Melton says.

In Pontiac, the Life Sldlls Center serves only grades nine to 12 while only the Pontiac
Academy for Excellence covers K-12.

Melton also is concented about the lack of transportation to and from charter schools.

Van Koevering points out, however; that while Michigan law does not reqtfire public
school districts to offer trausportation, if they do so for one, they must do so for all.
Chmter schools, meanwhile, are reqtthed to consider the ~vhole state as their smwice area.

Michigan needs to encourage the chatter school movement. One size does not fit all.
Students need to be ~natched to teaching styles that best stilt their pmticular situations.

Glenn Gflbm is executive editor of The Oakland Press. Contact hi~n at (248) 745-4587 or
by e-~nail at g!~. flbert@oakoress.com.

Washington Post

For Younger Generations, First Lesson In Inflation

By KJrstin Doxw~ey rqWashington Post Staff Writer []

Sunday, April 13, 2008; C01

 Page 1324

Economic theo17 is leaping out of the textbook and into real life for people in their teens,
20s and 30s, who ,are experiencing infl~ion for the fust time.

Julie Catan, 23, was used to her regttlar pizza special: two large pies delivered to her
house for $20. Bnt when she called recently to place an order; the restattrant owner told
her she would get oidy one large pizza and a side salad for that [nice.

"Why is it so much 1noney?" Catan, a college student in New York visiting her sister in
Alexandri_a, recalled asldng. "What happened to the deal?"

The owner Named it on inflation: Flora costs more, he said. Catan had to think back to
relnember the memting of the word.

"I lem~ed about it in social studies class -- I think it happened, like, during the Great
Depression," she said recently, as she strolled down an Alexan&ia street with her fiiend
Amy Mason, who has noticed prices rising as well.

"It’s, like, $3.50 for a bagel, and it used to be $1.50," Mason said.

For two decades, A~nericans have been spared the pain of fast-rising [nices. The Federal
Reserve had effectively kept inflation at "my by carefully ~noderating the pace of lending,
mainly by raising and lowering interest rate to speed or slow econolnic activity, but the
patterns have been disrupted by easy credit, financial instability and surging demand for
conmmdities on the global market.

The last time prices rose ~mrkedly was inthe 1970s and early 1980s, ~vhen double-digit
inflation led to wrenching econo~nic recessions. In 1980, inflation reached al~nost 14
percent, but it t~as been lower than 3.5 percent for a decade.

But inflation is back. Prices have risen 9.2 percent since 2006 for groceries, gasoline,
health care and other staples. It comes as wages continue to languish. The median family
income has dipped 2.6 percent since 2000, or almost $2,000 a year.

Across the region, parents and g~andparents are sharing with their childien stories about
hard ti~nes and how their relatives coped, a conunon pattern when economic eras change,
said Lisa Wise, executive director of the Center for a New Aznerican Dream, a Takoma
Park-based nonprofit that promotes consumer education and a tl~iftier apl~roach to living.

"Money is veI3~ emotional," Wise said. "There is a psychological tmdeltone in talking

about the economy. It triggers a ])alfily’s sense of their own histo~3, and their own family’s
experience."

Rising prices might hi~ng an end to the "hn~nediate gratification" cultm’e in the United
States, Wise said. People raised in the 1930s were highly conscious of the value of the
dollar and spent carefitlly, she said, but Americans have since developed careless
 Page 1325

spending habits. Otheis have not had to wonN about looking for ways to reduce spending.

"A lot of adults, even those who lived through inflation in the past, have become forgetful
about it," said Irene Leech, a professor of constraint studies at Vir~a Tech. She said her
students are just catching glimpses now.

Money is a frequent topic of conversation in the Kobor home in Great Falls. Samantha
Kobor, 14, of@eat Falls, receives up to $20 aweek, depending onhow m~my chores she
does, but it doesn’t go as fat as it once did. She recognized it as inflation, a word site first
learned about in foltrth grade, then again in her eighth-grade civics class.

"Now I see I don’t have the money to buy what I want," she said, noting that she is
won34ng about how much gasoline costs, becanse she wants to get her driver’s license in
two years.

She and her mother, Pat, have talked about rising prices and try to cut costs by c~reful
comparison shopping at the grocery store. Her ~nother told her that when she was a
student in ~ people saved money by putting coins into a ~neter to pay for home
heating instead of being sin-prised by an unexpectedly large bill a month later.

Amber Willimns, 15, the yotmgest of five children, is hearing a lot about inflation, too.
Her mother, ~vho lives in DtmafiJes, womes about money, pmfictflarly when she is buying
gasoline.

"She’s really, really frustrated with it, just exasperated," Wilfimns said, adding that her
mother told her she thonght it hadn’t been this bad since Amber’s grandfather’s younger
days, when prices rose sharply after World War II. In 1947, prices shot up almost 15
percent. Dining the Depression, prices dropped, falling loy 10.3 percent in 1932.

Tl’aina Tennelo, 28, program dfl’ector of a homeless shelter in Arlington Cotmty, said she
had been shocked by the change in Nices in just the few yeats since site began supporting
hersel£

"The last majorinflation was in the Carter era, just before I ~vas born," said Temlelo. "I
don’t recall it ever being as big an issue in my lifetime as it is now."

The experience is also tmprecedeuted in what Steve Roman, 25, of Kensington, calls his
"semi-adult fife."

"Evei3~thing in the grocery store goes up," said Roinan, a marketing assistant with a think
tatflc in the District. "The tricky part is that people’s incomes don’t rise."

Zack Stafford, 20, a student at George Washington University, scoffed when asked about
inflation. He said he isn’t that affected by it because his parents pay most of his bills.
 Page 1326

Then he thought some more. Milk, he said, has risen to more than $3 a gallon. "I dlink a
lot of milk. I eat alot of cereal," he said, the realization da~vning slowly onhis 15ce.
 Page 1327

Nonresponsiv __ _
From: Yudof, Samara
Sent: April 13, 2008 12:48 PM
To: Cariello, Dennis; Aud, Susan; Davis, Jim; Tracy Young; Skandera, Hanna; Dunn, David;
Terrell, Julie; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ridgway, Marcie; Pitts, Elizabeth; Earling, Eric; Tucker, Sara
Martinez; MacGuidwin, Katie; Wurman, Ze’ev; Smith, Valarie (SRR); McGrath, John; Kuzmich,
Holly; Monroe, Stephanie; Scheessele, Marc; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Flowers, Sarah; Young,
Tracy; Mesecar, Doug; Truong, Anh-Chau; Lepore, Kristen; Eitel, Robert S.; Zoellick, Todd;
Jones, Diane; Colvin, Kelly; Toomey, Liam; Tada, Wendy; Gartland, Lavin; Cohn, Kristine;
Hatada, Tori; Talbert, Kent; Cdby, Chad; Warder, Larry; Robb, Carly; Sentance, Michael;
Chlouber, Patricia; Briggs, Kerri; Evans, Wendy; Private- Spellings, Margaret; Casarona,
Emily; Morffi, Jessica; Hancock, Anne; Foxley, Donna; Evers, Bill; Dmytrenko, Orysia;
Maddox, Lauren; Beaton, Meredith; Anderson, Christy; Yudof, Samara; Oldham, Cheryl;
Gribble, Emily
Subject: 04.13.08 In the News

Attachments: 0413081ntheNews.doc

0,t1308 IntJ]eNews.
doc (204 KB)
04.13.08 In the News

i) Washington Post : Bailout Nation (David Ignatius)

2) Washington Post: Horrors of a ’Crisis’ (George Will)?

3) Washington Post: Kaine Touts Legislative Reforms for Mentally Ill (Michael Alison
Chandler )

4) Washington Post: CoAmm~ndo Performance; As the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech
rampage approaches, students all over the country are storming campuses with (toy) guns.
What kind of game is this? (Laura Wexler) ~

5) Louisville Courier-Journal: Editorial: Confronting the rising dropout rates

6) Chattanooga Times Free Press: Tennessee seeking standard grad rate (Kelli Gauthier)

7) Jackson Clarion Ledger: State to change way it computes grad rates? (Rebecca Helmes)
8) Associated Press; Educators work to boost East High School’s graduation rate (Ben
Fulton)
9) Nashua Telegraph: Nation deserves debates on failing schools (Morton Kondracke)

i0) The New York Times: When Strings Are Attached, Quirky Gifts Can Limit Universities
(Karen Arenson)
ii) The Oakland Press: Michigan needs to encourage the charter school movement (Glenn
Gilbert)

12) Washington Post: For Younger Generatioz~, First Lesson In Inflation (Kirstin Downey)

Washington Post

Bailout Nation

By David Ignatius
 Page 1328
Sunday, April 13, 2008; B07

As every parent knows, the danger of cutting a special break for one child is that all the
other children will demand the s~ne thing. "It’s not fair," goes the inevitable refrain.
"You said Susie could eat ice cream and watch TV until midnight, so why can’t I?" The
parents start caving, and family discipline is shot.
We’re now in a comparable cycle of bestowing special economic favors on me~Joers of the
national family who have been hurt by the credit market crisis. "It’s not fair," argue the
housing interests and consumer advosacy groups. "Bear Stearns got a financial bailout, so
why shouldn’t we?" And they’re right, by the simplest schoolyard definition of fairness.
So the line grows of people demanding breaks on financial obligations they can’t afford.
Last week, the Bush administration agreed to rescue i00,000 homeowners who are at risk of
foreclosure on their mortgages. Congressio~l Democrats promptly announced that this
wasn’t fair enough and that they intended to expand the bailout to as many as 2 million
distressed borrowers.
But why stop there? Wllat about onerous co~mmercial mortgages? And credit card debt? And
student loans? Why should anyone have to pay back anything? It’s not fair.
Economists talk about avoiding "moral hazard" -- the danger that by insuring people too
generously against risks you may encourage them to take even greater risks. Who are they
kidding? We are now so deep into this hazard that we ought to invent a new n~ne for it.
Moral myopia, perhaps.
As these special breaks proliferate, we are implicitly creating a system.of transfer
payments that shifts money from the smart to the stupid, from the lucky to the unlucky.
Well-managed banks that controlled their risk levels will subsidize poorly managed ones
that didn’t; prudent homeowners who decided not to take the interest-only refinancing
loans will subsidize imprudent ones who did.
There could be so many other, better ways to spend our tax dollars on housing subsidies:
M~ke loans directly to poor people so they can buy homes, say, or to needy veterans coming
back from Iraq or Afghanistan, or to people who’ve lost their jobs.
The other response to the financial crisis, in addition to the ever-widening circle of
bailouts, is increased regulation. And here, too, some argue that the cure might be nearly
as dangerous as the disease. The Economist magazine made that argument this month when it
warned that "bold re-regt~lation could damage the very economies it is designed to
protect." Certainly the last round of crisis-driven regulation -- the Sarbanes-Oxley
legislation that followed the Enron scandal -- created more busywork for accountants than
real protection against abuses.
But in this case, regulation is the right course -- and the plan for consolidated
supervision proposed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is a good start. I’d favor igoing
even further and creating a super-regulator -- on the model of the British Financial
Services Authority, which regulates all providers of financial services. Congress likes
the current jumble of Balkanized mini-agencies, but that’s a mistake. As boundaries
dissolve among financial institutions and technology creates new kinds of financial
instruments, regulation needs to keep pace -- and that’s best done with a big, modern
institution that can attract the best and the brightest to the task of monitoring the
mmrkets.
The world’s financial elites are pondering the wreckage as they gather in Washington this
weekend for the spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The
IMF h~s released a scary new "Global Financial Stability Report" that reckons U.S.
residential mortgage losses at about $565 billion and total credit market losses at a
stupendous $945 billion. The I~ warns against a " ’rush to regulate,’ especially in ways
that unduly stifle innovation or that could exacerbate the effects of the current credit
squeeze." But the report also includes a long list of reform measures to improve the
stability and transparency of the markets.
~nong the financial titans these days, what one ~m~inly hears are sighs of relief. They’ve
gotten their bailout from the Federal Reserve, and they’re hoping that the worst is over.
Now, inevitably, come the cries for equal treatment -- the "me, too" bailouts for folks on
Main Street who are lucky enough to have a lobbyist.
Congress will say yes -- it would be manifestly unfair to do otherwise. But after
shredding the moral hazard barriers, we should understand that the next financial crisis,
when it comes, is bound to be even worse.

Washington Post

Horrors of a ’Crisis’
 Page 1329
By George F. Will?

Sunday, April 13, 2008; B07

During presidential elections, when candidates postulate this or that "crisis" for which
each is the indispensable and sufficient cure, economic hypochondria is encouraged, so a
sense of suffering is rampant. Recently the Wall Street Journ~l, like Joseph Conrad
contemplating the Congo, surveyed today’s economic jungle and cried, "The horror! The
horror !"
Declines in housing values and the stock market are causing some Americans to delay
retirement. A Y~nsas City man hmd been eager to retire to Arizona but now, the Journal
says, "figures he’ll stay put for another couple of years." He is 59.
So, this is a facet of today’s hydra-headed "crisis" -- the ~mn must linger in the labor
force until, say, 62. That is the earliest age at which a person can, and most recipients
do, begin collecting Social Security.
The proportion of people aged 55 to 64 who are working rose 1.5 percentage points from
April 2007 to Febr<mry 2008, during which the percentage of working Americans older than
65 rose two-tenths of one percentage point. The Journal grimly reported, "The’prospect of
millions of grandparents toiling away in their golden years doesn’t square with the
American drea~."
Oh? The idea that protracted golden years of idleness are a ttniversal right is a delusion
of recent vintage. Deranged by the entitlement mentality fostered by a metastasizing
welfare state, Americans now have such low pain thresholds that suffering is defined as a
slight delay in beginning a subsidized retirement often lasting one-third of the retiree’s
adult lifetime.
In 1935, when Congress enacted Social Security, protracted retirement was a luxury enjoyed
by a tiny sliver of the population. Back then, Congress did its aritl~netic ruthlessly:
When it set the retirement age at 65, the life expectancy of an adult American male was
65. If in 1935 Congress had indexed the retirement age to life expectancy, today’s
retirement age would be 75.
The standard definition of a recession -- two consecutive quarters of contraction -- means
we still are probably several months short of being in one. The 9.9 percent first-quarter
decline of the Standard & Poor 500 barely ranks ~kmong the 40 worst quarterly losses in the
index’s history. Leave aside the 39.4 percent decline in the second quarter of 1932. The
economy experienced no long-term trauma because of the declines of 10.3 percent, 14.5
percent and 23.2 percent in the third quarter of 1998, the third qtmrter of 1990 and the
fourth quarter of 1987, respectively.
Yes, in January single-family homes in major metropolitan areas lost 10.7 peroent of their
value from last January. To find such a large decline in a year you must peer back into
the mists of prehistory, all the way back to . the 1990s. Furthermore, the vast
majority of homeowners will re~in well ahead, even after the market corrects for housing
inflation.
By one measure, between the beginning of 2000 and the middle of 2006, as the consumer
price index was rising 21 percent, average housing prices rose 93 percent -- and much more
in some markets (Miami, 180 percent; Los Angeles, 175 percent; Washington, D.C., 150
percent).
Not long ago there was broad agreement that too much of Americans’ wealth was tied up in
the nation’s housing stock and that the principal impediment to homeownership was not a
scarcity of cheap mortgages but the prevalence of high housing prices. Hence deflation of
housing prices would be desirable.
So far during this "crisis," the homeownership rate has declined just three-tenths of 1
percent since it peaked in 2004. At 67.8 percent, it remains higher than it was when
President Bill Clinton left office.
Subprime mortgages are a small minority of mortgages, and only a minority of subprime
borrowers are not making their payments. Casting this minority of a minority as victims of
"predatory" lending fits the liberal narrative that most Americans are victims of this or
that sinister elite or impersonal force and are not competent to cope with life’s
complexities without government supervision.
The politics of this may, however, be more complex than the compassion chorus supposes°
The 96 percent of mortgage borrowers who are fulfilling their colm~itments, often by
scrimping, may be gr~npy bystanders if many of the other 4 percent -- those who found the
phrase "variable rate" impenetrably mysterious -- are eligible for ameliorations of their
obligations.
What next? Adults still burdened with student loans have not yet announced their
entitlement to relief, but as they watch this subprime drank, they might.
 Page 1330

Washington Post

Kaine Touts Legislative Reforms for Mentally Iii

By Michael Alison Chandler?, Washington Post Staff Writer

?Sunday, April 13, 2008; C07

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) told Northern Virginia residents yesterday that the state has
taken steps to correct many of the problems in its mental health system that might have
contributed to Seung Hui Cho’s shooting rampage nearly a year ago at Virginia Tech.
The governor highlighted several reforms in a package of bills he signed last week, which
expand services and monitoring for those with mental illness, to an audience of more than
200 residents and local officials in Falls Church, an area close to home for families of
m~ny of the victims and Cho.
Wednesday ~mrks the anniversary of the rampage by Cho, who took 32 lives and then his own
on the Blacksburg campus. Two years earlier, a ~udge had ordered Cho to seek treatment,
saying he was an i~nninent danger to himself, but neither the court, the university nor any
other agency followed up to see that he received it.
A state panel appointed by Kaine to investigate the massacre offered "a real indictment of
this state’s lack of commitment to co~nnunity mental health service," Kaine said yesterday.
"We did not fund it well. We did not expect much from it," he said.
So in January, the governor and General Assembly set out to improve services for more
people. They lowered the criteria for someone to be involuntarily sent into treatment, and
they added $42 million to the state’s comm~ity health-care budget to add caseworkers and
psychiatrists to offer services to more people, "so they don’t have to be seriously
mentally ill to get in and see someone," Kaine said.
The elected officials also developed measures to increase accottntability in the system so
there will be more oversight if someone is ordered into treatment.
The to~n hall meeting at Luther Jackson Middle School in Falls Church was the last in a
series of such gatherings the governor has held since the General Assembly adgourned
nearly four weeks ago.
The governor also highlighted other laws passed this year, including one that pushes back
the time that foreclosure proceedings will begin for those in danger of losing their
homes. He also pointed out goals he did not accomplish, including closing a loophole that
permits unlicensed vendors to sell guns at gun shows without requiring a background check
and identifying new funding sources for transportation maintenance and new construction.
Many in the audience wore green stickers that read "FUND TRANSPORTATION NOW." They
applauded when he said he is planning to call for a special session this spring to come up
with solutions for gridlock and aging infrastructure. Many Repr~licans oppose tax
increases for transportation, so it is not clear that a solution is possible this year.
Del. Vivian E. Watts (D-Fairfax), who attended the meeting, said reforming the mental
health system was a "wonderful, constructive experience" because it brought Republicans
and Democrats together in what she described as an increasingly polarized environment in
Richmond. "Wouldn’t it be nice if we could extend" that cooperation to the state’s
transportation needs, she said.
Dozens of people turned out to oppose construction of a proposed coal-fire power plant in
southwest Virginia, which Kaine supports, and encourage the governor to promote greener
forms of energy.

Washington Post

Co~m~ando Performance

As the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech r~npage approaches, students all over the
cotmtry are storming campuses with (toy) guns. What kind of game is this?

By Laura Wexler?

Sunday, April 13, 2008; WI6

ON A THURSDAY MORNING LAST FALL, MAX TEMKIN STOOD IN HIS DOPd~ ROOM at Goucher College and
4
 Page 1331
took inventory of his arsenal.
"This is the Nerf Maverick," he said, brandishing a bright blue-and-yellow plastic
revolver. "It’s reliable, the bread and butter of guns. It goes everywhere with me when
I’m playing." He filled each of the gun’s six chambers with a soft foam dart and fired at
the ~all opposite him. Some of the darts stuck to the wall; some bounced off and fell to
the floor.
Next, he demonstrated the Nerf Atom Blaster, which shoots foam balls, and the Nerf
Firefly, a contraption that emits a light flash each time it releases a dart. Last, he
brought out his newest g~n], the Neff Longshot. "Other than the Maverick, this is probably
the coolest gun ever made," he said. "This has a collapsing stock, bipeds so you can snipe
with it and legitimate bolt action. I never had a toy this cool when I was a kid."
Temkin was dressed in a white Oxford shirt, a maroon necktie, gray sweater, jeans and
black Chuck Taylor sneakers. At 21, he is baby-faced and boyish. The Longshot-- a three-
foot-long Rube Goldberg marvel of fluorescent blue, yellow and orange hard-molded plastic
-- looks nearly as tall as he is.
In all, Temkin o~ns 10 Neff guns, but the Maverick and the Longshot (designed for ages 6
and tp) were the two he planned to rely on when the game of H~m~ans vs. Zon~ies began for
the fifth time at Goucher, a snmll liberal arts college north of Baltimore. At its most
basic, Humans vs. Zombies (also known as H v. Z, or Zol~bies) is an immersive game of tag
based upon the archetypal zombie narrative: All players except for the "original zon~ie,"
or O.Z., begin the game as humans. The O.Z. feeds on the humans one by one, converting
them to zon~ies who, in turn, "feed on" other humans by tagging them -- and must make a
kill every 48 hours or starve to death. Meanwhile, the humans avoid being eaten by the
zombies either by hiding -- holing up in their dorm rooms or sleeping in the library -- or
str~ning the zombies for 15 minutes with Neff darts and balled-up sock "grenades." The
game, which has fall and spring versions, is played all over campus 24 hours a day for
days, and sometimes weeks, on end. It’s over when all of the humans have perished or all
of the zombies have starved.
The 2005 inaugural Zon~ies game drew about 70 Goucher students. Since then, as many as 200
have played, making it one of the most popular student activities -- even though it’s not
an official student activity -- among the school’s roughly 1,500 students. The game has
spread to other campuses, with thousands of students playing, this month at Cornell
University, Penn State University, Bowling Green State University and the University of
Maryland, among others.
But as Zombies’ popularity has grown, criticism of it has grown, too -- especially since
last April, when a severely disturbed English major named Seung Hui Cho armed himself with
two semiautomatic handgt~s and killed 33 people, including himself, at Virginia Tech
University. In the immediate wake of that shooting, H~nans vs. Zombies became
controversial, raising a collegiate version of the prevailing question of our time: W~at
is the balance between security and freedom? And it prompts another fascinating question:
What can a group of young people learn about one another -- and themselves -- by running
around campus with Neff guns for days on end?
Temkin, a jttnior, is a philosophy major who likes nothing more than to chew on such
issues. Two years after first playing the game, he’s become one of its most vocal
evangelists on campus, speaking out from the pages of the student newspaper. He writes
with a fountain pen; he started Goucher’s debate team. But on that Thursday morning last
fall, he wasn’t interested in ruminating; he was preparing for war. He had read How to
Stay Alive in the Woods, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and Romalel’s Infantry Attacks. He had a
police scanner tuned to Goucher’s security frequency. He had a dorm room chosen for its
tactical advantages -- quick exit via two doors and the window (as !ong as he removed his
air- conditioning ~lit, which he is not supposed to have). He had a pair of steel-toed
"zombie-stomping boots" in the closet. And he had his new Neff Longshot. "I really want to
do well during this game," said Temkin, aiming at the wall and firing. "I’ve never had a
stupid early death. "
TEN DAYS LATER, JUST FOUR DAYS BEFORE HUMANS VS. ZOMBIES WAS TO BEGIN AT MIDNIGHT, 50
students waited in one of Goucher’s residence hall lounges. When senior Chris Weed walked
in just after 9 p.m., they chanted, "Speech! Speech! Speech~ Speech!"
In 2005, Weed and his then-roommate Brad Sappington invented Ht~ans vs. Zombies to amuse
themselves and their friends. When Sappington graduated in 2006, he left Weed as the
unlikely figure at the center of the burgeoning Zombies phenomenon. Weed is tall and thin,
with deep brown eyes and apple-red cheeks. At 22, he’s a dre~ner who speaks softly, gently
and infrequently. In his fall semester philosophy class, he didn’t participate once, while
Temkin talked so often that on at least one occasion the professor sighed and said, "Let’s
hear from someone besides Max, please." But this night, in response to the crowd’s chant,
Weed yelled back, "You’re all nerds!"
It was not an insult. At Goucher, which prides itself on encouraging students to be
individuals, a label such as "herd" is far less dan~ging than it would be elsewhere. And,
 Page 1332
anyway, what Weed really meant was, "We’re all nerds." To play a game as immersive and
fantastical as Zo~ies is to give oneself over completely and utterly, despite how silly
it looks, despite what others might think. That is the definition of herd.
After the initial frivolity, Weed and the other game organizers, who are know]] as
moderators, or "mods," turned serious. They’d called this meeting to make sure each player
l~d signed two legal forms instituted in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting, and to
emphasize the most important rules of the game: Don’t shoot nonplayers; don’t use or carry
guns visibly in academic buildings; and don’t use cars during game play. "No cars, no
cars, no cars," Weed said, leaning heavily on that rule because in a previous game he’d
had to kick out a player for using his car to avoid zombies. Weed warned the players that
if they didn’t comply with the rules, they would threaten the future of Zombies at
Goucher. "We’ve had to deal with a lot of crap about people not liking the game," Weed
said. "Some people are really angry about this."
Even before the Virginia Tech shooting, Goucher’s associate dean of students, Emily Perl,
said she had received at least a dozen oral and e-mail complaints about the game. On April
16 last year, as soon as she heard about the shooting at Virginia Tech, Perl called Temkin
and told him to imlnediately halt the Zombies game that had been ru~~ing for about a week.
"We don’t want students ru~ing around with guns today," Perl said she told him. "There
was a heightened sense of fragility."
Ultimately, however, Goucher president Sanford Ungar allowed the game to continue after
meeting with the Zombies organizers, who presented a~ninistrators with a gift-wrapped Neff
gun addressed to his or her "inner child." The gift of the toy guns was an attempt to
reinforce the idea that Humans vs. Zombies is a game, rather than an "issue," said Temkin,
who came up with the idea. Ungar saw his decision as part of a larger refusal to overreact
to wilt he called the "horrific aberration" at Virginia Tech. As he wrote in Goucher’s
alumni quarterly last spring: "We will not sign on to trendy, but unproven, electronic
alert systems . . We will not engage in tawdry one-upsmanship to try to claim that we
are safer-than-thou . . And we will not seek to label as ’dangerous’ every student who
is merely different . . We must make our decisions with an eye toward striking a
delicate balance between security and personal freedom."
Even so, Goucher a~ninistrators wanted to provide everyone on campus the chance to voice
their thoughts about the game. So Goucher’s chaplain scheduled a highly structured pt~lic
meeting on the eve of the fall g~nes. That day, nearly 10O people crowded into a classroom
to listen as Weed explained the game’s ability to bring together disparate groups of kids
and Temkin waxed poetic. "I know the Zombies game is a really weird, freaky thing," he
said. "It’s, like, not socially acceptable . . But we’re weird kids with weird pastimes,
and we’re part of a group. That’s a really incredible feeling."
Wllile the opponents acknowledged the game’s benefits, they criticized its representation
of killing and violence. Jenifer Jennings-Shaud, a me~mber of the graduate education
faculty, spoke of arriving on c~pus one evening and seeing a man with a grtn run over the
hill. "I was terrified," she said. "Guns scare me. Neff guns, regular guns. All guns."
Then she began to cry. English professor Jeff Myers raised questions about the ethics of
"playing war" while an actual war is happening in lraq. Peace studies instructor Fran
Donelan theorized about the possible link between fantasy violence and actual violence.
"There have been many studies done about how a society’s games reflect the society," she
said. "Host of the games in this country revolve around hunting people down and killing
them."
A similar conversation -- or argument, in some cases -- continues at several campuses
where the game is played. At Maryland and Bowling Green, letters in the student newspapers
have criticized Zombies players for their insensitivity to the Virginia Tech victims. At
Whitman College in Washington state, game a~ninistrators decided toy weapons were too
sensitive on a college campus in light of the Virginia Tech shooting and banned Neff guns
during their fall game. Bowling Green will not use the gt~]s this spring. At Butler
University in Indiana, administrators have banned Zombies outright. "People are a little
edgy," said Butler’s dean of student life, Irene Stevens. "Given the Virginia Tech
incident, we didn’t feel it was appropriate for them to be going around campus 24/7
carrying toy gm~s." Perl continues to wonder whether she and the other a~ninistrators are
doing right by allowing the game to continue. "My worst fear is that an outsider will walk
onto campus and pull a real gun, not knowing the kids are using fake gtms," she said.
W~]en concerns about the game first surfaced last year, Weed took it personally. And even
as he’s some to t~derstand that students running arottnd on campus with weapons can scare
some people, he stands fast in the belief that fear should not prevent fun. "Neff guns are
so innocuous," he said. "It’s the s!r~olism of it that scares people. It’s people letting
fear ru~ their lives."
Weed was 14 when the April 1999 Columbine High School shooting occurred. In the wake of
the Colorado massacre, a~inistrators at the private school Weed attended ~ndated that
one door in each set of do~le doors be locked. "I guess it was to prevent a big group of
6
 Page 1333
armed people from coming through the door, but it was ridiculous," he said. "I think they
realized they couldn’t do anything, so it ~as a symbolic action to make parents feel
better."
Temkin’s public school instituted lockdo~rn drills after Columbine, in which the students
would turn off the lights and sit against the wall where the door was, so if a shooter
looked through the window of the door, he’d think the classroom was empty. When Weed and
Temkin recall these measures, it’s almost as if they view the adults’ attempts to ensure
their total safety as naive, sensationalist and a bit silly -- even childish. They and the
other moderators say they are t~willing to allow what they see as a knee-jerk reaction to
a terrible event impinge on their personal freedom. "How has the Virginia Teoh shooting
affected me personally?" Temkin asked. "It’s reduced my individual liberty as a student
because of the reaction to it. I obviously think that school shootings are a tragedy .
But I just don’t see how they connect to our game of tag. Mmking that kind of collection
is pure political correctness -- the elevation of feeling good over doing right."
Coincidentally, Goucher’s spring 2008 game begins on April 16, the one-year anniversary of
the rampage at Virginia Tech. Despite their rejection of a link between the game and
campt~ violence, the organizers have decided to nmke the first day gttn-free, out of
deference to those who were killed.
AT APPROXI}6hTELY 10 A.M. ON OPENING GAME DAY LAST NOVEMBER, the first of 160 humans at
@oucher perished when sophomore Erika Cardona rushed up to one of her friends saying,
"Dude, I know who the O.Z. is!" When the guy said, "Who?" she said, "Me!" and tagged him.
Then she took his ID number to record her kill at the Web site the mods had created.
Cardona had the most kills of any zombie during the previous spring’s game, and she’s a
dedicated player, which is why the mods chose her to be the O.Z. (in general, women make
up about one-third of the Zo~Joies players). During two summers in high school, she
partioipated in roving games of Capture the Flag on the streets of Manhatt~], and she onoe
attended a mass pillow fight in Union Square. "I realized early on that it was kind of
important to have a sense of play outside work and schoolwork," said Cardona.
For the two nights before the game began, she dreamed of running around and tagging kids.
"It’s definitely taking me over," she said. After tagging her first victim, she continued
to stalk the campus disguised as a h~nan, with a blue bandanna on her leg and her Neff
Reaotor in her hand.
A few hours later, the 1~ or so humans holed up in Van Meter Hall, one of @oucher’s main
classroom buildings, checked the Web site ~ld were alarmed to discover that the O.Z. had
already recorded seven kills. It was only the first day of play, but these humans were
already in full game mode. Sutton Ashby was dressed all in black, wearing leg and shoulder
holsters that hold four of the seven guns tie owns. (Because game rules state that weapons
can’t be visible in academic buildings, Ashby’s guns were stowed in a plastic garbage bag
next to his backpack.) He had his student ID card taped to his wrist so he could wave it
in front of the card readers and quickly unlock doors. Jon Simon was wearing a black
hunting vest and cargo pants, and he carried a mirror that he could extend around corners
to spot zo~mbies lying in wait. Peter Danilchu_k had stocked up on granola, fruit bars,
raisins and V-8 -- dining halls are not "safe zones," he said. All wore bandannas tied
around their arms or legs that identified them as htnnans; if they got tagged and bec~me
zombies, they’d transfer the banda~lnas to their heads.
By 2:30 p.m. the next day, the human population was down from 150 to lO0 and Van Meter was
surrounded by zombies, including O.Z. Cardona, who was lying on her stomach outside the
basement door, hoping to catch unsuspecting htm~ns leaving class.
On the one hand, Cardona was feeling pretty good -- she’d bagged a reoord 18 kills the
first day, and she was ready to devote her entire weekend to eradicating the human
population. On the other hand, the humans who’d perished were the low-hanging fruit. She
wanted Temkin and a few other key players, who were holed up inside Van Meter. Through the
windows, Cardona saw them chatting and checking e-mail. "I don’t want to move from here,"
she said after waiting 30 minutes in the Noven~er chill. "It’s a hostage sitr~tion. We’re
psyching them out."
One of the human militia conunanders, Boman Modine, a husky senior with a disheveled mop of
curly hair and a penchant for fantasy games, came up with an escape plan for the 40-odd
huma~ scattered throughout Van Meter. And although Temkin had reservations, he agreed to
follow orders, because Modine was the ranking officer and Temkin is a firm believer in
chain of conuzand. According to the plan, all the freshman and inexperienced players would
run out the front of Van Meter and draw the zombies’ attention. The more experienced
militia menders would go out the back and take on the zombies there. Then the h~nans would
reconvene in an open field behind the building.
On cue, a group of humans charged out the front door with their guns blazing, and Temkin
and two others ran out the main back door. One of Temkin’s comrades died before Modine
arrived with backup, but it wasn’t a bad showing, considering that the building was
surrounded. The freshmen who ran out the front suffered no losses at all.
7
 Page 1334
Modine split the h~nans into three platoons, with Temkin at the helm of one as they
marched through the middle of campus. Later, Temkin would bask in the glory of that
moment. "I conmlanded 40 people," he said. "I feel like I did something big."
Temkin has no military training and no plans to join the military. But he and the others
r~mrching with him seemed hungry for at least part of the soldier’s experience -- the
friendships forged under fire, the intensity of life-or-death situations, the chance to be
tested. As one militia member said: "You get to be Arnold Schwarzenegger. You get to go
blazing into a pack of people and save the day."
It’s exaotly this vie~rpoint that disturbs Myers, the English professor who spoke out
during the oonununity conversation. "I don’t hmve anything specifically against the game as
a game," he said. "What sort of troubled me was seeing young men walking around campus in
camouflage and doing a kind of walk I would characterize as a swagger or aggressive pose.
It’s clearly role-playing, but, as Shakespeare would say, ’All the world’s a stage.’ So
the roles say a lot about who people are. The game perhaps gives some insight into why war
is so attractive to young men."
SEVERAL HOURS AFTER THE STANDOFF OUTSIDE VAN METER THAT FRIDAY AFTERNOON -- which was far
from the bloodbath Cardona had hoped for -- Cardona and a pack of zombies hnd gathered on
the hill next to the student parking lot, awaiting the humans, whom they’d learned were
marcl~ng through the woods that ring Goucher’s campus, headed their way. When the humans
realized the zolnbies were lying in wait, Modine and fellow militia commander Matt Sabine
huddled to decide whether the troops should press deeper into the woods or rush the
zombies. The decision was to rush, so the hummns made a quarter-turn and charged up the
hill, shooting and yelling. In the ensuing melee all the zombies were stunned by Nerf
darts before they could tag anyone, and the httmans ran off to the safety of their dorm
rooms.
"We didn’t get anyone?" O.Z. Cardona said, her chest rising and falling from exertion. "We
failed miserably."
A few hours later, the zombies attacked in Tuttle House, a dorm, but the humans
commandeered the stairwells, knocking the zombies back every time they attempted to
advance. After the 90-minute siege ended, Temkin and the other humans ordered Chinese food
and asked the delivery guy to pass it through the window.
~en Cardona finally went to bed at 3 a.m., she dreamt of zombies for the third night in a
row.
By ~ p.m. Saturday, half the humans h~d perished~ tagged here and there on the way to
class or to a friend’s dorm or to the bathroom. But Temkin remained at large. Me was due
any moment to return from a field trip, and the zon~ies had gathered at Van Meter to
~nbush him as he stepped off the bus. "I want Max to die so bad," said Cardona.
Suddenly Cardona yelled, "There’s the bus!" But instead of coming toward Van Meter, the
bus was traveling along the opposite side of campus to the student parking lot where the
melee had occurred the night before. Cardona and the rest of the horde raced off in that
direction, running past a group of perplexed groomsmen and bridesmaids gathered outside
the chapel. But before she and her crew reached the edge of c~npus, a zombie who was on
the bus with Temkin ran up to them and said, "Max got in his car and went off campus ....
which could be a violation of the game rules.
Weed, who b~d come out from his dorm room to watch what he supposed would be Temkin’s
demise, called Temkin on his cellphone. "Are you in the car?" Weed asked. When Temkin said
yes, Weed said, "We have to talk about this."
The previous night, during the march through the woods, Weed had gazed at the dancing and
singing hrtmans and said, "I could die a happy man right now." But now, Weed was quietly
and powerfully angry. Weed’s phone kept ringing -- Temkin calling back -- but he didn’t
answer it. He wanted to delay the possibility of having to eject Temkin, the game’s most
ardent fan and most recognizable spokesman, for breaking one of the key rules of the g~ne:
Don’t use your car to escape zombies.
A half-hour later, Cardona raced up the stairs in Tuttle Mouse to discover the glass in
the fire extinguisher case had been shattered: A zon~ie collided with it in the heat of
battle. Me suffered only a minor cut, but the word went out thmt someone was hurt, and
Temkin, parking his car, heard and rushed to Tuttle. As he entered the building, his
defenses down, a fresh/nan zolnbie simply reached out and tagged him, and that was the end
of Temkin’s career as a hunmn.
Later, Temkin explained that he’d worried during the entire field trip until he got the
idea to ask the bus driver to switch the drop-off spot. When he stepped off the bus at the
student parking lot, he shot one zombie to stun her then told the other zombie who’d been
on the bus: "I’m leaving. Do you want to fight me?" After that zo~l~ie walked away, Temkin
got into his car and drove to the store on an errand.
"If I had known people were coming toward me, I wouldn’t have gotten in the car, " he said.
"I would have died. "
Though some players believed him, some didn’t, and their doubt would leave Temkin torn and
 Page 1335
troubled -- and uncharacteristically tongue-tied -- for weeks afterward. In the meantime,
he checked the Web site. The tally stood at 86 zombies, 64 humans. He took a shower,
changed his clothes and ran around with the zombies until 2 a.m.
BY SUNDAY AFTERNOON, CARDONA HAD LOGGED 23 KILLS AND AT LEAST ONE IMPORTANT ASSIST: She
helped kill Modine. She hadn’t slept much, and every few minutes a zombie called to report
information (or runlors) and ask her what to do. "It’s a little exhausting," she said. "I’m
not schooled in military strategy like some of the guys. I don’t prepare for this game
like they do."
Later, as the zon~ies were walking en masse toward the residential qumd, Modine got a call
on his cellphone. He hung up, then quieted the crowd before issuing a proclamation.
"Jonatbmn Suss just killed Matt Sabine!"
The crowd chanted, "Suss! Suss! Suss!" Even on a campus full of eccentric students, Suss,
a fres~an, stands out. He is the polar opposite of senior Sabine, a militia colluuander
Temkin describes as "an alpha herd."
When someone asked how Suss made his glorious kill, Modine replied: "He was waiting in the
shower stall in the bathroom for eight hours. Me tagged Sabine on his way out of the
bathroom."
Fueled by the news that one of their weakest players had killed one of the strongest human
players, the zombies prepared to charge the 20 or so remaining humans, who were gathered
on the stone patio outside at the student center. After the zombies’ initial rush, only
four h~nans were left standing. Then the zombies charged again, and just one human
remained.
Even though a few more h~ans were hiding in their dorm rooms, the game felt effectively
finished: The zombies won. Emotions had run high and low. Alliances had been made and
broken. People had revealed themselves to one another more fully in the previous few days
than in a semester or year of sitting next to one another in a class.
Everyone was tired. Everyone was hungry. Everyone h~d homework to do.
In the days afterward, as players caught up on sleep and ate their first full meals in a
while, Weed and the other mods pledged to create a centralized Web site that would make it
easy for anyone any~lhere to start a game of Humans vs. Zombies. They considered forming a
limited liability company and incorporating new technology to make the g~e more
inunersive. And Weed daydreamed of buying a van and driving from campus to campus, an
itinerant preacher spreading the gospel of Zo~mbies to young people every~here.
"We’re never truly safe," he’d tell them. "And since we’re not safe, let’s have ft~."
Laura Wexler is the author of Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass L~n%ching in America and a
writer in Baltimore. She can be reached at laura@laurawexler.com. She will be fielding
questions and conm~ents about this article Monday at noon at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.

Louisville Courier-Journal, KY

April 13, 2008

Confronting the rising dropout rates

It’s a lot later than we think. We’re raising an illiterate and uneducated generation, and
there’s more to come. On April i, America’s Promise Alliance released a detailed study
revealing that fewer than half of the teenagers in 17 of the largest U.S. cities drop out
of high school before they graduate -- more than 1.2 million of them. The cost of this is
enormous: billions of dollars in lost productivity for expensive social services and
(because ignorance begets crime) to build more prisons. This report sounded like an April
Fool’s joke on the growing number of fools, meaning all of us.
The high school dropout resembles the fool depicted on Tarot cards -- standing at the edge
of a precipice, with no idea how far he’ll fall, when fall he will. It’s no coincidence
that the n~er symbol for the fool is a zero. A ht~dred times zero is still zero.
"When more than i million students a year drop out of high school, it’s more than a
problem, it’s a catastrophe," says Colin Powell, the former secretary of State and
founding chairman of ~nerica’s Premise Alliance. His wife, Alma, chairs the Alliance now.
Speaking as the old soldier he is, he describes these statistics as "a call to arms." The
Powells are joining Margaret Spellings, secretary of Education, to call for s~its in
every state to figure out how to halt the decline in graduation rates, as well as to
better prepare public school graduates for work and college.
But do we really need more meetings to talk endlessly (and tediously) about shopworn
educational ideas and stale theories? Alma Powell answers the question before someone asks
it: The su~mmits won’t be jabber-jabber sessions. "They will be about action," and de~-~nd
9
 Page 1336
that local, state and federal policy]~akers, grass roots co~lunities, parents, students and
advocates confront the reality now.
The statistics show what seems obvious to everybody: City kids are far more likely to live
on the precipice than kids from the suburbs. The Editorial Projects in Education Research
Center finds that graduation rates in city schools are 15 percentage points lower than
those in the suburbs. In some cities, the disparity is as wide as 35 percent. It’s the
kids in the largest cities who can’t see the value of an education. Life on the street and
the grr~t jobs found there ought to make even homework look attractive.
Knowledge is power, and this is the lesson we have to find a way to teach. Only by
identifying horrifio statistical disparities can we begin to demand change. But, we must
be careful about what kind of change to make.
No Child Left Behind legislation has left troublesome, unintended consequences. When the
legislation imposed rigid standards, teachers began to "teach to the test" instead of
imparting actual knowledge. Secretary Spellings wants to require states to provide more
uniform graduation data, but this will require careful monitoring, too. States sometimes
inflate graduation rates, so they won’t invite sanctions from the federal bureaucrats who
dole out the money.
Solutions to the education crisis cannot be determined on a one-size-fits- all basis.
We’ve learned a lot about the different ways different children learn. Older children in
kindergarten, for ex~tmple, generally do better than younger children, so parents have
learned to put their kids in schools where the cut-off age puts them in classes with
slightly younger classmates. Charter schools offer a choice to parents eager to rescue
their children from failing schools and put them in schools emphasizing math, science,
arts and langtlages. Unfortunately, the good charters usually have long waiting lists. The
charter movement needs more public support.
Parents who participate in their children’s schools, who pay attention to what and how
their children perform, are likely to raise achievers. We don’t need another study to tell
us t]~t. Children who grow up in poor single-parent families, without fathers to help
guide them, start out behind the proverbial eight ball. We don’t need another study to
tell us that, either.
The catechism of liberalism inevitably prescribes more money as the key to changing all
this, but the real key is how the money is spent. The public schools in the nation’s
capital spend about $25,000 per student per year, considerably more than a good private
school education. Nevertheless, Washington’s schools are among the worst in the country.
That’s why few congressmen send their kids to public schools. In some years, none do.
Dropping out is a fool’s errand, but getting children to stay in school requires
encouragement from all of us. "A knowledgeable fool," as Moliere observed, "is a greater
fool than an ignorant fool." We’ve been forewarned.
Suzanne Fields is a colur~ist with The Washington Times. Her e-mail address is sfieldsl000
@aol.com.

Chattanooga Times Free Press, TN

Tennessee seeking standard grad rate

Sunday, April 13, 2008

By Kelli Gauthier

Tennessee and the federal goverrn~ent disagree on the state’s high-school graduation rates
and it’s hurting Tennessee’s students, education officials say.
"There is no question that having an accurate measure of student success is vitally
important for every high school in ~kmerica," said Dan Challener, president of the Public
Education Foundation, "and we’ ve never been clear. "
But everything will be squared up by next year, officials promise, and not just because
the federal gover~Lment is trying to make them.
There’s widespread confusion over the way Tennessee and the rest of the country calculate
high school graduation rates. But officials with the state Department of Education say by
2009 they will have an accurate and nationally comparable count of high school graduates
in the Volunteer State.
Until all states are "comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges, " no one will
grasp the gravity of a national graduation crisis, where one-fourth of high school
students never earn a diploma, said Mr. Challener, who has studied state and local
graduation rates through the foundation’s work with high school reform efforts in Hamilton
 Page 1337

Using 2004 numbers, Tennessee says it gradmmtes 75.7 percent of its high school students.
No, says the U.S. Department of Education, it’s actually 66.1 percent. Although the
figures are four years old, 2004 is the most recent year that the Department of Education
used to calculate its fiqures.
Other states have reported different M and usually higher -- graduation rates than the
federal gover~nent. Because school systems that don’t reach federal guidelines under No
Child Left Behind can face penalties up to state takeover, states are being accused of
artificially inflating their graduation n~bers to meet those standards. In turn,
Tennessee says federal figures don’t take into consideration such factors as students who
have not dropped out but transferred out of the system or started homeschooling
Discrepancies expected
Because federal data dic[n’t take into acco~lt such students, the U.S. Department of
Education said there would be fairly wide discrepancies between its numbers and the
states’, said Rachel Woods, spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Education.
"They told us we should expect a l0 percentage-point discrepancy give or take between what
they report and what we report," she said.
Either way, both of Ter~nessee’s numbers are a healthy distance from its set goal of
graduating 90 percent by 2014, one of the most ambitious in the country.
To clear up the confusion nationwide, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings
recently ar~nounced that, as part of the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, all
states must move toward a single method of calculating high school graduation rates.
Mr. Challener said consistency in measuring gradt~tion rates is critical.
"I believe you can’t solve a problem until you understand it and have a good measure of
it," he said.
Step ahead
In the move to standardize calculations, Tennessee already may be a step ahead of the
game, state education officials say. Two years ago, the state began moving toward a 2009
implementation of the calculation method endorsed by the National Governor’s Association.
Louisiana, North Carolina, Hassachusetts and Texas are using a similar method, and a
l~ndful of other states are gathering student data needed to use the same plan.
Although Elaine Quesinberry, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Education, would not
confirm the specific method Ms. Spellings would request, Tennessee education officials
think it is likely the governor’s association method will become the national standard.
Ms. Quesinberry said an announcement about the new method would come soon on the Federal
Register, the Washington, D.C.-based daily publication that lists federal rules, proposed
rules and notices.
Like all states across the country, Tennessee was charged with determining its own
gradtmtion rate calculation after the No Child Left Behind Act was signed into law in
2001. The result was a confusing patchwork of statistics from across the country, with no
accurate way to compare states with each other.
U.S. Department of Education officials insist their recent graduation figures shouldn’t be
used as the be-all end-all, but merely are an estimate that states can use to compare
themselves with other states.
"The (calculation) provides a standard estimate of the on-time high school graduation
rate," David Tho~ms, spokesman at the U.S. Department of Education, said. "The numbers are
used for statistical purposes such as estinmting the national on-time graduation rate or
ex~lining changes in graduation rates over time."

Jackson Clarion Ledger, HS

April 13, 2008

State to change way it computes grad rates??

By Rebecca Helmes?rhelmes@jackson. gannett, com

The way one set of numbers reads, Mississippi’s 2006 graduation rate was 87 percent. By
another figuring method, it was 63 percent.
One set is artificially high, while the other is artificially low, said Mississippi’s
education chief, because until now the state’s data-collecting system has been unable to
accurately pinpoint graduation rates.
Superintendent of Education Hank Bounds and other education officials said the state’s
 Page 1338
more precise student data-tracking system took a few years to get up and ru~ning - which
is why Mississippi’s education department has kept two sets of graduation rates in recent
years. The state will soon abandon the traditional method in favor of the new one.
Changing to the new method would mean Mississippi’s graduation rate would go down in the
eyes of the federal goverr~aent and, therefore, could mean sanctions under the federa! No
Child Left Behind program for improving schools. Bounds said he doesn’t want schools to be
penalized for appearing as if graduation rates have dropped, when actually the state is
keeping more accurate numbers.
"We are at a point now where we can completely follow the (National Governors Association)
rate, except that we’re going to have to get the U.S.D.E. (U.S. Department of Education)
to reset our numbers," Bounds said. He was referring to the state’s graduation rate
bencl~marks.
The gradrmtion rate change comes 9ust in time for the recent announcement that U.S.
Education Secretary B~rgaret Spellings will require all states to use a uniform graduation
rate formula.
Bounds said he expects 2007 graduation rates, which will be finalized and announced later
this spring, to be slightly higher than 2006’s 63 percent but much lower than 87 percent.
The higher accuracy of the state’s new figuring method is a product of how the data is
collected.
The traditional graduation rate calculation overestimates districts’ graduation rates by
comparing the number of students who start ninth-grade, plus those who transfer in and
minus those who transfer out or die, to those who graduate four years later. The
graduation rate has been figured the same }~y since No Child Left Behind took effect in
2002.
The second set of numbers is more accurate because individual students rather than 9ust
the total nrtmber of students each year are accounted for in the data system. But this set
of numbers is artificially low, said Steve Hebbler, director of the state education
department’s Office of Research and Statistics, because this set of 2006 numbers does not
differentiate between first time and repeat ninth-graders. Once the 2007 graduation rate
information is available, that will no longer be a problem.
Because of t]~t ninth-grade issue, Hebbler and other education officials actually expect
the 2007 graduation rate to improve a little, but not much, over the 63 percent rate for
2006.

Associated Press

Sat April 12, 2008 00:07 EDT

Educators work to boost East High School’s graduation rate

BEN FULTON

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) His mother cares for him and his three siblings on a cashier’s
salary. One of his s~sters, he said, has already left high school.
But Ricardo Medina, a 15-year-old freslmman at Salt Lake City’s East High School, is
holding fast to his goal of becoming a psychologist.
"’So many kids’ parents can’t be there because they’re at work putting food on the
table, ’ ’ Medina said.
As for his teachers, Medina recognizes they’re plenty busy with the workloads they’ve got
as well.
He therefore is grateful East High participates in the federal Gaining Early Awareness and
Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP) after-school tutoring program.
¯ " (Program mentors) help us with anything,’’ he said. "’It’s an influence for us to stay
on track. ’ ’
Helping students stay on track, especially freshinen, has become a priority at East. That
the school has turned after-school tutoring from a mark of failure into a mark of
motivation is only a start.
With 72 percent of students graduating in the 2006-2007 school year, according to Adequate
Yearly Progress (AYP) reports, few if any Salt Lake Cou~ty high schools posted a lower
rate of graduation than East. The average graduation rate among state high schools for the
prior school year, according to the Utah State Office of Education figures, is 83 percent.
East High ac~ninistrators have launched a vigorous response. In addition to GEAR UP, which
offers 15 tutors’ and two cou~selors’ help to more th~n 300 students, the school also has
enlisted Westminster College students to tutor in math, teamed with the University of
Utah’s Pacific Islander Club to provide academic support, and instituted the Advancement
Via Individual Determination (AVID) program to prepare students for grad<~tion and future
~2
 Page 1339
college careers. To make sure students’ parents know about these services, East High
launched an outreach progr~~ thmt involves visits to students’ homes.
At East, a large part of the challenge is learning how to best serve refugee students from
Somalia, Burma and Liberia.
For any high school looking to reduce its number of dropouts, ninth grade is the make-or-
break year. Studies show high school fres~nen who fail math and reading requirements
rarely graduate. Sagers estimates slightly more than 150 ninth-graders "’don’t finish with
us,’’ either dropping out, or finishing schooling at the alternative Horizonte Instruction
& Training School.
East High’s most far-reaching attempt at i~provement is its "’Concentrated Classrooms’’
program, which allots all the school’s 600 freshmen into "’teaching teams’’ of four to
eight teachers who monitor students’ progress as a group and across all academic sr~ects,
rather than teachers’ individual specialties. Assistant principal John Hammil said this
model cultivates a greater sense of coz~nection between students and teachers, a crucial
element of success in ninth grade.
The program doesn’t segregate students by achievement level, a fact that may surprise.
"’If we surround students with others who are performing poorly, then they don’t know what
it looks like to perform well,’’ said science teacher Michael Lloyd, East High’s point
person for the program. "’It almost establishes a culture of failure.’’ Lloyd said the
program’s already allowed teachers to spot problems, and intervene with students before
those problems become patterns. "’We’ve almost taken on a counseling role within the
teaching team,’’ he said.
"’I definitely am not trying to minimize this at all,’’ Paul S. Sagers, who took the
of East High principal last July, said of his school’s graduation rate. "’We’re doing
whatever we can, basically, to keep these kids in school. It’s one of my major
initiatives.’’
East High’s effort under Sagers comes at a time when Secretary of Education Margaret
Spellings, tired of dealing with states’ myriad graduation rates, announced in early April
a plan to bring all the nation’s high schools under the same formula for calculating
graduation rates. Utah does not count dropouts who later earn ®EDs among its graduate
rate, but will count students who complete high school despite three failed attempts at
passing an exit ex~n.
Although Utah’s high school graduation rate far exceeds the national average, the State
Office of Education assigned students individual n~bers four years ago to track their
movement through the state school system. That made state graduation rates more accurate.

Nashua Telegraph, NH

PtJolished: Sunday, April 13, 2008

Nation deserves debates on failing schools

By Morton Kondracke

How ~any wake-up calls does America need before we make our failing public schools fit for
the competitive challenges of the 21st century? ??

This month marks the 25th anniversary of the first loud gong - the 1983 report "A Nation
at Risk," which famously warned that "if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to
impose on ~nerica the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well
have viewed it as an act of war." ??

That was Cold War talk, but the same report anticipated the world we live in today. "Our
once unchallenged pre-eminence in commerce, industry, science and technological innovation
is being overtaken by competition throughout the world. . What was unimaginable a
generation ago has begun to occur - others are matching and surpassing our educational
attainments." ??

Are they ever. In the latest Program for International Student Assessment, U.S. 15-year-
olds ranked 28th out of 41 countries in mathematics literacy, 16th in reading, 22nd in
science and 29th in problem-solving, far behind not only Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong
and most of Western Europe, but behind even Poland and the Slovak Republic. ??
 Page 1340
As Microsoft Chair~mn Bill Gates told a House committee last month: "The United States
today has one of the lowest high school graduation rates in the industrialized world.
Three out of every 10 ninth-graders - and nearly half of all African-American and Hispanic
ninth-graders - do not graduate on time. ??

"Of those who do graduate and continue on to college, over a quarter must take remedial
courses on material they should have learned in high school." ??

Gates anticipated one of the most dismal reports yet - issued April 1 by the ~lerica’s
Promise Alliance (full disclosure: my wife is its president) showing that only 52 percent
of students in the nation’s 50 biggest cities graduate from high school, compared with 75
percent in their suburbs. ??

In the worst cases, Baltimore city schools graduated less than 35 percent of their
students, compared with 81 percent in the suburbs; Columbus, Ohio, graduated 41 percent in
the city, 83 percent in the suburbs; Cleveland graduated 42 percent in the city, 78
percent in its suburbs; and New York graduated 47 percent in the city, 83 percent in the
suburbs. ??

At a press conference unveiling the new findings, the alliance’s founder, former Secretary
of State Colin Powell, pronounced them "a catastrophe," especially in view of the
emergence of new international competitors such as China, India and former Soviet
satellites. ??

Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., declared, "If this were a health crisis - a disease - we’d call
it an epidemic and would throw whatever resources we could at it. But nobody seems as
outraged by it as they ought to be." ??

Burr and Sen. Jeff Bing~mn, D-N.M., are co-sponsors of the Graduation Promise Act, which
would authorize $2 billion over five years to surround the country’s 2,000 most dropout-
prone schools with tutoring, health and parent-mentoring resources to ease the problem, a
plan America’s Promise is promoting on its own with lOO "dropout summits" around the
co~]try over the next two years. ??

Bingaman acknowledged to me in an interview that the bill had little chance of passing
this year because it will need to be folded into reauthorization of President Bush’s No
Child Left Behind law - a measure that is going nowhere this election year. ??

NCLB was a pioneering, bipartisan step on the road to improving American education -
requiring states to adopt measurable perfomnance standards, test children regularly,
report results based on race and income groups, and take remedial action when schools fall
short. ??

Yet, NCLB is regularly denounced on the campaign trail by Democratic candidates Barack
Ob~na and Hillary Clinton in a nod to teachers unions, which object to accountability
requirements, and it’s also opposed by right-wing Republicans as a federal "takeover" of
state primacy over education. ??

To his credit, Obama occasionally has hinted that he supports merit pay for teachers based
on their performance in improving student outcomes, but he was hissed for it at last
year’s National Education Association convention and has retreated to recon~ending higher
"battle pay" for teachers taking on difficult assigr~ments in science, math and poverty-
area schools. ??

In a recent speech, John HcCain eloquently backed NCLB and pay-for-performance, but he has
yet to make education a top-tier issue in the campaign. ??

As a measure of how low education stands as campaign priority, only 27 of about 500
questions asked during presidential debates this year have concerned schools, according to
former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, now head of Ed in ’08, a group funded by the Bill and
Melinda Gates Fot~dation to raise education’s profile. ??

In the audience at the alliance event was Dr. Milt Goldberg, executive director of the
1983 commission that produced the "Nation At Risk" report. I asked him how far we’ve come
since then. ??
 Page 1341

"We’ve made some incremental gains," he said, "but on the basics, not much." ??

Before the alliance event, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings told me she plans to
issue a report later this month commemorating the 25th a~liversary of "A Nation At Risk."
The gist of it? ??

"We continue to be at risk," she said. ??

That’s an understatement.

Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.

The New York Times

April 13, 2008

When Strings Are Attached, Quirky Gifts Can Limit Universities

By KAREN W. ARENSON

When Stanley J. Seeger gave Princeton $2 million for Hellenic studies nearly three decades
ago, the gift’s income paid for two courses in modern Greek and trips to Greece for five.
But the Seeger money, which must be spent only on matters Greek, is now worth $33 million,
multiplying through aggressive investing like the rest of Princeton’s endowment. So the
university offers Greek, Greek and more Greek -- 13 courses this semester, including "The
Image of Greece in European Cinema" and "Problems in Greek History: Greek Democracy," as
wel! as trips to Greece and nearby areas for more than 90 students and faculty members
last year. The history department recently hired its second Byzantine specialist. And the
fund paid half the cost of a collection of 800 rare coins from medieval Greece.
"Institutions do get shaped by the interests of donors," said Robert K. Durkee, vice
president and secretary of Princeton.
As the nation’s wealthiest colleges and universities report on their finances to Congress,
seeking to head off federal requirements t~mt they spend at least 5 percent of their ever-
growing endowment income, new attention is being paid to how endowments are structured,
and on the restrictions imposed by donors.
Aides to the Senate Finance Con~ittee, which sent out a query in January about endowment
practices to the 136 wealthiest colleges and universities, say they have received 131
responses and have begun to scrutinize them. The responses, some of which universities
have made public, show that at some, including Harvard and the University of Texas, 80
percent or more of the endorsement is constrained by donors’ wishes. But the responses do
not begin to detail the variety of these restrictions.
Recent interviews with college officials show that while many restrictions are for broad
uses like faculty chairs and student aid, others are less central to the functioning of a
modern university. Some are outright quirky.
"Endo~ent funds are in some ways like a museum," said Mark G. Yudof, the chancellor of
the University of Texas System, recently tapped to take over the California system.
"Sometimes they are visionary. Sometimes they aren’t. Land titles was a big business in
another era; now, professors and students are not that interested in the subject."
Critics of universities say that while sizable portions of university endo~~anents may be
restricted, the wealthiest universities still could use more of their endo~sments to reduce
tuition. "It is simply false to claim that donor restrictions prevent increased
spending," said Lynne Munson, an adgunct research fellow at the Center for College
Affordability and Productivity. "Almost half of endowment funds at private institutions
are unrestricted, as are nearly a quarter of endowment dollars at wealthy public
institutions."
Restrictions on endowments can create tensions between donors and universities. Princeton,
for ex~[ple, faces trial in a case brought by the heirs of a supermarket fortune over
whether a gift to help pay for programs at its Woodrow Wilson School was used as intended.
Frederic J. Fransen created the Center for Excellence in Higher Education in Indiana last
year to help donors ensure that colleges respect their wishes when they give money.
Mr. Yudof recalled that when he was dean of the law school at the University of Texas,
Austin, from 1984 to 1994, "I had more oil and gas professorships than I had oil and gas
 Page 1342
law faculty."
He said he asked one donor for permission to use the money temporarily for a professor in
another field, while he searched for an oil and gas faculty mender. (The donor said yes.)
"Sometimes they consent," he said. "Sometimes they don’t. Usually you don’t go to court."
Going to court is an option if a university finds it can no longer comply with the terms
of a gift. The Virginia Tech Foundation took this step when it could not grant a
scholarship for students from Warwick County, because the county no longer existed.
Gifts can become unworkable in many ways. Consider the Dudley Professorship of Railroad
Engineering at Yale. The chair was created in 1923 with a $152,679 gift from Plimmon H.
Dudley, an engineer who worked for the New York Central Rail. His express desire, he said,
was that his research into railway safety be continued, "in particular the work in
connection with the development and improvement of designs of rails, roadbeds and
crossties."
But over the years, railway engineering lost its luster as a hot academic topic. And the
professorship sat vacant for more than 70 years.
"I was kind of st~nped as to whmt to do with this chair, "’ Yale’s president, Richard C.
Levin, admitted.
Then Yale realized that the steam engines and wood ties of yesterday had been replaced by
today’s magnetic levitation and superconductivity. So since 2002, A. Stephen Morse, an
engineer who has studied urban transportation and switching strategies for the control of
uninl~nbited vehicles, has been the Dudley Professor of Engineering at Yale.
It is not just professorships that look different as decades go by.
Take the $i,000 bequest to Dartmouth in 1945, from a soldier who had died in Burma, which
his parents suggested be used to keep the Dartmouth president’s fireplace stocked with
wood. The president still has a fireplace, but it no longer burns wood; the money is used
for general expenses in the office.
A $i0,000 gift from Dartmouth’s class of 1879 was directed to pay for trumpeters at
graduation. The trumpets still blare in June. But the endo~n~ent, now valued at more than a
quarter of a million dollars, also pays for the music director.
Edwin Webster Sanborn, a Dartmouth graduate, gave the college money to build S~ioorn House
for the English department, hoping to foster the kind of close student associations his
father had had as a popular English professor. As a condition of the gift, the department
was to serve tea daily to its faculty and students at a nominal charge.
Tea is served in Sanborn today, daily at 4 p.m., for i0 cents a cup, open to anyone.
Sophia Yuan, the sophomore who hands out the tea as part of work-study, said the practice
was charming but drew few takers.
"I think it used to be a big tradition," Ms. Yuan said. "But as it got more modern, it got
washed out."
College officials say they try to be receptive to donor wishes, even when they sometimes
seem strange. That happened at Wellesley College, when Leonie Faroll, a 1949 graduate,
asked the college to use her gifts for the college’s power plant. When she died in 2003,
those gifts totaled $860,000.
"It was about giving for something that makes the place run," said Lynn C. Miles, acting
vice president for resources at Wellesley. "Once a year she would come to campus, and we
would sit and ]]ave lemonade and Pepperidge Farm cookies at the power plant."
"If she had given money to feed the swans in Lake Waban," Ms. Miles added, referring to a
small lake on campus, "we might have tried to talk her out of it."
Ms. Faroll later left the college more than $27 million in her will, the largest bequest
the college ever received. Some could be used for the science center; the rest was for the
power plant.

The Oakland Press

Michigan needs to encourage the charter school movement

By GLENN GILBERT Of The Oakland Press

The public will hear increasing discussion about what to do with failing public schools in
the coming months as districts seek to meet the requirements of the six-year-old federal
No Cl~id Left Behind Act.

The law promises sanctions up to and including closing schools. But no schools have been
closed yet as a result of NCLB.

One alternative that clearly is working is charter schools. These are public schools open
~6
 Page 1343
to all students. If the nru~ber of applicants exceeds capacity, lotteries are held to
determine enrollment.

Under Michigan law, charter schools can be formed under the umbrella of a college or
university, local or intermediate school district.

Basically, parties interested in forming a school must apply to an authorizer.

Of 230 such institutions in the state, 150 are authorized by universities. They are capped
at that n~u~ber by law.

Community colleges authorized 37 charter schools -- or public school academies, as they

are often referred to -- in the 2006-07 school year. Thirty were authorized by
intermediate districts and 13 by local districts.

"Charter schools crop up where there are unmet needs," said Stephanie Van Koevering,
executive director of the Michigan Council of Charter School Authorizers. "That’s why you
see so many in the Detroit area."

Often they are formed around specific purposes. For instance, they may offer a Montessori
method of teaching, an emphasis on fine arts, technical or vocational training or a back-
to-basics approach.
This is reflected in the n~es of two of the four charter schools in Pontiac. The Arts and
Technology Academy is located at 48980 Wooch~ard Ave. and the Life Skills Center is located
at 142 Auburn Ave. These two institutions were authorized by Bay Mills Co~mmunity College,
which is in northern Michigan.

There are three other charter schools in Pontiac. Great Lakes Academy, 46312 Woodward
Ave., was authorized by Eastern Michigan University; Walton Charter Academy, 744 East
Walton Blvd, was authorized by Northern Michigan University; and the Pontiac Academy for
Excellence, 196 Oakland Ave., was authorized by Saginaw Valley State University.

There are 17 charter schools in Oakland County. Across the state, they are
disproportionately located in urban areas. Five percent of Michigan’s pt~lic school
students attend charter schools.
This has steadily grown. The fall 2006 count of 98,667 represented a 7.7-percent gain over
fall 2005 figures, according to the latest report on charter schools put out by the
Michigan Department of Education.

Central Michigan University is the largest authorizer of charter schools in Michigan’s

higher education com!nunity with 57. After Michigan adopted its law enabling formation of
charter schools in 1993, then CMU President Leonard Plachta encouraged the university to
become the state’s first authorizer of charter public schools. He thought they could
provide a link to grades K-12 and enhance CMU’s role as a leading trainer of teachers,
according to James Goenner, executive director of what is now the Center for Charter
Schools at CMU.

Goenner thinks charter schools can provide an alternative to schools that fail to meet
standards of No Child Left Behind. He sees a resemblance to charter schools in Gov.
Jennifer Gra~olm’s push for small high schools to replace problematic large ones.

In her state-of-the-state message in January, Granholm said breaking up large high schools
into several smaller ones would help high-risk students achieve higher academic goals if
such schools emphasized strong personal relationships, consistent discipline and real-
world relevance.

"These are charters by a different n~e," Goenner said, but without the performance
contract and consequences for failure that are part of the charter concept.

Charter schools have been criticized for failing to consistently outperform their local
K-12 peers. But that is not necessarily their goal. Their purpose is to reach students in
ways that conventional schools may not, according to Goenner and Van Koevering. Their
purpose is to offer a choice, competition and innovation.
Michigan established charter schools because previously, only affluent families with
access to private schools could n~ke decisions about where and how their children would be
 Page 1344
educated. Charter schools were designed to make free, public educational options available
to all children.
The Michigan Council of Charter School Authorizers says charters save Michigan taxpayers
$1 billion over a five-year period and achieve better outcomes for many of the students.
This is because the state has capped their expenses at $7,175 per student, $2,612 less
than the average spent per student in Michigan. Generally, such schools are staffed by
non-union employees.

State Rep. Tim Melton, an Auburn Hills Democrat who chairs the House Education Co~~ittee,
said he would like to find a way to encourage charter schools to open more high schools.
Typically, high schools are more expensive to operate, but students who attend a K-8
charter school are left without an alternative when they reach ninth-grade, he says.
Perhaps the problem can be solved by encouraging such schools to form partnerships with
charter schools offering higher grades, Melton says.

In Pontiac, the Life Skills Center serves only grades nine to 12 while only the Pontiac
Academy for Excellence covers K-12.

Melton also is concerned about the lack of transportation to and from charter schools.

Van Koevering points out, however, that while Michigan law does not require public school
districts to offer transportation, if they do so for one, they must do so for all. Charter
schools, meanwhile, are required to consider the whole state as their service area.

Michigan needs to encourage the charter school movement. One size does not fit all.
Students need to be matched to teaching styles that best suit their particular situations.

Glenn Gilbert is executive editor of The Oakland Press. Contact him at (248) 745-4587 or
by e-mail at glenn, gilbert@oakpress.com.

Washington Post

For Younger Generations, First Lesson In Inflation

By Kirstin Downey?Washington Post Staff Writer?

Sunday, April 13, 2008; CO1
Economic theory is leaping out of the textbook and into real life for people in their
teens, 2Os and 30s, who are experiencing inflation for the first time.
Julie Catan, 23, was used to her regular pizza special: two large pies delivered to her
house for $20. But when she called recently to place an order, the restaurant owner told
her she would get only one large pizza and a side salad for that price.
"Wily is it so much money?" Catan, a college student in New York visiting her sister in
Alexandria, recalled asking. "What happened to the deal?"
The owner blamed it on inflation: Flour costs more, he said. Catan had to think back to
remember the meaning of the word.
"I learned about it in social studies class -- I think it happened, like, during the Great
Depression," she said recently, as she strolled do~] an Alexandria street with her friend
Amy ~son, who has noticed prices rising as well.
"It’s, like, $3.50 for a bagel, and it used to be $1.50," Mason said.
For two decades, Americans have been spared the pain of fast-rising prices. The Federal
Reserve had effectively kept inflation at bay by carefully moderating the pace of lending,
mainly by raising and lowering interest rate to speed or slow economic activity, but the
patterns have been disrupted by easy credit, financial instability and surging demand for
commodities on the global market.
The last time prices rose markedly was in the t970s and early 1980s, when double-digit
inflation led to wrenching economic recessions. In 1980, inflation reached almost 14
percent, but it has been lower than 3.5 percent for a decade.
But inflation is back. Prices have risen 9.2 percent since 2006 for groceries, gasoline,
health care and other staples. It comes as wages continue to languish. The median family
income has dipped 2.6 percent since 2000, or almost $2,000 a year.
Across the region, parents and grandparents are sharing with their children stories about
hard times and how their relatives coped, a common pattern when economic eras change, said
Lisa Wise, executive director of the Center for a New Pm~erican Dream, a Takoma Park-based
~8
 Page 1345
nonprofit that promotes consumer education and a thriftier approach to living.
"Money is very emotional," Wise said. "There is a psychological undertone in talking about
the economy. It triggers a family’s sense of their o~n history and their o~n family’s
experience."
Rising prices might bring an end to the "i~ediate gratification" culture in the United
States, Wise said. People raised in the 1930s were highly conscious of the value of the
dollar and spent carefully, she said, but Americans have since developed careless spending
habits. Others have not hmd to worry about looking for ways to reduce spending.
"A lot of adults, even those who lived through inflation in the past, have become
forgetful about it," said Irene Leech, a professor of consumer studies at Virginia Tech.
She said her students are just catching glimpses now.
Money is a frequent topic of conversation in the Kobor home in Great Falls. Sanmntha
Kobor, 14, of Great Falls, receives up to $20 a week, depending on how many chores she
does, but it doesn’t go as far as it once did. She recognized it as inflation, a word she
first learned about in fourth grade, then again in her eighth-grade civics class.
"Now I see I don’t have the money to buy what I want," she said, noting that she is
worrying about how much gasoline costs, because she wants to get her driver’s license in
two years.
She and her mother, Pat, have talked about rising prices and try to cut costs by careful
comparison shopping at the grocery store. Her mother told her that when she was a student
in England, people saved money by putting coins into a meter to pay for home heating
instead of being surprised by an unexpectedly large bill a month later.
A~er Williams, 15, the yom~gest of five ct~ldren, is hearing a lot about inflation, too.
Her mother, who lives in Dumfries, worries about money, particularly when she is buying
gasoline.
"She’s really, really frustrated with it, just exasperated," Williams said, adding that
her mother told her she thought it hadn’t been this bad since A~er’s grandfather’s
younger days, when prices rose sharply after World War II. In 1947, prices shot up almost
15 percent. During the Depression, prices ck’opped, falling by 10.3 percent in 1932.
Triina Tennelo, 28, program director of a homeless shelter in Arlington County, said she
had been shocked by the change in prices in ~ust the few years since she began supporting
herself.
"The last major inflation was in the Carter era, ~ust before K was born," said Tenmelo. "I
don’t recall it ever being as big an issue in my lifetime as it is now."
The experience is also unprecedented in what Steve Roman, 25, of Kensington, calls his
"semi-adult life."
"Everything in the grocery store goes up," said Roman, a marketing assistant with a think
tank in the District. "The tricky part is that people’s incomes don’t rise."
Zack Stafford, 20, a student at George Washington University, scoffed when asked about
inflation. Me said he isn’t that affected by it because his parents pay most of his bills.
Then he thought some more. Milk, he said, h~s risen to more than $3 a gallon. "I drink a
lot of milk. I eat a lot of cereal," he said, the realization da~ning slowly on his face.

19
 Page 1346

04.12.08 In the News

1) The New York Times: Fewer Optiom Open to Pay for Costs of College (Jonafllan
Glarer)

2) Washington Post: Sallie Mae To Charge For Loans To Stndents (David Cho)

3) United Press International: Parents struggle to finance kids’ college

4) Washington Post: N.Va. College Applicants Face Extra Hurdle; Abundance of

Achievers Stifl’ens Compefi lion (Jay Mathews)

5) Tile New York TiInes: Yale Moves Away Frown Plans for Link With Abu Dhabi
(Tamar Lewin)

6) The New York Times: Catholic Schools Face Changing Fortunes (Fernanda
Santos)

7) The New York Times: A Bittersweet Spring for Catholic Schools in Newark
(Mary do Patterson)

The New York Times

April 12, 2008

Fewer Options Open to Pay for Costs of College

By JONATHAN D. GLATER
Parents will have to navigate lmfamiliar and difficldt terrain when it comes time to pay
for college this year, with student loan companies in tt~noil and banks tightening theh-
standm’ds and raising rates on other types ofbonowing.

Lawmakers and the ad~ninistration are trying to head off any crisis by ~naking sm’e that
"lendels of last resort" stand ready to take the place of companies that have lel~ the
federal loan program, And a growing number of colleges have applied to participate in
the federal direct loan proglm~n, in which students borrow from the goverrm~ent.
 Page 1347

But families often use a combination of resources to pay for college, oh’awing on savings,
federal loans, bank loans and ho~ne loans to plug the gap bet~veen college costs and
financial aid.

Even if the govel]unent wards off problems in the credit markets and federal student
loans are easily accessible, other sources of firmnciug will become less accessible as
coustnners find themselves stretched thin and lenders get more choosy.

Turbulence in lending has complicated the effoIts of people like Dawn R. B eaton of Mill
Valley, Cali£, to pay for her daughters’ education. A single mother em-ning less than
$50,000 a yem; she ah’eady has ran into difficulty taldng out a federal parent loan for her
oldest daughter, Nicole, to attend a nearby community college. Her original lender plflled
out of the market, and she is still waiting, inoi~ths later, to hear fi’oIn a replacement lender
on that $5,000 request. She anticipates having to borrow about $10,000 to send her
iniddle daughter to a plivate college in Ohio later this year.

"When I go to bed at nigllt, I worry about it," said Ms. B eaton, who is a financial
manager for a viueymd.

"If you don’t have the money, there you ree, in a serious, ulcer state. You feel
inadequate."

According to a recent New York Times/CB S News poll, 70 percant of parents sttrveyed
were "very concerned" about how they would pay for college; only 6 percent were not
concerned.

To ensure continued availability of federal loans, the secretary of the federal Education
Department met on Friday with representatives of the state agencies and nonl~ofit
companies that guarantee federal loans onbehalf of the gove~annent. The goal was to
 Page 1348

work out ho~v the guarantors would serve as lenders, ifnecessm% This emergency safety
net has never been pressed into widespread use.

Though there is no major problem now, the lending industas~ is warniug of a credit
squeeze without action. "I wotfld say there is widespread belief," said Mal~,
the education secretary, "that we will have a real problem, that the lender of last resort or
some other solution will have to be used this yea’."

Last yem; students at~d their pareuts borrowed nearly $60 billion in federally guaranteed
loans, a figme that has grown more than 6 percent ammally over the last five years after
taking into account inflation. In recent yeas, the growth ~e has decl~ed but may pick
up as the economy slows and as other bo~ro~ving options fade.

"I want to mal~e sm’e we are going to do our pat-t, and that students will be able to go to
college tiffs l~all," Ms. Spelling said.

Lawmakers in Washington have proposed increasing the amotmts that students can
bonow ttnough federal progrmns and authorizing the Education Depat~ment to prochase
federal loans, thereby providing banks with cash to ~nake more loans. The Hottse
Education Committee approved legislation this week that wotfld allow dependent
students to borro~v a total of $31,000 tttrough federal programs to pay for their
undergraduate education, up fi’om $23,000 now.

Still, it is difficult to gauge whether a tin,racing problem will emerge later this year for
students and, if so, how serious it might be. The disrtlption in the federal lending prograln
so far has mostly been ffo~n borrowers shilting to ~tother lender. Ms. Beaton, for
example, expects her $5,000 loat~ request to eventually be granted. "By the time I get the
money, school will probably be over," she said.
 Page 1349

Financial aid achuinistrators say few students had been shut out. "I haven’t heard
anything about any sort oftmusual trends so far, not to say that it isn’t going to
intensify," said Daniel C. Walls, associate vice provost for enrollment management at
Emoi_-y University in Atlanta. "I suspect there’s going to be more negotiating around
financial aid this year than any other year that we’ve experienced."

Admitted students are just now receiving financial aid awards from colleges, and the test
will come when tuition payments for the fall term are due, aid admiifistrators say.

"By mid- to late June, certainly July, will be the months that we really begin to
understand the relative financial situations of families," said Jean McDonald-Rash,
director of financial aid at Rutgm, s in New Jersey.

Students attending several expensive and wealthy colleges will enjoy expanded financial
aid, as those institutions move to replace need-based loans with ga~’ants. Har’¢ard and Yale
recently annoanced expansions of aid to families making as much as $150,000,
displaying a degree of generosity that few institutions can match.

Some student advocates say lenders are exaggerating the obstacles they face in search of
a bailout from Washington.

"Student lenders are trying to hype the cutxent credit crunch to scare Congress into
providing them additional subsidies and to discredit last years’ hard won higher education
reform," said Luke Swarthont of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group in Washington,
refening to cuts lawmakers made last year to the subsidy payments to lenders of federal
loans.

Kevin Bums, executive director of America’ s Student Loan Providers, dismissed such
criticism as baseless. "Lenders’ only goal is to get the adirtinistlution to use its existing
 Page 1350

authority to provide liquidity to the capital markets that fired federal student loans," he
said. "Lenders don’t need to overstate anything -- the facts speak for themselves."

There me clear signs of potential problems m the fall. It remains difficult for lenders to
sell securities backed by student loans, in turn malting it hmder to raise capital. One
guarantor ofplivate loans, a nonprofit company called the Education Resources Institute,
filed for banlnalptcy protection this week.

"Everyttfing that’s happened in the capital markets with this credit Chinch has caused the
fixed-income investor base to sin:ink, so there are fewer potential buyers of securities
backed by the loans," said Andrea L. Mmad, senior director at Fitch Rating~ in New
York.

The House legislation seelcs to address this situation by allowing the Education
Department to buy student loans itself. At least 25 loan companies -- including big
lenders like the College Loan Corporation; the Student Lo,mt Xpress trait of CIT; and
No~hhStar Education Finance -- have stopped making federal loans, according to the
Education Department. Some estimates put the number at nearly twice that.

Colleges generally say that more than 2,000 companies make student loans, and there are
plenty of lenders to step into the breach.

No doubt to sidestep any related problems, ~nore thm~ 100 colleges and lmiversities have
applied to partidpate in the dh’ect loan progl~m since the end of Febnlary, according to
the depattment. Ms. Spellings, the depamclent secretary, has said the direct loan program
cotfld double the amotmt of new loans it ,nakes to students, if necessary.

So~ne conunercial education conlpanies have already taken steps to ensure that their
students can find lenders, in some i~lstances by preparing to make loans themselves.
 Page 1351

Problems are more likely for those seeking private loans, wbich do not have any
government bacldng. The trains of private loans, like other consu,mer loans, vary
depending on tie credit histories of individual applicm~ts and in some cases can top 20
percent.

In the last several months, rates on those loans have risen by nemly one percentage point,
according to resemch by Mmk Kantrowitz, who publishes the financial aid Web site
FinAid.org. Lenders have also tightened their standards, making it costlier for those with
weak credit histories to obtain loans.

Private loans have grown slam-ply in populmity over the last 10 yems, as families have
looked for ways to pay the difference between tttition, on the one hand, and their savings
and federal loan optJo~ts, on the other. Last yem; accordiug to the College Born’d, students
took out more than $17 billion in ~ivate loans, up from just $1.6 billion a decade emlier.

"If the financial aid system had kept pace with inflation, there ~vouldn’t be any need for
I~ivate loans," said Patti Wmbel, co-fotmder of TuitionCoach.com and a consttitant for
families trying to figtu’e out how to pay for college.

Families also have closed the gap between college costs and federal loans by bonowing
against their ho~nes -- and that is another option vanishing as house p~ices fall and
lenders clamp down. Millions of homeowners now owe more than their houses are
leaving no equity to bon’ow agair~st.

There is no data on how many parents may have used ho~ne eqttity loans to pay for higher
education, rese~rchms and aid ad~ninistrators said, but there is no doubt many did, to take
advantage oftmx breaks and lower rotes.

Tapping into home eqttity was always pint of the college finance plan for Connie and
 Page 1352

Dave Orient ofCanonsbmg, Pa. She is a paralegal at a law firm in Pittsbmgh and he is in
the family co1Nxuction business. Their older son, Christopher, is a sopholnore at
California University of Pennsylvania, a public institution relatively inexpensive for in-
state residents. The yolmger son, Luke, a high school janior, wants to go to Vi_j£ginia
Tech, which she said would cost three times as much.

"I believe that I am in an area that is not depressed or anything," Ms. Olient said. She
added that she hoped sfiil to be able to bon’ow against the house she and her husband
built 25 yeal~ ago, but was tmsme how nmch eqnity site really has in it and how much a
lender wonid be ~villing to extend. "Nothing’s selling anywhere right now."

Alan Finder contributed reporting.

Washington Post

Sallie Mae To Charge For Loans To Students

By David Cho[~Washington Post Staff Writer[]

Saturday, April 12, 2008; D01

Sallie Mae, the country’s laigest student lender, announced yesterday ttmt it will start
charging students who apply for federally backed loans and cut the type of loans
available, citing the tt~noil in the credit markets as a reason for this sttift.

The Reston company said in a letter to schools and tmiversities that it would immediately
stop offering loans that consolidate debt acctuntflated by undergradtmte and graduate
students.

This has traditionally represented a maj o1 pro* of Sallie Mae’s business. The finn said it
wotfld instead concenta’ate solely on lending to ctment students.

Starting next inonth, Sallie Mae will charge fees -- ranging front $35 for fieshrnen to a
few htmched dollm~ for graduate students -- to apply for fedelM loans. These fees had
 Page 1353

largely been covered by lenders in the past, but most firms are now ~opping this benefit.

Citing "severe credit market deterioration" and a decision by Congress last year to cut
subsidies to lendeis, Sallie Mae President C.E. Andiews and Executive Vice President
B an~ S. Feim~tein said that one-third of the top 100 student lenders have letI the
business. He ~vamed that this means "loan demand will significantly exceed lender
supply for rite upcoming acadenfic year."

The trend is ~VOlrying some lavcmakers and top federal education officials who are
preparing emergency programs to enable the govermnent to inake up the ShOll~all in
student loans for the coining school year.

Some education advocates remain skeptical of Sallie Mae and other lenders, accusing
them of using the disruption in the credit markets to push for a restoi~ion of the subsidies
that were cut last year.

"Clearly the loan industl:¢ has a long history of stretching the truth and the law to
maximize their own profits," said Lttke Swat~out, ttigher-education advocate for the
U.S. Public Interest Research Group. "Of course they are being oppoltunistic about this."

But Mark Kantt~witz, publisher ofFinAid, a Web site that provides financial advice for
students, said the exodus from the industry is an alauning trend mid may lead to higher
bonowing costs for students.

Sallie Mae dropping out of the student-loan co~tsolidation business is "fairly significant,"
Kantrowitz said. "It shows the student-loan system is trader extreme stress when you
have the largest student lender stopping the largest federal loan program."

Sallie Mae said in the letter that lenders who make federally backed loans would only be
able to meet student demand once their t~litional sources of~noney in the credit markets
begin functioning noxmally again.

In addition to federally backed loans, private loans have also offered students a major
source of finandng for college. Students will now face higher rates for private loans,
which they often need to cover tuition costs because there is a cap on the amount they can
bolxow in federally guaranteed loans. A small percentage of studeuts who have bad credit
or attend for-profit colleges with low graduation rates may be deitied loans altogether,
analysts say.

For lenders making federally backed loans, the $50.4 billion consolidation business has
deteriorated the most. In a consolidation, sttutents combine their various fede~N loans
into a single package and lock in a single rate after they graduate.

Lenders making up two-tttirds of tiffs ,narket have exited in the past fe~v months,
according to FinAid. Government officials have said that they will be able to fill the gap
 Page 1354

by offering consolidation loans themselves.

Last year, Congress cut the subsidies it paid to lenders offering federally guaranteed loans
and used that money to lower rotes from 6.8 percent to 6.0 percent for financially needy
students. This group borrowed $27.5 billion last yeN’. The i~es on all other types of
federally backed non-consolidation loans, which totaled $36.8 billion, were left tile stone
and iarlge from 6.8 percent to 8.5 percent.

United Press International

Parents struggle to finance kids’ college

Published: Aplil 12, 2008 at 11:04 AM

NEW YORK, April 12 (UPI) -- U.S. parents who pay for their chilch’en’s college
educations are facing new challenges this year as strained lenders increase selectivity,
experts say.

Legislators are attempting to avoid a major crisis by secttring "lenders of the last resoI~"
to fill in for co:npanies that have checked out ofgovernmont lending programs, The New
York Times reported.

"I wotfld say there is widespread belief that we will have a real problem, that the lender
oflast resort or some other solution will have to be used this year," U.S. Education
Secretary Malgaret Spellings said.

Federal loan programs arenl the Olfly troubled resource, as parent’s savings accounts and
mortgages are also increasiltgly strained this year, the Times repolted.

In an effort to nmke sure student loans will be available, Spellings inet Friday with state
agency mid nonprofit organizations that guarantee such lending. The meeting reportedly
focused on figming out how the gualnontols wotfld step iu and provide loans in an
elnergency situation.

Washington Post

N.Va. College Applicants Face Extra Hurdle

 Page 1355

Abundance of Achievers Stiffens Competition

By Jay Maflie~vs, I IWashington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, April 12, 2008; A01

The news 1fit Robinson Secondaw School in Fairfax Comlt~ right after spffng vacation.
"Joe Robinson got rejected by JMU? ! How can that be?"

James Madison University in Harrisonbm~g is one of the best schools in ~

students, teachets and cotmselors agree. Most students would have trouble getting in. But
this was Joe Robinson who got the thin envelope, the same Joe Robinson who had an
SAT score of 2270, who was one of only two National Merit semifinalists in Iris class,
who heads the choral group, who wlites fantasy novels in his spare time, who had some
of the most glowing teacher recolnmendations his com~selor had ever seen.

"Everyone at Robinson who knows Joe" is "in disbelief," colmselor Mitch Aydlette said
in awfitten appeal of JMU’s decision. The lmiversity had been his best hope, for the 17-
year-old was rejected by the more selective schools on his list: the Univm, sit¥ of Virginia,
Dmtmonth College, Boston Colleg~ the University of Notre Dame and the Univel,sity of
Oxford.

This is a tough year for applicants to top colleges. De~nographers say the ntmtber of high
school gl~aduates has reached a peak. Adslfission standards axe higher, and well-regarded
public tmivelsities such as JMU, charging nmch less than private colleges of si~nilar
quality, are particularly prized.

But Joe Robinson’s faihtre to get into a tmiversity his family and advisel~ thought a cinch
for someone with his record suggests to several expmts that college applicants from
Northern Vir_Nnia are facing tmusually stiff competition -- increasingly from one another.
The regioIL with an extraordinary concentration of high-pelforrning schools and students,
inight have to adjust long-held assttmpfions about the po~ver of scores and grades in
college ad~nissions.

JMU spokesInan Don Egle said the tmiversity’s admission process is "very cornpetitive,"
with 20,000 applications this year for a class of 3,960. The univei~ity, he said, considers
test scores, awards, reconmlendations, activities, grades and essays.

The one apparent flaw on Robinson’s application was his 3.4 grade point average, when
the JMU average is about 3.6. Fairfax doesn’t use class ranldngs. He managed a 3.0 in
ninth and 10th grade, when he was preoccupied with tronbles a friend faced, two of Iris
great-grandparents died and mononucleosis put him in bed for four weelcs. Many
selective schools tell applicants that if they finish strong in high school, mediocre early
repolt cards won’t mean so much. In the past two years, his GPA has been 4.1, and rising.
With an SAT score among the top 10 percent for JMU students and litel’al3~ skills that
 Page 1356

leave school facttlty awestruck, Robinson’s grades, Aydlette said he thought, ~vould not
be a problem.

"Alnong nly 18 students who applied to JMU (7 adinitted), I rate Joe as the finest overall
scholar," Aydlette va’ote in his appeal. Robinson Secondary, with about 4,000 students
from grades 7 to 12, is the state’s largest public school.

But Shirley Bloomqnist, a former guidance director at the Thomas Jefferson HiNI School
for Science and Technology in Faiffax ~vho is now a college-admissions consttltant, said
many Northern Virginia families overlook that large numbers of students in the region
have high test scores and good grades. Many of thegn, she said, are in competition with
each other. The top state lmdergmduate institutions, such as U-Va., the College of
William &amp; MAIN, Vhginia Tech and JMU, also "cannot take all of their students
frown Northern Virginia," Bloomquist said. "They have to leave room" for students from
other parts of the state.

On file role of geography in admissions, JMU’s Egle said, "We are interested in the best
high school students fro~n all of the regions across the state." Greg Roberts, associate
dean of admission at U-Va., said through a spokesrnan: "Onr plitnar] goal is to enroll an
academically strong and diverse class of first-year and transfer students each year. As a
state institution, we are interested in enrolling students from all areas of the
commonwealtk"

Robinson’s SAT score of 2270, out of a possible 2400, looked tmrific cornpared with the
JMU average of about 1710. But experts said JMU’s adinissions officers expect high
scores froln Fairfmx and will probably take just as close a look at a hardworking student
with a lower SAT score from a place such as Galax, to the southwest, or Petersbmg,
south of Rictunond.

The competition for spaces in state universities is also intensifying. "I believe the
do~vntm-n in the economy this year has made public schools hotter thail ever," said New
York-based educational constfltant William Short. David Ha~vldns, director of public
policy and research for the Alexandlia-based National Association for College Admission
Counseling, said JMU is an example of what ~nany top students have long considered a
good "safety" school. B~ he said, "We cml see that it is not, in fact, a sm’e thing for these
students anymore."

Bloomqnist said she lms expunged the tel:tn "safety school" from her vocabtflary and
speaks instead of "likely schools." In the past few years, she said, "I have become very
conservative." Even for students with records as good as Robinson’a she said, she might
suggest adding to their lists state universities such as Christopher Newport in Newport
News or George Mason in Faiffax, just north of Robinson Secondary. That ~vould force
students to apply to more colleges, but several experts said expanding the pool of likely
admissions prospects seems better than what happened to Joe Robinson.
 Page 1357

In the meanti~ne, some Virginia lawmakels have called for tighter li~nits on the number of
out-of-state students. But the higher out-of-state tuition, $8,693 this year at JMU
compared with $3,333 for in-state students, helps pay faculty salmies as the state
government grapples with lean budgets amid a difficult economy. The governing boards
of each state tmivmsity in Virginia decide how many out-of-state students will be
admitted. At JMU, the ratio is 70 percent in-state and 30 percent out-of-state.

Students in Robinson’s situation ate not without options. Often, they can seek admission
in the late spring to colleges that still have openi~tgs. If his appeal to JMU is denied,
Robinson said, he might spend a year" at a community college and then t~3~ again, focusing
next time on Notre Dame. His school’s principal, Dan Meier, a fo~xner cotmselor, said he
has talked to Robinson about his rejections and wonders why more room for Virginia
students can~ be found.

"I have been fiaastrated by this for many yeats," Meier said. "We have such ~vonderful
state colleges, but it is so difficult for our students to get into them."

The New York Times

April 12, 2008

Yale Moves Away From Plans for Link With Abu Dhabi

By TAMAR LEWIN
After more than a year of talks, Yale Univeisity has b~ked away from its plan for an arts
iustitute in Abu Dhabi, involving Yale’s art, music, architectttre and drama schools.

The stumbling block, ultimately, was Abu Dhabi’s insistence that Yale offer degree
proglmns at the insfitnte, and Yale’s refusal to grant its degrees in Abu Dhabi.

Yale’s at[ institute ~vas to be patl of Abu Dhabi’s development of Saadiyat Island as a
cuitmul center, including outposts of the Louvre, the Guggenheim and other musenms.

"Frown the begimfing, we ~vere clear that degree prograrns were not what we were talldng
about," said Linda K. Lo~nel; secretary and vice N’esident of Yale. "We were exploring
exciting plans for progra~ns that would be value-added for cultm’al developmant. But in
 Page 1358

the end, they ~v’anted degrees. And at fltis point in time, we just don’t think we could
~notmt a faculty of the same quality we have here, or attract students of the same caliber."

The collapse of the talks was Nst reportedm The Yale Daily News on Friday.

Almost eve13~ major American resemch university has recently beco~ne intent on
globalizing, with many starting branches in the Persian Gtflf, while others pursue research
pmtnerships andj oint-degree progrmns ~rotmd the globe.

But the ~ ttniversifies -- with the exception of Comell’s inedical school in

Qatm--have been notably unwilling to offer their home degrees througl~ ovelseas
programs. Yale, for example, has dozens of foreign progratns in China and elsewhere, but
none offer Yale degrees.

"R is tmderstandable ttmt some of ottr elite and most selective ttniversities me not eager to
increase significantly the number of degrees they award armually, here or abroad," said
Dr. Edward Gulliano, presidant of the NewYork Insfitnte of Technology, which offers its
degrees in China, Canada, Jordan, B alttain and Abu Dhabi. "Selectivity is part of their
value equation as well as the pride of their almnni. Plus, of course, it is standmd ctmency
with l~ing and ranl~g sttrveys."

The Abu Dhabi project would have been Yale’s fia’~t major venture in the Middle East.
Abu Dlmbi, the oil-rich capital of the United Arab Enfirates, has recently invested heavily
in importing edacafional and cultural institutions from the West. In 2006, the Sorbonne
opened a liberal-arts campus in Abu DivaN. New York Univmsit¥ is pla~ming a fitll-
fledged liberal ~ts ca~npus on Saadiyat Island. And Abu Dhabi paid $520 ~nillion for the
figl~t to use the Louvre nmne, part of a deal worth nearly $1.3 billion to ca’eate a branch of
the Louvre.
 Page 1359

Last year, Yale’s president, Richard Levi1~ told the Yale almnni magazine that he hoped
to complete the university’s Abn Dtk~tbi agreement in the summer of 2007. E~h of Yale’s
arts graduate schools was plmming activities -- master classes, design workshops and
elementmT school programs -- for the Alto Dhabi insfitnte, all of which were to be paid
for by the emh-ate’s govermnent.

With its Abu Dhabi plans l~’oceeding, New York Univm~aity earlier this month ended its
talks to absorb the American Univelsity of Paris.

"As we got closer to the merger, the trade-offs became more apparent," said John
Bectanan, a spokesman for N.Y.U. "What we were hearing from the A.U.P. people,
consistently, was that they were worried about mak~taining the distinctiveness of their
identity, and what we were hearing from ore students consistently was that they felt the
acade~nic experience between the two institutions was incompatible."

The New York Times

April 13, 2008

Catholic Schools Face Changing Fortunes

By FERNANDA SANTOS
BREWSTER, N.Y.

THE grmnmm" school at St. Lavcrence O’Toole Roman Catholic parish here opened in
1926, in a two-stoW buildk~g at the crest of a gentle slope near the train station. For
decades, ntms lived in the rooms upstairs and taught their students in classrooms on the
first floor.
 Page 1360

In 1968, when Brian Ledley entered first grade, most cla~sses were still taught by nuns
and abont 400 students attended the pre-K-thi’ough-eighth-grade school. But by the time
his daughter Deirdra entered fiIst glvtde in 2005, the rams had long been replaced by lay
teachers and eurollment stood at 220, with no sign that it wotfld clhnb back up anytime
soon, said Mr. Ledley, a local caterer and a father of 10. Five of his children attended the
school, and four are cmrently eraoiled.

Now, like many Catholic schools around the region in recent years, St. Lawrence
O’Toole is facing the prospect of closing its doors.

With 130 students this school year and only 88 students committed to retmaling in
September, the school would have to raise $850,000 to pay its teachers and another
$200,000 for a new boiler if it ~vere to open this fall, according to the parish.

Gazing at his yellowing eighth-grade gradnation picture in an old family album, seven of
his 10 chJldien huddled with him arom~d akitchen table, Mr. Ledley, 45, said, dejectedly,
"We’re going to have to fight a real hard fight if ~ve ~vant our school to SUlwive."

Under a plan annolmced last month by the Archdiocese of New York, St. Lawrence
O’ Toole and five other Catholic schools- two each in Westchester mid Rockland
Counties and one in the Bronx -- wotfld dose at the end of the school year. This will
bring the total inmlber of schools closed to 15 since the archdiocese rolled out a
reorganization plan in 2007 that also called for closing 21 parishes.

On Long Island, the Diocese of Rockville Centre closed fotzr schools in 2004 and 2005,
including one in Levittown and another in Cedarhurst.

After significant declines, enrolhnent no~v seems to be holding on the Island, according
to Scan P. Dolan, a spokesman for the diocese.
 Page 1361

Mr. Dolan said that elementmy school enrollment had declined by about 8,000 students
or 27 percent from 1995 to 2005. But he said the rate of decline had slowed in the last
two years since the diocese put in place auintervention team made up of lay and religious
educators who go into schools facing difficulties and recommend sdutious.

"We have become a lot more attuned as to the health of our schools, so ~ve kno~v when
they’re reaching a challenging thne and we’re able to go in and make adjustments before

it is too late," Mr. Dolan said.

Across the colmtry, more than 1,260 Catholic schools, inostly elementary schools, have
closed since 2000, according to the National Catholic Education Association, based in
Washington. The reason cited in most cases is declining enrollment, making it diffictllt
for schools that rely heavily on tuition to ineet expenses.

The forces behind declining em’olhnent me Valied, and include de,nographic shifts over
the last few decades, as well as rising tltifion, which ad,uinistrators attribute largely to an
increase in costs because of the transition from an all-religious faculty to a pi£-narily lay
factflty. Catholic schools also face competition ffmn solid pulolic school systems in some
commmfities where parents are paying high plopmty taxes.

Ellen Ayoub, supelintendent of schools for the Diocese of Metuchen, in New Jersey,
which has closed six schools in the last six years, explained it tiffs way: "Seventy percent
of our budget comes from tuition and tile rest comes from fand-raising and flom the
parish, so ~vhen you don’t have enough students, you don’t have that 70 percent coming
in, ~vhich means yon’ll need more money from the palishes, but the parishes are aheady
sl~’uggling."

When Pope Benedict XVI anives in the United States on Tuesday, he will find a Catholic
 Page 1362

Church that with 65 million members in the count17 is bigger than it has ever been. But
that chmch is in the midst of a profound hunsition as it hies to catch up with three
decades of changes ttmt pushedits base ffoln the cities to the far suburbs and fioln the
Northeast to the West and South.

While the demographic shifts depleted some congregations, leaving shnggling pmishes
and so~ne schools that could no longer sustain themselves, the population growth in some
areas has led to new chrtrches and expanded parishes.

As an exmnple, Ms. Ayoub said that a consultant hired by the Metuchen Diocese said that
the population growth in Hunterdon County, N.J., would suppolt a new elementm7
school.

Underscoring the financial crisis faced by some Catholic schools, one union representing
teachers in the Ne~v York Archdiocese --which covers Manhattan, Staten Islmld,
Westchester, Rockland, Putna~n and five c~her cotmties -- staged a t~vo-day strike early
this inonth, ~vhile another has fltreatened to go on shike dining the pope’s visit ~md picket
papal events. At the heart of tile protests m-e the higher health-insur~mce t~elnimns
proposed by the archdiocese and the tmions’ deshe for bigger pay raises.

There are 2.27 million students enrolled in Catholic schools nation,vide this year -- 56
percent less th~n in 1960, when enrollment peaked at 5.25 million, ~d 14 percent less
than in 2000, when it was 2.65 million, statistics by the Catholic education association
show. Paid for every ne~v school that opened last year, 43 of thegn in,all, 4 schools closed,
the figures show.

There are now 7,500 Catholic schools in the cotmtry; in 1960, there were 13,000.

°’There’s still great interest in Catholic education, but there are also problems -- -~vith
 Page 1363

enrollment, with finances and with the fact Hispanics, the fastest-growing segment of the
Catholic popnlation and of the American population as a whole, m’e still tmderrepresented
in our schools," said the Rev. Ronald J. Nuzzi, director of the Alliance for Catholic
Education, a graduate program for Catholic school teachers and ad.nfinistrators at the
University of Notre Dame.

"It took us some thne to understand the depth oftha great social changes of the ’60s and
the ’70s, and it has taken us some tinge to adapt to those changes, to figure out where we
need to grow and where we need to sacrifice," Father Nuzzi said.

Respondii~g to the recent shills in demographics, the Catholic Church has built new
churches in places that have experienced significant population growth, but not every
church has been acco~npanied by a ne~v school.

"There ~vas a tbne in tfistory when the bishops told the pastors that when they built a new
church, they should build a new school, but that had ended by the time we were
experiencing these changes," said Karen Ristau, president of the National Catholic
Education Association. "What happened was that the fmnilies moved, but the schools did
not."

What has resulted, Dr. Ristan explained, is alopsided distribution of resources, with
empty schools abotmdii~g in some parts of the country and schools bursting at the se~ns
in others pints. For example, in the West -- an area that includes Texas and Arizo~m,
~vhere the Catholic population ~nore than doubled between 1965 and 2005, and Nevada,
where it sextupled dtuJng the same period-- about half of the more than 1,400 Catholic
schools have waiting lists, she said.

"School closings di’aw a lot of news covmNge, but they’re only put of the story," Dr.
 Page 1364

Ristau added. "The sad pint of the story."

Catholic schools face many challenges aside flo~n adapting to population shifts. In
affluent co~n~nunities, ~vhere the cost of educafionis not an issue, itmay be elite priwate
schools. In middle-class submbs, it may be other Catholic schools or a solid public school
system. And ininner-cities, it is most likely the paice oft~tion, or, in some cases, other
alternatives, like charter schools.

The six Catholic elementary schools in B~idgepoit, Conn., had straggled for more than a
decade to meet em’olbnent goals. Tuition kept them out of reach for at least the one in
five local families who lived below the povelty line, and their ftsing operating costs
slxained the finatces of parishes already straggling to make ends meet.

In 2004, Bishop Willimn E. Loft, who had replaced Cardinal Edward M. Egan as head of
the Diocese of Bridgeport, issued a call to action. He e~tlisted the help of retired chief
executives attd fired-raising specialists, who then recruited patrons for the schools or
school projects, like maintenance and lib~at3, renovation. He met with pasto~ of vat, ions
Afllcan-American chm-ches and told them that their children were welcome in the
Catholic schools. And he advel~ised to Latino fmnilies on Spanish-language radio.

Then, the schools were brought under one administrative ttrnbrella l~town as rite
Cathed~-al Cluster, wtfich l~incipals said has ~nade it easier for thegn to trade ideas and
share resomces like books, laptops, teachers and even the math and literacy consultants
who work a few hours a week in each of the schools, their salaries paid tl~ough i~ivate
donors and grants.

°’We study together; we look at student work together; we do planning together; we meet
eveI3~ month to find out where we need help," said Mmia O’Neill, l~incipal of St.
 Page 1365

Andrew School, on the ninth side of the city. "If there’s an issue going on in one of our
b~fildings, we feel vel~j co~nfottable callh~g one another."

Enrollment at the six Btidgepo~ eletnentm2z schools has increased by 10 percent since
2004- to 1,399 this school year fiom 1,270; 11 percent of the students are non-
Catholics, about 10 percent are black and about 10 percent are Hispanic, said Margaret A.
Dames, superintendent of schools. Nationwide, 12 percent of Catholic elementary school
students are non-Catholics, 13 percent of them are Hispanic and 7 percent are black,
according to the Catholic education association figmes.

Since 2005, the Bridgeport Diocese -- which stretches fiom Danbm3, and Brookfield on
the north to Greeuwich in the south -- has controlled all of its 39 schools. Under this
arrangement, paishes contribute 8 perceut of their offertoI3~ collections to a general fund
that is then divided among rite schools; the diocese gives each school an additional
$12,000, Dr. Danes said.

"The idea was to avoid placing too 1nnch of the burden on one person or one institution,"
she said. "What we did in essence was reinvent omselves so as to reflect the original
mission of Catholic schools, which is to provide edncation for everyone, and not just
those who can afford it."

On a dlizzly altemoon here in Brewster, IVlr. Ledley, the local caterer, wondered where
exactly things started to go wrong for St. Lawrence O’Toole and whether parents mighi
have taken too long to try to develop a rescue plan.

"We kne~v the school wasn’t doing well, that the enrollment was declining, but we
thought that St. Lawrence was safe because it’s the biggest and the oldest of the other
Catholic schools around," Mr. Ledley said.
 Page 1366

Mr. Ledley and oilier parems began to join forces two yem~ ago, conducting Sunday open
houses and organizing ~novie nights to woo new families. One mother, Linda Highmn,
marled handmade Christmas cards to the parents of each of the babies baptized at the
pmish chnrch in 2006 and again last year, reminding them to consider the school once
their ctfilchen al~ old enough. In recent months, the parents wrote to residents here and
altmmi everywhere, asking for donations. To this point they have iNsed about $100,000,
far fl’om enoughto save the school.

MRS. HIGHAlVl conceded that she has visited another Catholic school just in case she
needs to enroll her 11-year-old daughter, Latuel, a fillh grader at St. Lawrence O’Toole,
elsewhere in the fall. The girl is crushed; she is an only child and her school friends, she
said, are for the most part the only friends she has ever had.

"I don’t want tohave to leave them, but it see~ns like everybody is going to go to a
different place," Lanrel said as she left school, hauling a black and pink backpack
~veighed doom with books.

Mr. Ledley has what may be a tougher task -- to find a new school for his chikken, when
St. Lawrence O°Toole is the only school he has ever known. His grandfather, Thomas
Fan’ell, was a member of one of its first g~duating classes. His father, Daniel Ledley,
graduated in 1952, and Mr. L edley Nmself did so in 1976.

His five older cNl&en- Brian, 24; Brendmi, 22; Patrick, 19; Anne, 18; and Wflliean, 16
-- went to St. La~vrence O’Toole, and four yotmger ones are there now: Germd, 14, in
eighth grade; Anthew, 12, in seventh; Deh’di~n, 10, a fomth grader, and Sean, 6, in
ldnde~garten. (The youngest, Mary, is 3.)

"We could have really nice cars, we cottldbe traveling to nice places on vacation, we
 Page 1367

could be saving up for a good retirement," Mr. Ledley said. "But Catholic education is
something we believe in. It’s a pliority to us."

Seated next to him on the couch, his wife of 25 years, Paaicia, dabbed her eyes.

"Of com,se the religion is a big pint of it," she said, "but there’s also a really warm feeling
of family."

The New York Times

April 13, 2008

A Bittersweet Spring for Catholic Schools in Newark

By MARY dO PATTERSON
NEWARK

ALICE TERRELL opens the door to Miss Hargrove’s illst grade at Blessed Sacrament
School, where nine child~en sit attentively at desks arranged like pieces on a
checkerboard.

The room is huge and they are tiny, but the 92-year-old school w~s built when Catholic
education was flomishing and a typical classroom held 40 students. These days, with a
totai emollment of 95 in Grades K-8, Blessed Sacrament is a ghost of its former sel£

"Good morning" says Miss Terrell, the academic director, who, as aMethodist, cmmot
hold the title ofplincipal.

"Good morning Miss Terrell, and God bless you," nine high-pitched voices reply in
unison.
 Page 1368

Such are the daily rituals at this school, which are about to end. With enrollment far
belo~v 225, considered a healthy number for a school in the Archdiocese of Newark,
Blessed SaClm-nent will close for good in Jtme. A chmter school plans to take over the
bnilding.

As the weather warms and Catholic schools in New Jersey prepare for Pope Benedict
XVI’s impending visits to Washington m~t New York, it is a bittmsweet spring for
Blessed Sacrament’s shaken fmnilies and staff. Many have no idea where they will go.

The closing has also left othe~,s in Catholic education with a lmnp in their ticoats.

"It’s a loss for all of us -- a door for evangelizing has closed," said Eveflyn Hay,
plincipal of Queen of Angels School, ~ont a 1nile away.

With about 200 studems, Queen of Angels is not in danger; its enrollment rmay even grow
if it absorbs solne of Blessed Sacrament’s stranded students. But over the last decade the
archdiocese, covering Bergen, Hudson, Essex and Union Counties, has closed one-fomth
of its schools. After Blessed Sacrament closes, the archdiocese will have seven

elementm~¢ schools.

Mrs. Hay, an usher at Queen of Angels Charch, fomlded in 1930 as the fit’st Afiican-
American Catholic congregation in Newark, is a realist.

’Tll be truthflfl-- the moment emollment struts dipping, we strut ~vorrying," she said
early this month. "Right now we have families losing their jobs left and fight. We ask
each other: ’Who’s next?’"

Blessed Sacrament, in the city’s South Ward, and Queen of Angels, in the Centi,-al Ward,
are close cousins in many ways. BUt only one will survive past the end of this school
 Page 1369

Both schools have proud histories and fielcely loyal adherents. Even though they are not
likely to be Catholic, many Afiican-Alnefican parents who live or work in Newark
consider the two schools preferable to public schools. Ask why, and the parents are likely
to say the Catholic schools are safer and academically superior. They also praise teachers
as "like family" and unusually dedicated.

"The public schools are too dangerous," said Char’les Treadwell, a transportation
company ovcnerin Newark who graduated froln Queen of Angels in 1984 and sent all
four ofhis children there. "A teacher cannot effectively teach when she has one ortwo
childi’en who constantly disrupt the class. At Queen of Angels, that is not going to
happen. It’s mnthe old-school way, caling but stem. ffyou go there you’re going to stay
focused, you will learn, and you will succeed."

Fewer than I0 percent of students at Blessed Sacrament and Queen of Angels are
Catholic, and fewer still attend their school’s parish chm’ch. Still, religion penneates both
places, throughinsm~ction in faith and twice-daily prayers.

Both schools straggle without subsidies from the diocese. They receive celtain services
and supplies from the State Department of EducafiolL but they are financed largely
through tuition and other fees.

Both employ lay staff and could use more. Blessed Sacrament has no librmian or mnsic
teacher, and the gym teacher is pair time; at Queen of Angels, Mrs. Hay herself grabs a
crossing guard’s vest, whistle and stop sign to lead students to the playgroand, a banen
patch of sloping blacktop across a street. A volunteer travels daily fiom Manhattan to
help at hmch.
 Page 1370

As for the buildings, they are hopelessly obsolete, with a history of few renovations.
Dusty spolts trophies fi’om the 1940s crowd the tops of towering bookcases at Blessed
Sacrament. Queen of Angels, built in 1887, houses pre-K through eighth grades in a
confusing wanen of roolns attached to the church.

MISS TERRELL, a 30-year-old Newark native, says high fees and the lure of free charter
schools killed off Blessed Sacrament.

When she anived in 2005, "we were aheady in a danger zone, though I didn’t know it,"
she said.

The school had 159 students then. Tttition was $2,700 per child, and families had to raise
an additional $300 thiough candy sales.

Miss Tei:rell, who had been teaching at a public school, came to Blessed Sacrament with
a master’s degree and principal’s celtification, and dreams of an ideal educational setting.
She landed the director’s position.

"The particular public school where I taught previonsly, in East Orange, was very rough,"
she said. "I wanted a focus on education, not discipline. Co~ning here was a joy."

But Blessed Sacrament had problems of its OWql- financial ones.

In 2006 the pmish raised the tuition to $2,900 and the fund-raising m,~mdate to $400.
Enrollment nose-dived, Miss Tenell said. This year the chttrch again raised tuition, to
more than $3,000. The fund-raising obligation swelled to $900, causing ~nore parents to
withdi’aw their childien.

Meanwhile, the current tuition at Queen of Angels is $2,900, and the fired-raising
 Page 1371

requirement is $300.

Miss Tenell said she did not undelstm~d that Blessed Sacrmneut was in trouble lmtil last
Noveinber, when a group of strangers sho~ved up for a tottr. The school year had opened
on an anxious note when fewer pupils than expected showed up, bnt pmish leadei,s told
parents at a meeting that the school would not close. Miss Tei~rell felt reassured too, until
the slmngers appeared. The custodian called her after they left.

"Are you sitting down?" she recalled him asking. "That ",was a cha~er school They want
to move in." Later an appraiser sho~ved up, but official notification of the closing did not
come lmtil Febnmry. Families grew emotional. Miss, Terrell said she was g~ief-stricken.

The bureaucl~ic machinei:¢ to close Blessed Sacrament was actually activated at the end
of December, when the church’s po, sto~; the Rev. Anselm I. Nwaorgu, wrote the
archdiocese asking for permission to close the school, said James Goodness, fl~e
spokesman for the mchdiocese. The letter cited an opei~ing deficit this year of $270,000
and noted there were o~fly 97 students. The archtliocese granted Father N~morgu’s
request on Jan. 21.

By last week, those at the school seemed to have accepted its fate, but the the cairn
atmosphere belied the amxiety so~ne of the chilch’en and the adttlts were feeling.

’°Everything’s up in the aft," said Cmissa Chase of Newm’k, awonied mother of two. Her
eighth grader has been accepted at Mmist High School in Bayonne, a Catholic school,
Ms. Chase said, but she has no idea about her fottt~h grader. The chmter school moving
into the building told her it had no room for him, she said.

Michelle Maycock-Smith, who has a son in second grade at Blessed Sacrament, said she
and her husband ~vere also in limbo.
 Page 1372

"It’s honJble, what’s happening," she said. "The teachers here have been very caring, mtd
Ctuistopher loves school. This was a positive place to be. We have been to a couple of
charter schools, but. really, we’re most interested in Catholic schools."

Patricia Neblett of Orange, who WOlkS in the Blessed Sacrament lunct~aoom, ha~s the same
headache, multiplied by five. In addition to relocating her fore youngest to new schools,
site has to find anew job.

Miss TetTell is also sending out applications. In September she bought a house in
Hillside. Now, she said, she is worried about paying the moltgage.

"We’re all looking for a position, but none of us has been hired. It’s nerve-racking, but I
ant more worried about my ldds," she said. "Some ~nay end up in public schools. If they
do, they’ll be in for cultttre shock."
 Page 1373

Nonresponsiv
From: Yudof, Samara
Sent: April 12, 2008 6:22 PM
To: Cariello, Dennis; Aud, Susan; Davis, Jim; Tracy Young; Skandera, Hanna; Dunn, David;
Terrell, Julie; Rosenfett, Phil; Ridgway, Marcie; Pitts, Elizabeth; Earling, Eric; Tucker, Sara
Martinez; MacGuidwin, Katie; Wurman, Ze’ev; Smith, Valarie (SRR); McGrath, John; Kuzmich,
Holly; Monroe, Stephanie; Scheessele, Marc; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Flowers, Sarah; Young,
Tracy; Mesecar, Doug; Truong, Anh-Chau; Lepore, Kristen; Eitel, Robert S.; Zoellick, Todd;
Jones, Diane; Colvin, Kelly; Tourney, Liam; Tada, Wendy; Gartland, Lavin; Cohn, Kristine;
Hatada, Tori; Talbert, Kent; Cdby, Chad; Warder, Larry; Robb, Carly; Sentance, Michael;
Chlouber, Patdcia; Briggs, Kerri; Evans, Wendy; Private- Spellings, Margaret; Casarona,
Emily; Morffi, Jessica; Hancock, Anne; Foxley, Donna; Evers, Bill; Dm~renko, Orysia;
Maddox, Lauren; Beaton, Meredith; Anderson, Christy; Yudof, Samara; Oldham, Cheryl;
Gribble, Emily
Subject: 04.12.08 In the News

Attachments: 0412081ntheNews.doc

041208 IntheNews.
doc (138 KB)
04.12.08 In the News

i) The New York Times: Fe~er Options Open to Pay for Costs of College (Jonathan Glater)

2) Washington Post: Sallie Mae To Charge For Loans To Students (David Cho)

S) United Press International: Parents struggle to finance kids’ college

4) Washington Post: N. Va. College Applicants Face Extra Hurdle; Abundance of Achievers
Stiffens Competition (Jay Mathews)

5) The New York Times: Yale Moves Away From Plans for Link With Abu Dhabi (Tamar Lewin)

6) The New York Times: Catholic Schools Face Changing Fortunes (Fernanda Santos)
7) The New York Times: A Bittersweet Spring for Catholic Sohools in Newark (Mary Jo
Patterson)

The New York Times

April 12, 2008

Fewer Options Open to Pay for Costs of College

By JONATHAN D. GLATER
Parents will have to navigate unfamiliar and difficult terrain when it comes time to pay
for college this year, with student loan companies in turmoil and banks tightening their
standards and raising rates on other types of borrowing.

La~nakers and the administration are trying to head off any crisis by making sure that
"lenders of last resort" stand ready to take the place of companies that have left the
federal loan program. And a growing number of colleges have applied to participate in the
federal direct loan program, in which students borrow from the gover~lent.

But families often use a combination of resources to pay for college, drawing on savings,
federal loans, bank loans and home loans to plug the gap between college costs and
financial aid.
 Page 1374
Even if the government wards off problems in the credit markets and federal student loans
are easily accessible, other sources of firmncing will become less accessible as consumers
find themselves stretched thin and lenders get more choosy.

Turbulence in lending has complicated the efforts of people like Dawn R. Beaton of Mill
Valley, Calif., to pay for her daughters’ education. A single mother earning less than
$50,000 a year, she already b~s run into difficulty taking out a federal parent loan for
her oldest daughter, Nicole, to attend a nearby commttnity college. Her original lender
pulled out of the market, and she is still waiting, months later, to hear from a
replacement lender on that $5,000 request. She anticipates having to borrow about $i0,000
to send her middle daughter to a private college in Ohio later this year.

"When I go to bed at night, I worry about it," said Ms. Beaton, who is a financial manager
for a vineyard.

"’If you don’t have the money, there you are, in a serious, ulcer state. You feel
inadequate."

According to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, 70 percent of parents surveyed were
"very concerned" about how they would pay for college; only 6 percent were not concerned.

To ensure continued availability of federal loans, the secretary of the federal Education
Department met on Friday with representatives of the state agencies and nonprofit
companies that guarantee federal loans on be]malf of the government. The goal was to work
out how the guarantors would serve as lenders, if necessary. This emergency safety net has
never been pressed into widespread use.

Though there is no major problem now, the lending industry is warning of a credit squeeze
without action. "I would say there is widespread belief," said Margaret Spellings, the
education secretary, "that we will have a real problem, that the lender of last resort or
some other solution will have to be used this year."

Last year, students and their parents borrowed nearly $60 billion in federally guaranteed
loans, a figure that has gro~n more than 6 percent annually over the last five years after
taking into accot~t inflation. In recent years, the growth rate has declined but may pick
up as the economy slows and as other borrowing options fade.

"I want to make sure we are going to do our part, and that students will be able to go to
college this fall," Ms. Spelling said.

La~makers in Washington have proposed increasing the amounts that students can borrow
through federal programs and authorizing the Education Department to purchase federal
loans, thereby providing banks with cash to lnake more loans. The House Education Committee
approved legislation this week that would allow dependent students to borrow a total of
$31,000 through federal programs to pay for their undergraduate education, up from $23,000
now.

Still, it is difficult to gauge whether a financing problem will emerge later this year
for students and, if so, how serious it might be. The disruption in the federal lending
program so far has mostly been from borrowers shifting to another lender. Ms. Beaton, for
example, expects her $5,000 loan request to eventually be granted. "By the time I get the
money, school will probably be over," she said.
Financial aid administrators say few students had been shut out. "I haven’t heard anything
about any sort of unusual trends so far, not to say that it isn’t going to intensify,"
said Daniel C. Walls, associate vice provost for enrollment management at Emory University
in Atlanta. "I suspect there’s going to be more negotiating arotu~d financial aid this year
than any other year that we’ve experienced."

Admitted students are just now receiving financial aid awards from colleges, and the test
will come when tuition payments for the fall term are due, aid administrators say.

"By mid- to late June, certainly July, will be the months that we really begin to
understand the relative financial situations of families," said Jean McDonald-Rash,
director of financial aid at Purgers in New Jersey.

Students attending several expensive and wealthy colleges will en~oy expanded financial
 Page 1375
aid, as those institutions move to replace need-based loans with grants. Harvard and Yale
recently announced expansions of aid to families making as much as $150,000, displaying a
degree of generosity that few institutions can match.

Some student advocates say lenders are exaggerating the obstacles they face in search of a
bailout from Washington.

"Student lenders are trying to hype the current credit crunch to scare Congress into
providing them additional subsidies and to discredit last years’ hard won higher education
reform," said Luke Swarthout of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group in Washington,
referring to cuts lawmakers nmde last year to the subsidy payments to lenders of federal
loans.

Kevin Brims, executive director of /u~erica’s Student Loan Providers, dismissed such
criticism as baseless. "Lenders’ only goal is to get the administration to use its
existing authority to provide liquidity to the capital markets that fund federal student
leans," he said. "Lenders don’t need to overstate anything -- the facts speak for
themselves."

There are clear signs of potential problems in the fall. It remains difficult for lenders
to sell securities backed by student loans, in turn making it harder to raise capital. One
guarantor of private loans, a nonprofit company called the Education Resources Institute,
filed for bankruptcy protection this week.

"Everything that’s happened in the capital markets with this credit crunch has caused the
fixed-income investor base to shrink, so there are fewer potential buyers of securities
backed by the loans," said Andrea L. Murad, senior director at Fitch Ratings in New York.

The House legislation seeks to address this situation by allowing the Education Department
to buy student loans itself. At least 25 loan companies -- including big lenders like the
College Loan Corporation; the Student Loan Xpress unit of CIT; and NorthStar Education
Finance -- have stopped making federal loans, according to the Education Department. Some
estilm~tes put the number at nearly twice that.

Colleges generally say that more than 2,000 companies make student loans, and there are
plenty of lenders to step into the breach.

No doubt to sidestep any related problems, more than 100 colleges and universities have
applied to participate in the direct loan program since the end of February, according to
the department. Ms. Spellings, the department secretary, has said the direct loan program
could double the amount of new loans it nmkes to students, if necessary.

Some commercial education companies have already taken steps to ensure that their students
can find lenders, in some instances by preparing to nmke loans themselves.

Problems are more likely for those seeking private loans, which do not have any gover~ent
backing. The terms of private loans, like other consumer loans, vary depending on the
credit histories of individual applicants and in some cases can top 20 percent.

In the last several months, rates on those loans have risen by nearly one percentage
point, according to research by Mark Kantrowitz, who publishes the financial aid Web site
Fi1~hid. org. Lenders have also tightened their standards, making it costlier for those with
weak credit histories to obtain loans.

Private loans hmve grown sharply in popularity over the last 10 years, as families have
looked for ways to pay the difference between tuition, on the one hand, and their savings
and federal loan options, on the other. Last year, according to the College Board,
students took out more than $17 billion in private loans, up from just $1.6 billion a
decade earlier.

"If the financial aid system had kept pace with inflation, there wouldn’t be any need for
private loans," said Paul Wrubel, co-founder of TuitionCoach. com and a consultant for
families trying to figure out how to pay for college.

Families also t~ve closed the gap between college costs and federal loans by borrowing
against their homes ~ and that is another option vanishing as house prices fall and
3
 Page 1376
lenders clamp dome. Millions of homeowners now owe more than their houses are worth,
leaving no equity to borrow against.

There is no data on how ~mny parents may have used home equity loans to pay for higher
education, researchers and aid administrators said, but there is no doubt many did, to
take advantage of tax breaks and lower rates.

Tapping into home equity was always part of the college finance plan for Connie and Dave
Orient of Canonsburg, Pa. She is a paralegal at a law firm in Pittsburgh and he is in the
family construction business. Their older son, Christopher, is a sophomore at California
University of Pennsylvania, a public institution relatively inexpensive for in-state
residents. The younger son, Luke, a high school junior, wants to go to Virginia Tech,
which she said would cost three times as much.

"I believe that I am in an area that is not depressed or anything," Ms. Orient said. She
added that she hoped still to be able to borrow against the house she and her husband
built 25 years ago, but was unsure how much equity she really has in it and how much a
lender would be willing to extend.

"Nothing’s selling anywhere right now. "

Alan Finder contributed reporting.

Washington Post

Sallie Mac To Charge For Loans To Students

By David Cho?Washington Post Staff Writer?

Saturday, April 12, 2008; DOI

Sallie Mae, the country’s largest student lender, announced yesterday that it will start
charging students who apply for federally backed loans and cut the type of loans
available, citing the turmoil in the credit i~arkets as a reason for this shift.

The Reston company said in a letter to schools and universities that it would immediately
stop offering loans that consolidate debt accumulated by undergraduate and graduate
students.

This has traditionally represented a major part of Sallie Mae’s business. The firm said it
would instead soncentrate solely on lending to current students.
Starting next month, Sallie Hae will charge fees -- ranging from $35 for freshm~en to a few
hundred dollars for graduate students -- to apply for federal loans. These fees had
largely been covered by lenders in the past, but most firms are now dropping this benefit.
Citing "severe credit nmrket deterioration" and a decision by Congress last year to cut
subsidies to lenders, Sallie Mac President C.E. Andrews and Executive Vice President Barry
S. Feierstein said that one-third of the top 1O0 student lenders have left the business.
He warned that this means "loan demand will significantly exceed lender supply for the
upcoming academic year."

The trend is worrying some la~nakers and top federal education officials who are preparing
emergency programs to enable the government to make up the shortfall in student loans for
the coming school year.

Some education advocates remain skeptical of Sallie Hae and other lenders, accusing them
of using the disruption in the credit markets to push for a restoration of the subsidies
that were cut last year.

"Clearly the loan industry has a long history of stretching the truth and the law to
maxil~ize their own profits," said Luke Swarthout, higher-education advocate for the U.S.
Public Interest Research Group. "Of course they are being opportunistic about this."
But M~rk Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid, a Web site that provides financial advice for
students, said the exodus from the industry is an alarming trend and may lead to higher
 Page 1377
borrowing costs for students.

Sallie Mae dropping out of the student-loan consolidation business is "fairly

significant," Kantrowitz said. "It shows the student-loan system is under extreme stress
when you have the largest student lender stopping the largest federal loan program."

Sallie Mae said in the letter that lenders who make federally backed loans would only be
able to meet student demand once their traditiona! sources of money in the credit markets
begin functioning normally again.

In addition to federally backed loans, private loans have also offered students a ~jor
source of financing for college. Students will now face higher rates for private loans,
which they often need to cover tuition costs because there is a cap on the amount they can
borrow in federally guaranteed loans. A small percentage of students who have bad credit
or attend for-profit colleges with low graduation rates may be denied loans altogether,
analysts say.

For lenders im~king federally backed loans, the $50.4 billion consolidation business has
deteriorated the most. In a consolidation, students co~ine their various federal loans
into a s.ingle package and lock in a single rate after they graduate.
Lenders making up two-thirds of this market h~ve exited in the past few months, according
to FinAid. Government officials have said that they will be able to fill the gap by
offering consolidation loans themselves.

Last year, Congress cut the subsidies it paid to lenders offering federally guaranteed
loans and used that money to lower rates from 6.8 percent to 6.0 percent for financially
needy students. This group borrowed $27.5 billion last year. The rates on all other types
of federally backed non-consolidation loans, which totaled $36.8 billion, were left the
same and range from 6.8 percent to 8.5 percent.

United Press International

Parents struggle to finance kids’ college

Published: April 12, 2008 at 11:04 AM

NEW YORK, April 12 (UPI) -- U.S. parents who pay for their children’s college educations
are facing new challenges this year as strained lenders increase selectivity, experts say.
Legislators are attempting to avoid a major crisis by securing "lenders of the last
resort" to fill in for companies that have checked out of government lending progr~ns, The
New York Times reported.

"I would say there is widespread belief that we will have a rea! problem, that the lender
of last resort or some other solution will have to be used this year," U.S. Education
Secretary Margaret Spellings said.

Federal loan programs aren’t the only troubled resource, as parent’s savings accounts and
mortgages are also increasingly strained this year, the Times reported.

In an effort to n~ke sure student loans will be available, Spellings met Friday with state
agency and nonprofit organizations that guarantee such lending. The meeting reportedly
focused on figuring out how the guarantors would step in and provide loans in an emergency
situation.

Washington Post

N. Va. College Applicants Face Extra Hurdle

Ab~c~nce of Achievers Stiffens Competition

By Jay Mathews,?Washington Post Staff Writer?
5
 Page 1378

Saturday, April 12, 2008; A01

The news hit Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax County right after spring vacation. "Joe
Robinson got rejected by JHU?! How can that be?"

James Madison University in Marrisonburg is one of the best schools in Virginia, students,
teachers and counselors agree. Most students would have tror~le getting in. But this was
Joe Robinson who got the thin envelope, the same Joe Robinson who had an SAT score of
2270, who was one of only two National Merit semifinalists in his class, who heads the
choral group, who writes fantasy novels in his spare time, who had some of the most
glowing teacher reco~nendations his counselor had ever seen.

"Everyone at Robinson who knows Joe" is "in disbelief," counselor Mitch Aydlette said in
written appeal of JMU’s decision. The university had been his best hope, for the 17-year-
old was rejected by the more selective schools on his list: the University of Virginia,
Dartmouth College, Boston College, the University of Notre Dame and the University of
Oxford.

This is a tough year for applicants to top colleges. Demographers say the number of high
school graduates has reached a peak. Admission standards are higher, and well-regarded
public universities such as JMU, charging much less than private colleges of similar
quality, are particularly prized.

But Joe Robinson’s failure to get into a university his family and advisers thought a
cinch for someone with his record suggests to several experts that college applicants from
Northern Virginia are facing unusually stiff competition -- increasingly from one another.
The region, with an extraordinary concentration of high-performing schools and students,
might have to adjust long-held assumptions about the power of scores and grades in college
admissions.
JMU spokesman Don Egle said the university’s admission process is "very competitive," with
20,000 applications this year for a class of 3,960. The r~iversity, he said, considers
test scores, awards, reeom~endations, activities, grades and essays.

The one apparent flaw on Robinson’s application was his 3.4 grade point average, when the
JMU average is about 3.6. Fairfax doesn’t use class rankings. He managed a 3.0 in ninth
and 10th grade, when he was preoccupied with troubles a friend faced, two of his great-
grandparents died and mononucleosis put him in bed for four weeks. Many selective schools
tell applicants that if they finish strong in high school, mediocre early report cards
won’t mean so much. In the past two years, his GPA has been 4.1, and rising. With an SAT
score ~ong the top i0 percent for JMU students and literary skills that leave school
faculty awestruck, Robinson’s grades, Aydlette said he thought, would not be a problem.

"A]nong my 18 students who applied to J~ (7 admitted), I rate Joe as the finest overall
scholar," Aydlette wrote in his appeal. Robinson Secondary, with about 4,000 students from
grades 7 to 12, is the state’s largest public school.

But Shirley Bloomquist, a former guidance director at the Thomas Jefferson High School for
Science and Technology in Fairfax who is now a college-admissions consultant, said many
Northern Virginia families overlook that large numbers of students in the region hmve high
test scores and good grades. Many of them, she said, are in competition with each other.
The top state undergraduate institutions, such as U-Va., the College of William &amp;
~ry, Virginia Tech and J~[U, also "cannot take all of their students from Northern
Virginia," Bloomquist said. "They have to leave room" for students from other parts of the
state.

On the role of geography in ac~issions, JMU’s Egle said, "We are interested in the best
high school students from all of the regions across the state." Greg Roberts, associate
dean of a~ission at U-Va., said through a spokesman: "Our primary goal is to enroll an
academically strong and diverse class of first-year and transfer students each year. As a
state institution, we are interested in enrolling students from all areas of the
COlmmonweal th. "
Robinson’s SAT score of 2270, out of a possible 2400, looked terrific compared with the
JMU average of about 1710. But experts said JMI]’s admissions officers expect high scores
from Fairfax and will probably take just as close a look at a hardworking student with a
lower SAT score from a place such as Galax, to the southwest, or Petersburg, south of
6
 Page 1379
Ri chmo nd.

The competition for spaces in state r~iversities is also intensifying. "I believe the
do~Tnturn in the economy this year has made public schools hotter than ever," said New
York-based educational consultant William Short. David Hawkins, director of public policy
and research for the Alexandria-based National Association for College Admission
Counseling, said JMU is an example of what many top students hmve !ong considered a good
"safety" school. But he said, "We can see that it is not, in fact, a sure thing for these
students anymore. "

Bloomquist said she h~s expunged the term "safety school" from her vocabulary and speaks
instead of "likely schools." In the past few years, she said, "I have become very
conservative." Even for students with records as good as Robinson’s, she said, she might
suggest adding to their lists state universities such as Christopher Ne~rport in Ne~Tport
News or George Mason in Fairfax, ~ust north of Robinson Secondary. That would force
students to apply to more colleges, but several experts said expanding the pool of likely
ach~issions prospects seems better than what happened to Joe Robinson.

In the meantime, some Virginia la~mmkers have called for tighter limits on the number of
out-of-state students. But the higher out-of-state tuition, $8,693 this year at JMU
compared with $3,333 for in-state students, helps pay faculty salaries as the state
government grapples with lean budgets amid a difficult economy. The governing boards of
each state university in Virginia decide how many out-of-state students will be admitted.
At JHU, the ratio is 70 percent in-state and 30 percent out-of-state.

Students in Robinson’s situation are not without options. Often, they can seek admission
in the late spring to colleges that still ]~ve openings. If his appeal to JMU is denied,
Robinson said, he might spend a year at a community college and then try again, focusing
next time on Notre D~mle. His school’s principal, Dan Meier, a former counselor, said he
has talked to Robinson about his re~ections and wonders why more room for Virginia
students can’t be fot~do
"I have been frustrated by this for many years," Meier said. "We have such wonderful state
colleges, but it is so difficult for our students to get into them."

The New York Times

April 12, 2008

Yale Moves Away From Plans for Link With Abu Dhmbi

By TAMAR LEWIN

After more than a year of talks, Yale University has backed away from its plan for an arts
institute in Abu Dhabi, involving Yale’s art, music, architecture and drama schools.

The stumbling block, ultimately, was Abu Dbabi’s insistence that Yale offer degree
programs at the institute, and Yale’s refusal to grant its degrees in Abu Dhabi.

Yale’s art institute was to be part of Abu Dhabi’s development of Saadiyat Island as a
cultural center, including outposts of the Louvre, the Guggenheim and other musezm~s.
"From the beginning, we were clear that degree programs were not what we were talking
about," said Linda K. Lorimer, secretary and vice president of Yale. "We were exploring
exciting plans for program, s that would be value-added for cultural development. But in the
end, they wanted degrees. And at this point in time, we ~ust don’t think we could mount
faculty of the s~me quality we have here, or attract students of the s~m~e caliber."

The collapse of the talks was first reported in The Yale Daily News on Friday.
Almost every ma~or American research university has recently become intent on globalizing,
with many starting branches in the Persian Gulf, while others pursue research partnerships
and ~oint-degree programs around the globe.

But the Ivy League universities -- with the exception of Cornell’s medical school in Qatar
 Page 1380
-- have been notably ~willing to offer their home degrees through overseas programs.
Yale, for example, has dozens of foreign programs in China and elsewhere, but none offer
Yale degrees.

"’It is understandable that some of our elite and most selective universities are not eager
to increase significantly the number of degrees they award annually, here or abroad," said
Dr. Ed~Tard ®uiliano, president of the New York Institute of Technology, which offers its
degsees in China, Canada, Jordan, Bahrain and Abu Dhabi. "Selectivity is part of their
value equation as well as the pride of their altmuni. Plus, of course, it is standard
currency with rating and ranking surveys."

The Abu Dhabi project would have been Yale’s first major venture in the Middle East. Abu
Dhabi, the oil-rich capital of the United Arab Emirates, has recently invested heavily in
importing educational and cultural institutions from the West. In 2006, the Sorbonne
opened a liberal-arts campus in Abu Dhabi. New York University is planning a full-fledged
liberal arts c~npus on Saadiyat Island. And Abu Dhabi paid $520 million for the right to
use the Louvre name, part of a deal worth nearly $1.3 billion to create a branch of the
Louvre.

Last year, Yale’s president, Richard Levin, told the Yale aluml~i magazine that he hoped to
complete the university’s Abu Dhabi agreement in the summer of 2007. Each of Yale’s arts
gradtmte schools was pla~ing activities m master classes, desi~] workshops and
elementary school programs -- for the Abu Dhabi institute, all of which were to be paid
for by the emirate’s government.
With its Abu Dhabi plans proceeding, New York University earlier this month ended its
talks to absorb the American University of Paris.

"As we got closer to the merger, the trade-offs became more apparent," said John Beckman,
a spokesman for N.Y.U. "~/hat we were hearing from the A.U.,P. people, consistently, was
that they were worried about maintaining the distinctiveness of their identity, and what
we were hearing from our students consistently was that they felt the academic experience
between the two institutions was incompatible."

The New York Times

April 13, 2008

Catholic Schools Face Changing Fortunes

By FERNANDA SANTOS

BREWSTER, N.Y.
THE grammar school at St. Lawrence O’Toole Roman Catholic parish here opened in 1926, in a
two-story building at the crest of a gentle slope near the train station. For decades,
nuns lived in the rooms upstairs and taught their students in classrooms on the first
floor.

In 1968, when Brian Ledley entered first grade, most classes were still taught by nuns and
about 400 students attended the pre-K-through-eighth-grade school. But by the time his
daughter Deirdra entered first grade in 2005, the nuns had long been replaced by lay
teachers and enrolh~ent stood at 220, with no sign that it would climb back up anytime
soon, said Mr. Ledley, a local caterer and a father of i0. Five of his children attended
the school, and four are currently enrolled.

Now, like nmny Catholic schools around the region in recent years, St. Lawrence O’Toole is
facing the prospect of closing its doors.

With 130 students this school year and only 88 students committed to returning in
September, the school would have to raise $850,000 to pay its teachers and another
$200,000 for a new boiler if it were to open this fall, according to the parish.

Gazing at his yellowing eighth-grade graduation picture in an old family album, seven of
his i0 children huddled with him around a kitchen table, Mr. Ledley, 45, said, dejectedly,
 Page 1381
"We’ re going to have to fight a real hard fight if we want our school to survive.’"

Under a plan a~ounced last month by the Archdiocese of New York, St. Lawrence O’Toole and
five other Catholic schools -- two each in Westchester and Rockland Counties and one in
the Bronx -- would close at the end of the school year. This will bring the total nr~ber
of schools closed to 15 since the archdiocese rolled out a reorganization plan in 2007
that also called for closing 21 parishes.

On Long Island, the Diocese of Rockville Centre closed four schools in 2004 and 2005,
including one in Levittown and another in Cedmrhurst.
After significant declines, enrollment now seems to be holding on the Island, according to
Sean P. Dolan, a spokesman for the diocese.

Mr. Dolan said that elementary school enrollment had declined by about 8,000 students or
27 percent from 1995 to 2005. But he said the rate of decline had slowed in the last two
years since the diocese put in place an intervention team made up of lay and religious
educators who go into schools facing difficulties and recommend solutions.

"’We h~ve become a lot more attuned as to the health of our schools, so we know when
they’re reaching a challenging time and we’re able to go in and ~mke adjustments before it
is too late," Mr. Dolan said.
Across the country, more than 1,260 Catholic schools, mostly elementary schools, have
closed since 2000, according to the National Catholic Education Association, based in
Washington. The reason cited in most cases is declining enrollment, making it difficult
for schools that rely. heavily on tuition to meet expenses.
The forces behind declining enrollment are varied, and include demographic shifts over the
last few decades, as well as rising tuition, which administrators attribute largely to an
increase in costs because of the transition from an all-religious faculty to a primarily
lay faculty. Catholic schools also face competition from solid public school systems in
some colmmunities where parents are paying ]~gh property taxes.

Ellen Ayoub, superintendent of schools for the Diocese of Metuchen, in New Jersey, which
has closed six schools in the last six years, explained it this way: "Seventy percent of
our budget comes from tuition and the rest comes from fund-raising and from the parish, so
when you don’t have enough students, you don’t have that 70 percent coming in, which means
you’ll need more money from the parishes, but the parishes are already struggling."

When Pope Benedict XVI arrives in the United States on Tuesday, he will find a Catholic
Church that with 65 million me~ers in the country is bigger than it has ever been. But
that church is in the midst of a profound transition as it tries to catch up with three
decades of changes that pushed its base from the cities to the far suburbs and from the
Northeast to the West and South.
While the demographic shifts depleted some congregations, leaving struggling parishes and
some schools that could no longer sustain themselves, the population growth in some areas
has led to new churches and expanded parishes.
As an example, Ms. Ayoub said that a consultant hired by the Metuchen Diocese said that
the population growth in H~nterdon County, N.J., would support a new elementary school.

Underscoring the financial crisis faced by some Catholic schools, one union representing
teachers in the New York Archdiocese -- which covers Manhattan, Staten Island,
Westchester, Rockland, Putnam and five other counties -- staged a two-day strike early
this month, ~hile another has threatened to go on strike during the pope’s visit and
picket papal events. At the heart of the protests are the higher health-insurance premiums
proposed by the archdiocese and the unions’ desirefor bigger pay raises.

There are 2.27 million students enrolled in Catholic schools nationwide this year-- 56
percent less than in 1960, when enrollment peaked at 5.25 million, and 14 percent less
than in 2000, ~{hen it was 2.65 million, statistics by the Catholic education association
show. A~d for every new school that opened last year, 43 of them in all, 4 schools closed,
the figures show.
 Page 1382
There are now 7,500 Catholic schools in the co--try; in 1960, there were 13,000.

"There’s still great interest in Catholic education, but there are also problems --with
enrollment, with finances and with the fact Hispanics, the fastest-growing segment of the
Catholic population and of the American population as a whole, are still underrepresented
in our schools," said the Rev. Ronald J. Nuzzi, director of the Alliance for Catholic
Education, a graduate program for Catholic school teachers and administrators at the
University of Notre Dame.
"It took us some time to understand the depth of the great social changes of the ’60s and
the ’70s, and it has taken us some time to adapt to those changes, to figmre out where we
need to grow and where we need to sacrifice," Father Nuzzi said.

Responding to the recent shifts in demographics, the Catholic Church has built new
churches in places that have experienced significant population growth, but not every
church has been accompanied by a new school.

"There was a time in history when the bishops told the pastors that when they built a new
church, they should build a new school, but that had ended by the time we were
experiencing these changes," said K~ren Ristau, president of the National Catholic
Education Association. "What happened was that the f~nilies moved, but the schools did
no t. "

What has resulted, Dr. Ristau explained, is a lopsided distribution of resources, with
empty schools abounding in some parts of the country and schools bursting at the seams in
others parts. For example, in the West -- an area that includes Texas and Arizona, where
the Catholic population more than doubled between 1965 and 2005, and Nevada, where it
sextupled during the s~me period -- about half of the more than 1,400 Catholic schools
have waiting lists, she said.
"School closings draw a lot of news coverage, but they’re only part of the story," Dr.
Ristau added.

"The sad part of the story."

Catholic schools face many challenges aside from adapting to population shifts. In
affluent communities, where the cost of education is not an issue, it may be elite private
schools. In middle-class suburbs, it may be other Catholic schools or a solid public
school system. And in inmer-cities, it is most likely the price of tuition, or, in some
cases, other alterl~tives, like charter schools.
The six Catholic elementary schools in Bridgeport, Conn., had struggled for more than
decade to meet enrollment goals. Tuition kept them out of reach for at least the one in
five local families who lived below the poverty line, and their rising operating costs
strained the finances of parishes already struggling to nmke ends meet.

In 2004, Bishop William E. Lori, who had replaced Cardinal Edward M. Egan as head of the
Diocese of Bridgeport, issued a call to action. He enlisted the help of retired chief
executives and ftu~d-raising specialists, who then recruited patrons for the schools or
school projects, like maintenance and library renovation. He met with pastors of various
African-~nerican churches and told them that their children were welcome in the Catholic
schools. And he advertised to Latino f&milies on Spanish-language radio.
Then, the schools were brought under one administrative umbrella known as the Cathedral
Cluster, which principals said has made it easier for them to trade ideas and share
resources like books, laptops, teachers and even the math and literacy consultants who
work a few hours a week in each of the schools, their salaries paid through private donors
and grants.

"We study together; we look at student work together; we do planning together; we meet
every month to find out where we need help," said Maria O’Neill, principal of St. Andrew
School, on the north side of the city. "If there’s an issue going on in one of our
buildings, we feel very comfortable calling one another."

Enrollment at the six Bridgeport elementary schools has increased by i0 percent since 2004
-- to 1,399 this school year from 1,270; ii percent of the students are non-Catholics,
 Page 1383
about 10 percent are black and about 10 percent are Hispanic, said Margaret A. D~m~es,
superintendent of schools. Nationwide, 12 percent of Catholic elementary school students
are non-Catholics, 13 percent of them are Hispanic and 7 percent are black, according to
the Catholic education association figures.

Since 2005, the Bridgeport Diocese -- which stretches from Danbury and Brookfield on the
north to Greenwich in the south-- has controlled all of its 39 schools. Under this
arrangement, parishes contribute 8 percent of their offertory collections to a general
fund tk~t is then divided ~ong the schools; the diocese gives each school an additional
$12,000, Dr. Dsmles said.

"The idea was to avoid placing too much of the burden on one person or one institution,"
she said.

"What we did in essence was reinvent ourselves so as to reflect the original mission of
Catholic schools, which is to provide education for everyone, and not ~ust those who can
afford it."

On a drizzly afternoon here in Brewster, Hr. Ledley, the local caterer, wondered where
exactly things started to go wrong for St. Lawrence O’Toole and whether parents might have
taken too long to try to develop a rescue plan.

"We knew the school wasn’t doing well, that the enrollment was declining, but we thought
that St. Lawrence was safe because it’s the biggest and the oldest of the other Catholic
schools around," Mr. Ledley said.

Mr. Ledley and other parents began to ~oin forces two years ago, conducting Sunday open
houses and organizing movie nights to woo new families. One mother, Linda High~, mailed
h~n~de Christmas cards to the parents of each of the babies baptized at the parish
church in 2006 and again last year, reminding them to consider the school once their
children are old enough. In recent months, the parents wrote to residents here and alumni
everywhere, asking for donations. To this point they have raised about $100,000, far from
enough to save the school.

MRS. HIGHAM conceded that she has visited another Catholic school ~ust in case she needs
to enroll her ll-year-old daughter, Laurel, a fifth grader at St. Lawrence O’Toole,
elsewhere in the fall. The girl is crushed; she is an only child and her school friends,
she said, are for the most part the only friends she has ever had.

"I don’t want to have to leave them, but it seems like everybody is going to go to a
different place," Laurel said as she left school, hauling a black and pink backpack
weighed dow]~ with books.

Mr. Ledley has what may be a tougher task -- to find a new school for his children, when
St. Lawrence O’Toole is the only school he has ever known. His grandfather, Thomas
Farrell, was a member of one of its first graduating classes. His father, Daniel Ledley,
graduated in 1952, and Mr. Ledley himself did so in 1976.

His five older children-- Brian, 24; Brend~], 22; Patrick, 19; Anne, 18; and William, 16
-- went to St. Lawrence O’Toole, and four younger ones are there now: Gerard, 14, in
eighth grade; Andrew, 12, in seventh; Deirdra, i0, a fourth grader; and Sean, 6, in
kindergarten. (The youngest, Mary, is 3.)

"We could have really nice cars, we could be traveling to nice places on vacation, we
could be saving up for a good retirement," Mr. Ledley said. "But Catholic education is
something we believe in. It’s a priority to us."

Seated next to him on the couch, his wife of 25 years, Patricia, dabbed her eyes.

"Of course the religion is a big part of it," she said, "but there’s also a really warm
feeling of family."

The New York Times

April 13, 2008

 Page 1384

A Bittersweet Spring for Catholic Schools in Newark

By MARY JO PATTERSON

NEWAPi<

ALICE TERRELL opens the door to Miss Hargrove’s first grade at Blessed Sacrament School,
where nine children sit attentively at desks arranged like pieces on a checkerboard.

The room is huge and they are tiny, but the 92-year-old school was built when Catholic
education was flourishing and a typical classroom held 40 students. These days, with a
total enrollment of 95 in Grades K-8, Blessed Sacr~nent is a ghost of its former self.

"Good morning, " says Miss Terrell, the acadenric director, who, as a Methodist, cannot hold
the title of principal.

"Good morning Miss Terrell, and God bless you," nine high-pitched voices reply in ~]ison.
Such are the daily rituals at this school, which are about to end. With enrollment far
below 225, considered a healthy number for a school in the Archdiocese of Newark, Blessed
Sacrament will close for good in June. A charter school plans to take over the building.

As the weather warms and Catholic schools in New Jersey prepare for Pope Benedict XVI’s
impending visits to Washington and New York, it is a bittersweet spring for Blessed
Sacrament’s shaken families and staff. Many have no idea where they will go.

The closing has also left others in Catholic education with a lump in their throats.

"It’s a loss for all of us -- a door for evangelizing has closed," said Everlyn Hay,
principal of Queen of Angels School, about a mile away.

With about 200 students, Queen of Angels is not in danger; its enrollment may even grow if
it absorbs some of Blessed Sacrament’s stranded students. But over the last decade the
archdiocese, covering Bergen, Hudson, Essex and Union Cortnties, has closed one-fourth of
its schools. After Blessed Sacrament closes, the archdiocese will have seven elementary
schools.

Mrs. Hay, an usher at Queen of Angels Church, founded in 1930 as the first African-
American Catholic congregation in Newark, is a realist.

"I’ii be truthful -- the moment enrollment starts dipping, we start worrying," she said
early this month. "Right now we have fa~ilies losing their jobs left and right. We ask
each other: ~Who’s next?’"
Blessed Sacr~nent, in the city’s South Ward, and Queen of Angels, in the Central Ward, are
close cousins in many ways. But only one will survive past the end of this school year.

Both schools have proud histories and fiercely loyal adherents. Even though they are not
likely to be Catholic, many African-American parents who live or work in Newark consider
the two schools preferable to public schools. Ask why, and the parents are likely to say
the Catholic schools are safer and academically superior. They also praise teachers as
"like family" and unusually dedicated.

"The pr~lic schools are too dangerous," said Charles Treadwell, a transportation company
owner in Newark who graduated from Queen of Angels in 1984 and sent all four of his
children there. "A teacher cannot effectively teach when she has one or two children who
constantly disrupt the class. At Queen of Angels, that is not going to happen. It’s run
the old-school way, caring but stern. If you go there you’re going to stay focused, you
will learn, and you will succeed."

Fewer than i0 percent of students at Blessed Sacrament and Queen of Angels are Catholic,
and fewer still attend their school’s parish church. Still, religion permeates both
places, through instruction in faith and twice-daily prayers.

Both schools struggle without subsidies from the diocese. They receive certain services
and supplies from the State Department of Education, but they are financed largely through
 Page 1385
tuition and other fees.

Both employ lay staff and could use more. Blessed Sacrament has no librarian or music
teacher, and the gym teacher is part time; at Queen of Angels, Mrs. Hay herself grabs a
crossing guard’s vest, whistle and stop sign to lead students to the playground, a barren
patch of sloping blacktop across a street. A volt~teer travels daily from Manhattan to
help at lunch.

As for the buildings, they are hopelessly obsolete, with a history of few renovations.
Dusty sports trophies from the 1940s crowd the tops of towering bookcases at Blessed
Sacrament. Queen of Angels, built in 1887, houses pre-K through eighth grades in a
confusing warren of rooms attached to the church.

MISS TERRELL, a 30-year-old Newark native, says high fees and the lure of free charter
schools killed off Blessed Sacrament.
When she arrived in 2005, "we were already in a danger zone, though I didn’t know it," she
said.
The school had 159 students then. Tuition ~as $2,700 per child, and families had to raise
an additional $300 through candy sales.

Hiss Terrell, who h~d been teaching at a public school, came to Blessed Sacrament with a
master’s degree and principal’s certification, and drea~s of an ideal educational setting.
She landed the director’s position.

"The particular public school where I taught previously, in East Orange, was very rough,"
she said. "I wanted a focus on education, not discipline. Coming here was a joy."

But Blessed Sacra!~ent had problems of its own -- financial ones.

In 2006 the parish raised the tuition to $2,900 and the fund-raising mandate to $400.
Enrollment nose-dived, Miss Terrell said. This year the church again raised tuition, to
more than $3,000. The ft~d-raising obligation swelled to $900, causing more parents to
withdraw their children.

Meanwhile, the current tuition at Queen of Angels is $2,900, and the f~~d-raising
requirement is $300.

Miss Terrell said she did not understand that Blessed Sacr~nent was in trouble until last
November, when a group of strangers showed up for a tour. The school year had opened on an
anxious note when fewer pupils than expected showed up, but parish leaders told parents at
a meeting that the school would not close. Miss Terrell felt reassured too, until the
strangers appeared. The custodian called her after they left.

"Are you sitting down?" she recalled him asking. "That was a charter school. They want to
move in." Later an appraiser showed up, but official notification of the closing did not
come until February. Fa~lilies grew emotional. Miss Terrell said she was grief-stricken.

The bureaucratic machinery to close Blessed Sacrament was actually activated at the end of
December, when the church’s pastor, the Rev. Anselm I. Nwaorgu, wrote the archdiocese
asking for permission to close the school, said James Goodness, the spokesnmn for the
archdiocese. The letter cited an operating deficit this year of $270,000 and noted there
were only 97 students. The archdiocese granted Father Nwaorgu’s request on Jan. 21.
By last week, those at the school seemed to have accepted its fate, but the the calm
atmosphere belied the anxiety some of the children and the adults were feeling.

"Everything’s up in the air," said Carissa Chase of Newark, a worried mother of two. Her
eighth grader has been accepted at Marist High School in Bayonne, a Catholic school, Ms.
Chase said, but she has no idea about her fourth grader. The charter school moving into
the building told her it had no room for him, she said.

Michelle Haycock-Smith, who has a son in second grade at Blessed Sacrament, said she and
her husband were also in limbo.

"It’s horrible, what’s happening," she said. "The teachers here have been very caring, and
Christopher loves school. This was a positive place to be. We have been to a couple of

13
 Page 1386
charter schools, but really, we’ re most interested in Catholic schools."

Patricia Neblett of Orange, who works in the Blessed Sacrament lunchroom, hms the same
headache, multiplied by five. In addition to relocating her four youngest to new schools,
she has to find a new ~ob.

Miss Terrell is also sending out applications. In September she bought a house in
Hillside. Now, she said, she is worried about paying the mortgage.

"’We’re all looking for a position, but none of us has been hired. It’s nerve-racking, but
I &m more worried about my kids," she said. "Some may end up in public schools. If they
do, they’ll be in for culture shock."
 Page 1387

04.12.08 In the News

1) The New York Times: Fewer Options Open to Pay l~or Costs of College (Jonathan
Glarer)

2) Washington Post: Sallie Mae To Charge For Loans To Students (David Cho)

3) United Press International: Parents struggle to finance ldds’ college

4) Washington Post: N.Va. College Applicants Face Extra Hurdle; Abundance

Acllievers Stiffens Compeiifion (Jay Mathews)

5) The New York Ti~nes: Yale Moves Away From Hans for Link Wifll Abu Dhabi
(Tamar Lewin)

6) The New York Times: Catholic Schools Face Changing Fortunes (Fernanda
Santos)

7) The New York Times: A Bittersweet Spring for Catholic Schools in Newark
(Mary Jo Patterson)

The New York Times

April 12, 2008

Fewer Options Open to Pay for Costs of College

By JONATHAN D. GLATER
Parents will have to navigate tmfanliliar and difficult ten’ain when it comes time to pay
for college tiffs yem; with student loan companies in tmanoil mid banks tightening their
standards and raising rotes on other types of borrowing.

L awrn,otkers and the administa’ation are tt34ng to head off any crisis by malting sure that
"lendelS of last resort" stand ready to take the place of companies that have left the
federal loan program. And a growing mmlber of colleges have applied to patticipate in
the federal direct loan InoglmlL in wtfich students bolaO~V from the govemlnent.
 Page 1388

But families otten use a combination ofresources to pay for college, drawing on savings,
federal loans, bank loans and home loar~s to plug the gap between college costs and
financial aid.

Even if the government wards offproblems in the credit markets and federal student
loans are easily accessible, other sources of fi~mncing will become less accessible as
consmners find themselves stretched thin and lendei,s get 1nore choosy.

Tttrbulence in lending has complicated the efforts of people like Dawn R. Beaton of Mill
Valley, Cali£, to pay for her daugl~ters’ education. A single mother earning less than
$50,000 a year, she aheady has run into difficulty taldng out a fede~N parent loan for her
oldest daughter, Nicole, to attend a nearby community college. Her oliginal lender ptflled
out of the market, and she is still waiting, months later, to hear from a replacement lender
on that $5,000 request. She anticipates having to bon’ow about $10,000 to send her
~niddle dal~ghter to a plivate college in Ohio later this year.

"When I go to bed at night, I -~vorry about it," said Ms. B eaton, who is a financial
manager for a vineyard.

"If you don’t have the money, there you are, in a serious, ulcer state. You feel
inadequate."

According to a recent New York Times/CB S News poll, 70 percent of parents surveyed
were "vm3~ conce~ed" about how they would pay for college; ouly 6 percent were not
concerned.

To ensttre contitmed availability of federal loans, the secretm~j of the federal Education
Depmtment met on Friday with representatives of the state agencies and nonprofit
companies that gum-m~tee federal loans onbehalfofthe government. The goal was to
 Page 1389

work out how the guarantors would serve as lenders, ifnecessmN. This emergency safety
net has never been pressed into widespread use.

Though there is no major problem no,v, the lending indust~3~ is warning of a credit
squeeze without action. "I would say there is widesl~ead belief," said Margaret Spellings,
the education secretm% "that we will have a real problem, that the lender of last resort or
some otlier solution will have to be used this year."

Last yem; students and their parents bonowed nearly $60 billion in federally guaranteed
lom~s, a figme that tins grovcn more than 6 percent annually over the last five yeats after
taking into account inflation. In recent years, the growth ~te has declined but may pick
up as the economy slows and as other borrowing options fade.

"I water to make sure we are going to do our part, and that students will be able to go to
college this fall," Ms. Spelling said.

Lawmakers in Washh~gton trove proposed increasing the amounts that students can
borrow thi’ough federal progrmns and antho~zing the Education Depaxtment to purchase
federal loans, thereby providing banks with cash to make more loans. Tlie House
Education Committee approved legislation this week that would allow dependent
students to bonow a total of $31,000 through federal programs to pay for their
tmdergraduate education, up fiom $23,000 now.

Still, it is difficult to gauge ~vhether a financing problem will emerge later this yeat" for
students and, if so, how serious it might be. The disruption in the federal lending program
so far has mostly been from bolTowers shitting to another lender. Ms. Beaton, for
exan~ple, expects her $5,000 loan request to eventually be granted. "By the time I get the
money, school will probably be over," she said.
 Page 1390

Financial aid administrators say few students had been shut out. "I haven’t heard
anyflting about any sort of mlusual trends so far, not to say that it isn’t going to
intensify," said Daniel C. Walls, associate vice provost for em’ollment management at
Emor2 University in Atlanta. "I suspect there’s going to be inore negotiating around
financial aid this year than any other year that we’ve experienced."

Admitted students are just now receiving financial aid awards from colleges, and the test
will come when tuition payments for the fall telrn are due, aid administrators say.

"By mid- to late Jtme, celtainly July, will be the months that we really begin to
understand the relative financial situations of families," said Jean McDonald-Rash,
director of financial aid at Rutgers in New Jersey.

Students attending several expensive and wealthy colleges will enjoy expanded financial
aid, as those institutions nlove to replace need-based loans with grants. Harvmd and Yale
recently almolmced expansions of aid to families making as much as $150,000,
displaying a degree of generosity that few institutions can match.

Some student advocates say lenders are exaggerating the obstacles they face in search of
a bailout from Washington.

"Stndent lenders are tl3dng to hype the cunent credit chinch to scare Congress into
providing them additional subsidies and to discredit last years’ hard won higher education
reform," said Luke Swalthout of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group in Washington,
referring to cnts lawmakers made last year to the subsidy paylnents to lenders of federal
loans.

Kevin Bllms, executive director of Aanerica’s Student Loan Providers, dismissed such
criticism as baseless. Lenders ouly goal is to get the administration to use its existing
 Page 1391

authority to provide liquidity to the capit~l markets that fund federal student loans," he
said. "Lendei~ don’t need to overstate anything -- the facts speak for themselves."

There are clear signs of potential problems in the l~all. It remains diffictflt for lenders to

sell secttrities backed by student loans, in tttm making it harder to raise capital. One

guarantor of private loans, a nonprofit company called the Education Resotnces Institute,

filed for banl~ptcy protection this week.

"Eve~3rthing that’s happened in the capital markets with this credit crunch has caused the
fixed-income investor base to shrink, so there are fe~ver potential buyers ofsecmifies
backed by the loans," said Andrea L. Mttrad, senior director at Fitch Rafing~ in New
York.

The House legislation seeks to address this situation by allowing the Education
Depm~rneut to buy student loans itself. At least 25 loan companies -- including big
lenders like the College Loan Corporation; the Student Loan Xpress refit of CIT; and
No~thStar Education Finance -- have stopped making federal loans, according to the
Education Departmeut. Some estimates put the number at nearly twice that.

Colleges generally say that more than 2,000 compa~ties make student loans, and there are
plenty oflendels to step into the breach.

No doubt to sidestep any related problems, more thin1 100 colleges and tmiversities have
applied to partidpate in the direct loan program since the end of February, according to
the depmtmeut. Ms. Spellings, the depmtrnent secretat% has said the dhect loan program
could double the mnount of new loans it makes to students, if necessary.

Some cornmerdal education companies have aheady taken steps to ensttre that their
students can find lenders, in some instances by preparing to make loans themselves.
 Page 1392

Problems are more likely for those seeldng private loans, which do not have any
government backing. The telms of private loans, like other consmner loans, vary
depending on the credit histories of individual applicants and in some cases can top 20
percent.

In the last several months, rates on those loans have risen by nearly one percentage point,
according to research by Mark Kantrowitz, who publishes the financial aid Web site
FinAid.org. Lenders have also tightened their standards, malting it costlier fox" those with

weak credit histories to obtain loans.

Private loans have grown sharply in popttlmity over the last 10 years, as families have
looked for ways to pay the difference bet~veen tuition, on the one hand, and their savings
and federal loan optior~s, on the other. Last yea; according to the College Boa’d, students
took out more that $17 billion in private loans, up from just $1.6 billion a decade earlier.

"If the financial aid system had kept pace with inflation, there wouldn’t be any need for
p~ivate loans," said Paul Wrubel, co-founder of TuitionCoach.com and a consultant for
families t~ying to figure out how to pay for college.

Fmnilies also have closed the gap between college costs and federal loans by borrowing
against their homes -- and that is another option vanishing as house l~ices fall and
lenders clamp down. Millions of homeowners now owe more than their houses m’e wolth,
leaving no eqttity to boxa’ow against.

There is no data on how ~nany parents may have used home equity loans to pay for hinter
education, resem’chers and aid administrators said, but there is no doubt many did, to take
advantage of tax breaks and lower rotes.

Tapping into home equity was always part of the college finance plan for Connie and
 Page 1393

Dave Orient of Cano~tsburg, Pa. She is a pm’alegal at a law filrn in Pittsburgh and he is in
the family construction business. Their older son, Christopher, is a sophomore at
Califo~a University of Pennsylvania, a public institution relatively inexpensive for in-
state residents. The younger son, Luke, a high school janior, ,,’cants to go to ~nia
Tech, which she said would cost three times as ~nuch.

"I believe that I an in an area that is not depressed or anything," Ms. Orient said. She
added that she hoped still to be able to bonow against the house she and her husband
btfilt 25 years ago, but was unsure how much equity she really has init and how inuch a
lender wottld be willh~g to extend. "Nothing’s selling anywhere iight now."

Alan Finder contributed reporting.

Washington Post

Sallie Mae To Charge For Loans To Students

By David Cho[2Washington Post Staff Writer[3

Saturday, April 12, 2008; D01

Sallie Mae, the counttN’s lmgest student lender, amlounced yesterday that it will start
chmging students who apply for federally backed loarrs and cut the type of loans
available, citing the tmanoil in the credit markets as a reason for this shift.

The Reston company said in a letter to schools and unive~-sities that it would immediately
stop offering lcans that consolidate debt accumulated by undergraduate and graduate
students.

This has traditionally represented a maj or part of Sallie Mae’s business. The firm said it
would instead concentrate solely on lendh~g to cma’ent students.

Stinting next month, Satlie Mae will charge fees -- ranging fi’o~n $35 for fi’eshmen to a
few hunch’ed dollm~ for graduate students -- to apply for federal loans. These fees had
 Page 1394

largely been covered by lenders in the past, but most firms are now ~kopping Otis benefit.

Citing "severe credit market deterioration" and a decision by Congress last year to cut
subsidies to lendel,s, Sallie Mae President C.E. Andrews and Executive Vice Presideut
Barry S. Feim~tein said that one-third of the top 100 student lenders have left the
business. He warned that this means "loan denland will significantly exceed lender
supply for the upcoming academic year."

The trend is woI~34ng some lawbreakers mid top federal education officials who are
preparing enlergency progrmns to enable the government to make up the shortfall in
student lomts for the coming school year.

So~ne education advocates remain skeptical of Sallie Mae and other lenders, accusing
them of using the disruption in the credit markets to push for a resto~ion of the subsidies
that were cut last year.

"Clearly the loan industry has a long history of stretching the truth and the law to
maximize theh om~ profits," said Luke S~valIhout, higher-education advocate for the
U.S. Public Interest Research Group. "Of com~e they are being oppoi/lmisfic about tiffs."

But Mark Kaut~owitz, publisher of FinAid, a Web site that provides financial advice for
students, said the exodus from the industry is an alanning trend and may lead to higher
borrowing costs for students.

Sallie Mae diopping out of the student-loan consolidation business is "fairly significant,"
Kantrowitz said "It shows the student-loan system is under extreme stress ~vhen you
have the largest studeut lender stopping the largest federal loan progrmn."

Sallie Mae said in the letter that lenders who make federally backed loans would only be
able to meet student demand once their traditional som’ces ofinoney in the credit markets
begin fimctioning normally ~ain.

In addition to federally backed loans, private loans have also offered students a inajor
somce of Nmndng for college. Students will now face higher rates for pa-ivate lomts,
wtfich they often need to cover ttfifion costs because there is a cap on the mnount they can
borro~v in federally guaranteed loans. A small percentage of studeuts xvho have bad credit
or attend for-profit colleges ~vith low graduation rates ~nay be denledloans altogether,
analysts say.

For lenders malting federally backed loans, the $50.4 billion consolidation business has
deteriorated the most. In a consolidation, students combine their various federal loans
into a single package and lock in a single rate after they graduate.

Lenders making up two-thirds of this market have exited in the past few months,
according to FinAid. Govermnent officials have said that they will be able to fill the gap
 Page 1395

by offeling consolidation loans themselves.

Last year, Congress cut the subsidies it paid to lenders offering fedei~dly guaranteed loans
mid used that money to lower rates from 6.8 percent to 6.0 percent for financially needy
students. This group bolTowed $27.5 billion last year. The 1Nes on all other types of
federally backed non-consolidation loans, which totaled $36.8 billion, were left the same
and range fioln 6.8 percent to 8.5 percent.

United Press International

Parents sh’uggle to finance kids’ college

PuNished: Aplil 12, 2008 at 11:04 AM

NEW YORK, Aplil 12 (UPI) -- U.S. parents ‘‘vho pay for their childa’en’s college
educations are facing new challenges this year as strained lendel, s increase selectivity,
experts say.

Legislatols are attempting to avoid a major crisis by secming "lendels of the last resol~"
to fill in for companies that have checked out ofgovernnlent lending programs, The New
York Times repol~ed.

"I wottld say there is widespread belief that we ,,-dR have a real problem, that the lender
of last resort o1 some other solution will have to be used this yem’," U.S. Education
Secretary Mmgaret Spellings said.

Federal loan programs aren’t the only tronbled resource, as parent’s savings accounts and
inortgages are also increasingly strained this year, the Times reported.
In an effort to make sme student loans will be available, Spellings met Friday with state
agency and nonprofit organizations that guarantee such lending. The meetfllg reportedly
focused on figming out how the guarantols would step in and provide loans in an
emergency sitlmtion.

Washington Post

N.Va. College Applicants Face Extra Hurdle

 Pagel]396

Abundance of Achievers Stiffens Competition

By Jay NLathews, k~Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, April 12, 2008; A01

The news hit Robinson Secondary School m Falrl~ax Cotmt~ rigllt after spi~g vacation.
"Joe Robinson got rejected by JMUg. ! How can that be?"

Jmnes Madison U~fiversity in Harrisonbur~ is one of the best schools in Vir~

students, teachers and cotmselors agree. Most students would hmre trouble getting in. But
this was Joe Robinson who got the thin envelope, the stone Joe Robinson who had an
SAT score of 2270, who was one of oulytwo National Merit ser~fifinalists in his class,
who heads the choral group, who writes fimtasy novels in iris spare time, who had some
of the most glowing teacher recommendations his cotmselor had ever seen.

"Everyone at Robinson who knows Joe" is "in disbelief," counselor Mitch Aydlette said
in a written appeal of JMU’s decision. The tmiversity had been his best hope, for the 17-
year-old was rej ected by the more selective schools on his list: the Universit~a,
Damnouth College, Boston College, the University of Notre Dame and the Univm,sity of
Oxford.

This is a tougl~ year for applicants to top colleges. Demographers say the number of high
school gl~aduates has reached a peak. Admission standards are higher, and well-regarded
public universities such as JMU, charging much less than private colleges of si~nilar
quality, are particularly raSzed.

But Joe Robinson’s failure to get into au~versity his family and advisers thought a cinch
for so~neone with his record suggests to several expelts that college applicants from
Nolthem VirNnia are facing unusually stiff coinpefifion -- increasingly from one another.
The region, with an extraordinary concontration of high-performing schools and students,
might have to adjust long-held assumptions about the power of scores and grades in
college adinissions.

JMU spokesman Don Egle said file university’s admission process is "very co~npetitive,"
with 20,000 applications this year for a class of 3,960. The utfiversity, he said, considers
test scores, awards, recomnlendations, activities, grades and essays.

The one apparont flaw on Robinson’s application was his 3.4 glade point average, when
the JMU average is about 3.6. Fairfax doesn’t use class ranldngs. He managed a 3.0 in
ninth and 10th grade, when he was preoccupied with troubles a fiiend faced, two of his
great-grandparents died and mononucleosis put him in bed for four weeks. Many
selective schools tell applicants that if they finish strong in higll school, inediocre early
report cards won’t mean so much. In the past two yeats, his GPA has been 4.1, and rising.
With ,an SAT score anlong the top 10 percent for JMU students andliterary skills that
 Page 1397

leave school faculty a~vesU-uck, Robinson’s g~ades, Aydlette said he thought, would not
be a problem.

"Among lny 18 students ~vho applied to JMU (7 admitted), I rate Joe as tile finest overall
scholar," Aydlette wrote inhis appeal. Robinson Secondary, with about 4,000 students
from grades 7 to 12, is the state’s largest public school.

But Shirley Bloomquist, a fol~ner guidance director at the Thoinas Jefferson High School
for Science and Techilology in Fairfax who is now a college-adnlissions consultant, said
many Northern Virginia families overlook that large numbers of students in the region
have high test scores and good grades. Many of them, she said, are in competition with
each other. Tile top state undergraduate institutions, such as U-Va., the College of
Williain &amp; MaiN, ~a Tech and JMU, also "cmmot take all of their students
from Noi¢ahem Virginia," Bloomquist said. "They have to leave room" for students from
other parts of the state.

On the role of geography in admissions, JMU’s Egle said, "We are interested in the best
high school students from all of the regions across file state." Greg Roberts, associate
dean of admission at U-Va., said through a spokemnan: "Our prinmry goal is to enroll an
academically strong and diverse class of first-year and transfer students each year. As a
state institution, we are interested in enrolling students from all areas of the
conmlonwealttL"

Robinson’s SAT score of 2270, out of a possible 2400, looked ten~fic compared with the
JMU average of about 1710. But experts said JMU’s admissions officers expect high
scores from Fairfmx and will probably take just as close a look at a hardworldng student
with a lower SAT score from a place such as Galmx, to the southwest, or Petersbmg,
south of Richinond.

The competition for spaces in state universities is also intensifying. "I believe the
downtmrl in file economy this year has ~nade public schools hotter than ever," said New
York-based educational consnltant Willimn Short. David Hawkins, director of public
policy and research for the Alexandria-based National Association for College Adinission
Counseling, said JMU is an exainple of what many top students have long considered a
good "safety" school. But he said, "We c,’m see that it is not, in fact, a sare thing for these
students anymore."

Bloomquist said she has explmged the telan "safety school" from her vocabulary and
speaks instead of "likely schools." In tile past few years, she said, "I have become very
conservative." Even for students with records as good as Robinson’~ she said, she might
suggest adding to their lists state uuiversifies such as Christopher Newpol~ in Newport
News or Geolg~ Mason in Fairfax, just nollh of Robinson Secondary. That would force
students to apply to more colleges, but several experts said expanding the pool of likely
admissions prospects seems better than what happened to Joe Robinson.
 Page 1398

In the meantime, some VilNnia lawmakers have called for tighter limits on the nmnber of
out-of-state students. But the higher out-of-state tuition, $8,693 tiffs year at JMU
compared with $3,333 for in-state students, helps pay faculty salaries as the state
govermnent glN~ples with lean budgets an~id a difficult economy. The governing boards
of each state university in Vh’ginia decide how many out-of-state students will be
adi~titted. At JMU, tlie ratio is 70 percent in-state arid 30 percent out-of-state.

Students in Robinson’s sittmtion are not without options. Often, they can seek admission
in the late sp~ing to colleges that still have openings. If iris appeal to JMU is denied,
Robinson said, he ~night spend a year at a community college and then try again, focusing
next time on Notre Dame. His school’s lx~ncipal, Dan Meier, a fo~Tner counseloi; said he
has talked to Robinson about his rejections arid wonders why more room for Vh’ginia
students can~ be found.

"I have been fl~strated by this for many years," Meier said. "We have such wonderfal
state colleges, but it is so difficult for ore students to get into them."

The New York Times

April 12, 2008

Yale Moves A~vay trrom Plans for Link With Abu Dhabi

By TAMAR LEWIN
After more than a year of talks, Yale University has backed away from its plan for an arts
institute in Abu Dhabi, involving Yale’s at, ~nusic, architectme and oharea schools.

The stumbling block, ulthnately, was Abu Dhabi’s insistence that Yale offer degree
programs at the institute, and Yale’s refusal to grant its degrees in Abu Dhabi.

Yale’s at~ institate was to be pm-t of Abu Dtkabi’ s developmeut of Saadiyat Island as a
cultm-al center, includhlg outposts of the Louvre, the Guggelfl~ei~n and other ,nusemns.

"From the beginning, we ~vere clear that degree programs were not what we were talldng
about," said Linda K. Lofimer, secretat3~ and vice president of Yale. "We were explo~ing
exciting plans for programs that would be value-added for cultmN development. But in
 Page 1399

the end, they wanted degrees. And at this point in time, we just don’t think we could
moant a faculty of the same quality we have here, or attract mtdeuts of the stone caliber."

The collapse of the talks was first reportedin The Yale Daily News on Friday.

Almost every major American resem’ch university has recently become intent on
globalizing, with many stinting branches in the Persian Gulf, while others prague research
partnerships andj oint-degree progrmns around the globe.

But the ~ universities -- with the exception of Cornell’s medical school in

Qatar -- have been notably unwilling to offer theh" home degrees ttnough ovelseas
prograrns. Yale, for example, has dozens of foreign progrmns in Ctfina and else~vhere, but
none offer Yale degrees.

"It is understan&able that some of our elite and most selective universities are not eager to
increase significantly the number of degrees they award annually, here or abroad," said
Dr. Edward Guiliano, president of the NewYork Institute of Teclmology, which offers its
degrees in China, Canada, Jordan, B abaNn and Abu Dhabi. "Selectivity is part of their
value equation as well as the pride of theh alumni. Plus, of comse, it is standard ctmency
with rating and ranking storeys."

The Abu Dhabi project wotild have been Yale’s fil~t ~najor ventare in the Middle East.
Abu Dhabi, the oil-rich capital of the United Arab En~ates, has recently invested heavily
in importing educational and ctfltttral institutions from the West. In 2006, the Sorbonne
opened a liberal-mls campus in Abu Dlmbi. New York University is planning a fitll-
fledged liberal arts cmnpus on Saadiyat Island. And Abu Dhabi paid $520 million for the
~ight to use the L ouw’e name, pint of a deal worth nearly $1.3 billion to create a branch of
the Louvre.
 Page 1400

Last year, Yale’s president, Richard Levin, told the Yale alumni magazine ttmt he hoped
to complete the university’s Abu Dhabi agreement in the sututner of 2007. Each of Yale’s
arts graduate schools was pla~ming activities -- 1naster classes, design workshops and
elementary school proglmns -- for the Aim Dhabi institute, all of Wl-dch were to be paid
for by the emil~e’s government.

With its Abu Dtuabi plans proceeding, New York Unive~,ity earlier this month ended its
talks to absorb rite American Univel, ity of Paris.

"As we got closer to the merger, the trade-offs became more apparent," said John
Beckman, a Ngokesman for N.Y.U. "What we were hearing from the A.U.P. people,
consistently, was that they were wo~xied about ,naintaining the distinctiveness of their
identity, and what we were heming from out" students consistently ,,was that they felt the
academic experience between the two institutions was incompatible."

The New York Times

April 13, 2008

Catholic Schools Face Changing Fortunes

By FERNANDA SANTOS

BREWSTER, N.Y.

THE gmrmnar school at St. Lawrence O’Toole Ro~nan Catholic pmish here opened in
1926, in a two-story buildfl~g at the crest of a gentle slope near the train station. For
decades, nuns lived in the rooms npstaias and taught their students in classroo,ns on the
first floor.
 Page 1401

In 1968, when Brian Ledley entered first grade, most classes were still taught by rams
and about 400 students attended the pre-K-through-eighth-grade school But by the time
his daughter Deirdra entered fi~st grade in 2005, the nlms had long been replaced by lay
teachers and enrollment stood at 220, withno sign that it would climb back up anythne
soon, said Mr. Ledley, a local caterer and a father of 10. Five of his children attended the
school, and four are ctmently enrolled.

Now, like many Catholic schools around the region in recent years, St. Lawrence
O’ Toole is facing the prospect of closing its doors.

With 130 students this school yea and only 88 students colmnitted to retmaling in
September, the school would have to raise $850,000 to payits teachers and another
$200,000 for a new boiler if it were to open this fall, according to the palish.

Gazing at his yellowing eighth-grade graduation picture in an old fmnily alblmi, seven of
Iris 10 cttildrenhuddled with him around akitchen table, Mr. Ledley, 45, said, dejectedly,
"We’re going to have to fight a real hard fight if we want our school to smwive."

Under a plan announced last month by the Archdiocese of New York, St. Lawrence
O’ Toole and five other Catholic schools -- two each in Westchester and Rockland
Counties and one in the Bronx -- would dose at the end of the school year. This will
bring the total r0a.mber of schools closed to 15 since the archdiocese rolled out a
reorganization plan in 2007 that also called for closing 21 parishes.

On Long Island, the Diocese of Roclccille Centre closed four schools in 2004 and 2005,
including one in Levittown and another in Cedarhurst.

After significant declines, em’olhnent now see~ns to be holding on the Island, according
to Sean P. Dolan, a spokesman for the diocese.
 Page 1402

Mr. Dolan said that elementary school enrollment had declined by about 8,000 stndents
or 27 percent from 1995 to 2005. But he said the rate of decline had slowed in the last
two years since the diocese put in place anintel~cention team made up of lay and religious
educators who go into schools facing difficulties and recommend solutions.

"We have become a lot more atttmed as to the health of onr schools, so we lmow when
they’re reaching a challeuging time and we’re able to go in and make adjustments before

it is too late," Mr. Dolan said.

Across the cou.nt1% more than 1,260 Catholic schools, ~nostly elementatN schools, have
closed since 2000, according to the Natiork~l Catholic Education Association, based in
Washhlgton. The reason cited in most cases is declkting enrolhnent, making it difficult
for schools that rely heavily on tuition to meet expenses.

The forces betfind declining e~trollment am varied, and inclnde demoga’aphic shifts over
the last few decades, as well as rising tuition, which adininistrators attribute largely to an
increase in costs because of the t~N~sition from an all-religious faculty to a p~imatily lay
faculty. Catholic schools also face competition from solid pnblic school systems in some
contmtmities where parents are paying high propelty taxes.

Ellen Ayoub, superintendent of schools for the Diocese of Mettu:her~ in New Jersey,
which has closed six schools in the last six yem~, e~cplained it this way: "Seventy percent
of ore budget co~nes from tuition and the rest comes from fired-raising and from the
parish, so when you don’t Nave enough students, yon don’t have that 70 percent coming
in, which means you’ll need more money from the parishes, but the parishes are aheady
straggling."

When Pope Benedict XVI at-rives in the United States on Tuesday, he ~vill find a Catholic
 Page 1403

Church that with 65 million members in the country is bigger than it has ever been. But
that chttrch is in the midst of a profound transition as it tries to catch up with three
decades of changes that pushed its base from the cities to the far suburbs and fi’om the
Northeast to the West and South.

While the demographic shifts depleted some congregations, leaving struggling pmishes
and some schools that could no longer sustain themselves, the population g4owth in some
areas has led to new chm’ches and expanded parishes.

As an example, Ms. Ayoub said that a consultant hired by the Metuchen Diocese said that
the population growth in Hlmterdon Cotmty, N.J., wottld support a new elementary
school.

Underscoring the financial crisis faced by some Catholic schools, one anion representing
teachers in the New York Pa’chdiocese --which covers Manhattan, Staten Island,
Westchester, Rockland, Putnam and five other col, mties -- staged a two-day strike early
this month, while another has threatened to go on strike during the pope’s visit and picket
papal events. At the heart of the protests m-e the higl~er health-insurance l~emimns
proposed by tha archdiocese and the tt~tions’ desire for bigger pay raises.

There are 2.27 million students em’olled in Catholic schools nationwide this year-- 56
percent less than hi 1960, when emollinent peaked at 5.25 million, and 14 percent less
than in 2000, when it was 2.65 inillion, statistics by the Catholic education association
show. And for every new school that opened last year, 43 of them in all, 4 schools closed,
the figures sho~v.

Thare are now 7,500 Catholic schools in the cotmtry; in 1960, there were 13,000.

"There’s still great interest in Catholic education, but there are also problems -- with
 Page 1404

emollment, with finances and with the fact Hispanics, the fastest-growing segment of the
Catholic population and of the American population as awhole, are still lmdel:represented
in our schools," said the Rev. Ronald J. Nuzzi, director of the Alliance for Catholic
Education, a graduate program for Catholic school teachers and administrators at the

Uulversit¥ of Notre Dame.

"It took us some time to trade,stand the depth of the great social changes of the ’60s and
the ’70s, and it has taken us some time to adapt to those changes, to figure out where we
need to grow ,and where we need to sacrifice," Father Nuzzi said.

Responding to the recent shifts in demoglaphics, the Catholic Church has bttilt new
churches in places that have experienced significant population growth, but not every
church has been accompanied by a new school.

"There ~vas a time in history when the bishops told the pastors that when they built a new
church, they should bttild a new school, but that had ended by the time we were
experiencing these changes," said Karen Ristan, president of the National Catholic
Education Association. "What happened was tt~at the fmnilies moved, but the schools did
not."

What has resulted, Dr. Ristan explained, is a lopsided distribution ofresottrces, with
empty schools abotmdi~g in so~ne palts of the colmtry and schools bulsting at the seams
in others patts. For example, in the West -- an area that includes Texas and Al:izona,
where the Catholic population more than doubled between 1965 and 2005, and Nevada,
where it sextupled dtlting the same period -- about half of the more than 1,400 Catholic
schools have waiting lists, she said.

"School closings draw a lot ofne~vs covel~age, but they’re ollly part of the stoi%" Dr.
 Page 1405

Ristau added. "The sad part of the story."

Catholic schools face many challenges aside from adapting to population shifts. In
affluent commurtities, where file cost of education is not an issue, it may be elite private
schools. In middle-class suburbs, it may be other Catholic schools or a solid public school
system. And ininner-cities, it is most likely the price of tuition, or, in some cases, other
alternatives, like chalter schools.

The six Catholic elementary schools in Bfidgepolt, CoIm., had struggled for Inore than a
decade to meet em’ollment goals. Tuition kept them out of reach for at least the one in
five local l~alnilies who lived below the povelty line, and theh" rising opel~ing costs
strained the flimnces ofpatishes already straggling to make ends meet.

In 2004, Bishop William E. Loii, who had replaced Cardinal Edward M. Egan as head Of
the Diocese of Bridgeport, issued a call to action. He enlisted the help of retired ctfief
executives and fired-raising specialists, who then recruited patrons for the schools or
school projects, like maintenance and liblary renovation. He met with pastol~ of valious
Afi~can-Amefican chm’ches and told them that their children were welcome in file
Catholic schools. And he adveltised to Latino families on Spanish-l~mguage radio.

Then, the schools were brought under one administsative mnbrella known as the
Catheda-al Cluster, which principals said has made it easier for them to trade ideas and
share resources like books, laptops, teachers ,and even tile math and literacy consultants
who work a few horns a week in each of the schools, their salaries paid through pri,cate
donors and grants.

"We study together; we look at student work together; we do planning together; we meet
every month to find out where we need help," said Maria O’Neill, plincipal of St.
 Page 1406

Andrew School, on the north side of the dty. "If there’s an issue going on ~1 one of om
buildings, we feel very comfoltable calling one another."

Enrolhnent at the six Bridgeport elementary schools has increased by 10 percent since
2004 --to 1,399 this school year from 1,270; 11 percent of the students are non-
Catholics, about 10 percent are black and about 10 percent are Hispafic, said Margaret A.
Drones, supefintandent of schools. Natioinvide, 12 percent of Catholic elementary school
students are non-Catholics, 13 percent of them are Hispmfic and 7 percent are black,
according to the Catholic education association figmes.

Since 2005, the BfidgepoIt Diocese -- which stretches from Danbm3~ and Brookfield on
the no~h to Greenwich in the south -- has controlled all of its 39 schools. Under this
arrange~nent, paishes contribute 8 percei~ of their offertory collections to a general fund
that is then divided antong the schools; the diocese gives each school an additional
$12,000, Dr. D,’~nes said.

"The idea was to avoid placing too much of the bmden on one person o1" one institution,"
she said. "What we did in essence was reinvent om~elves so as to reflect the original
mission of Catholic schools, which is to provide education for everyone, and not just
those who can afford it."

On a diizzly altemoon here in Brewster, Mr. Ledley, the local caterer, wondered where
exactly things stmled to go wrong for St. Lawrence O’Toole and whether parents might
have taken too long to try to develop a rescue plan.

"We kne~v the school wasn’t doing ~vell, that the enrollinent was dedi~fing, but ~ve
thought that St. Lawrance was safe because it’s the biggest and the oldest of the other
Catholic schools around," Mr. Ledley said.
 Page 1407

Mr. L edley and other parems began to join forces two yeal~ ago, conducting Sunday open
houses and organizing movie itights to ~voo new families. One mothel; Linda Higham,
mailed handmade Ctnist~nas cards to the parents of each of the babies baptized at the
parish church in 2006 and again last year, reminding them to consider the school once
their chiRh’en are old enough. In recent months, the parents vaote to residents here and
alumni evel3avhere, asking for donations. To this point they have iaised about $100,000,
far from enough to save the school.

MRS. HIGHAM conceded that she has visited another Catholic school just in case she
needs to euroll her 11-year-old daughter, Laurel, a fifth grader at St. Lawrence O’ Toole,
elsewhere in the fall. The girl is Cl~ashed; she is an only child and her school friends, she
said, are for the most pint the only fiiends she has ever had.

"I don’t want to have to leave them, but it seems like everybody is going to go to a
different place," Laurel said as she left school, hauling a Mack and Izinl¢ backpack
weighed down with books.

Mr. Ledley has what may be a tougher task -- to find a new school for his children, when
St. Lawrence O’Toole is the only school he has ever lmown. His gl’andfather, Thomas
Fanell, was a member of one of its first gt~aduating classes. His father, Daniel Ledley,
graduated in 1952, and Mr. Ledley him_sell’did so in 1976.

His five older ctfilchen- BIian, 24; Brendan, 22; Patrick, 19; A~me, 18; and William, 16
-- ~vent to St. Lawrence O’Toole, and four yotmger ones are there now: Germ’d, 14, in
eighth grade; Andrew, 12, in seventh; Deirda~, 10, a fourth grade1; and Sean, 6, in
ldndei~gmten. (The yom~gest, Mary, is 3.)

"We could have really nice cars, we could be traveling to nice places on vacation, we
 Page 1408

could be saving up for a good retirement," Mr. Ledley said. "But Catholic education is
somett~lg we believe in. It’s a Iniority to us."

Seated next to him on the couch, his wife of 25 years, Patdcia, dabbed her eyes.

"Of cottrse the religion is a big part of it," she said, "but there’s also a really ~vman feeling
of family."

The New York Tiines

April 13, 2008

A Bittersweet Spring for Catholic Schools in Newark

By MARY JO PATTERSON

NEWARK

ALICE TERRELL opens the door to Miss Hargrove’s fitst grade at Blessed Sacrament
School, where nine children sit attentively at desks an-anged like pieces on a
checkerboard.

The room is hnge and they are tiny, but the 92-year-old school was built when Catholic
education was floltrishing and a typical classroom held 40 students. These days, with a
total em’olhnent of 95 in Grades K-8, Blessed Sacrament is a ghost of its fo~iner sel£

"Good morning" says Miss Tenell, the academic director, who, as aMethodist, cannot
hold the title of principal.

"Good morning Miss Tenell, and God bless you," nine high-pitched voices reply in
unison.
 Page 1409

Such are the daffy rituals at this school, which are about to end. With em-ollment far
below 225, cor~sidered a healthy mlmber for a school in the Archdiocese of Newark,
Blessed Sacrament will close for good in Jlme. A chm-ter school plans to tal~e over the
building.

As the ~veather warms and Catholic schools in New Jei~ey prepare for Pope Benedict
XVI’s inlpending visits to Washington and New York, it is a bittersweet spring for
Blessed Sacra~nt’s shaken families and staff. Many have no idea where they will go.

The closing has also left othelS in Catholic education with a lump in their throats.

"It’s a loss for all of us -- a door for evangelizing has closed," saidEveflyn Hay,
principal of Queen of Angels School, about a mile away.

With about 200 studems, Queen of Angels is not in danger; its em’olhnent may even grow
if it absorbs some of Blessed Sacramant’s stranded students. But over the last decade the
archdiocese, covering Bergen, Hudson, Essex and Union Counties, tins closed one-fomth
of its schools. After Blessed Sacrament closes, the archdiocese will have seven
elementaI~ schools.

Mrs. Hay, an tk~Ser at Queen of Palgels Chttrch, folmded in 1930 as the first African-
American Catholic congregation in Newmk, is a realist.

"I’11 be t~tlfful-- the momeut emollment starts dipping, we start won34ng," she said

early this month. "Right now we have families losing their jobs left and iJght. We ask

each other: ’ Who’s next?’ "

Blessed Saclnoanent, in the city’s South Ward, and Queen of Angels, in file Ceutlal Ward,
are close cousins in many ways. BUt only one will sttrvive past the end of this school
 Page 1410

year.

Both schools have prond tfistofies and fiercely loyal adherents. Even thongh they are not
likely to be Catholic, many Afiican-Amefican parents who live or ~vork in Newark
consider the b, vo schools preferable to public schools. Ask why, and the parents are likely
to say the Catholic schools are safer and academically superior. They also praise teachers
as "like famils~’ and unusually dedicated.

"The public schools are too dangerous," said Charles Treadwell, a t~anspo~tafion
company owner in Newmk who graduated from Queen of Angels in 1984 and sent all
four of his childi’en there. "A teacher cam~ot effectively teach when she has one or two
children who constantly disrupt the class. At Queen of Angels, that is not going to
happen. It’s nmthe old-school way, caring but stem. If you go there you’re going to stay
focused, you will lemaL and you will succeed."

Fewer than 10 percent of students at Blessed Sacrmnent and Queen of Angels are
Catholic, ,and fewer still attend their school’s parish church. Still, religion pe~neates both
places, through instruction in faith and twice-daily praye~,s.

Both schools straggle without subsidies from the diocese. They receive certain selarices
and supplies from the State Department of Education, but they are financed largely
ttnough tuition and other fees.

Both employ lay staff and COlfld use more. Blessed Sacrament has no librarian or ~nusic
teacher, and tile gynl teacher is part time; at Queen of Angels, Mrs. Hay herself grabs a
crossing guard’s vest, whistle and stop sign to lead students to the playground, a barren
patch of sloping blacktop across a street. A vohmteer travels daily fl~m Manhattan to
help at hmch.
 Page 1411

As for the buildings, they are hopelessly obsolete, with a history of few renovations.
Dusty sports trophies front the 1940s crowd the tops of towering bookc~es at Blessed
Sacamnent. Queen of Angels, built in 1887, houses pre-K through eighth grades in a
confusing wanen of rooms attached to the cintrch.

MISS TERRELL, a 30-year-old Ne,,~’mk native, says high fees and the ltu’e of free charter
schools killed off Blessed Sacrament.

When she alrived in 2005, "we were aheady in a danger zone, though I clidJt’t know it,"
she said.

The school had 159 students then. Tuition ~ws $2,700 per cttild, and families had to raise
an additional $300 through candy sales.

Miss Terrell, who had been teaching at a public school, cm-ne to Blessed Sacrament with
a ~naster’s degree attd plincipal’s certification, and dremns of an ideal educational setting.
She landed the dhector’s position.

"The particular public school where I taught previously, in East Orange, was very rough,"
she said. "I wanted a focus on education, not discipline. Coming here was a joy."

But Blessed Sact’ament had problems of its own- financial ones.

In 2006 the p,°krish raised the tttifion to $2,900 and the fimd-raisiug mandate to $400.
Em’ollment nose-dived, Miss Tenell said. Tiffs year the chtuch again raised tuition, to
more than $3,000. The land-raising obligation swelled to $900, causing more parents to
withdraw their children.

Meanwtfile, the cm~’ent tuition at Queen of Angels is $2,900, and the flmd-raisi~g
 Page 1412

reqt~irement is $300.

Miss Tenell said she did not understand that Blessed Sacrament ~vas ha trouble tmtil last
November, when a group of strangers showed up for a tom. The school yea had opened
on an anxious note when fewer pupils than expected showed up, but parish leaders told
parents at a meeting that the school would not close. Miss Terrell felt reassured too, m~il
the st~migers appeared. The custodian called her after they left.

"Are you sitting down?" she recalled him asking. "That was a chatter school. They ~vaut
to move ha." Later an appraiser showed up, but official notification of the closing did not
come mttil Februmy. Families grew emotional. Miss Terrell said she ~vas grief-stricken.

The btu’eancratic machine~3r to close Blessed Saclmnent was actually activated at the end
of December, when the church’s pastol; the Rev. Ansehn I. Nwaolgu, wrote the
archdiocese asking for permission to close the school, said James Goociness, the
spokesinan for the archdiocese. The letter cited an operating deficit tiffs yea of $270,000
and noted there were only 97 students. The archdiocese granted Father N~waorgu’s
request on Jan. 21.

By last week, those at the school seemed to have accepted its fate, but the the calm
atmosphere belied the anxiety some of the ctnld~en and the adnlts were feeling.

"Everything’s up ha the ah," said Carissa Chase of Newark, a wonied mother of two. Her
eighth grader has been accepted at Mmist High School ha Bayo~me, a Catholic school,
Ms. Chase said, but she has no idea about her fomth grader. The chatter school movhag
into the building told her it had no room for him, she said.

Michelle Maycock-Smitk who has a son ha second grade at Blessed Sacrmnent, said she
and her husbmtd were also ha lfinbo.
 Page 1413

"It’s honible, what’s happening," she said. "The teachers here have been vein cming, and
Cluistopher loves school. This was aposifive place to be. We have been to a couple of
chatter schools, but really, we’re most interested in Catholic schools."

Pat~icia Neblett of Orange, who works in the Blessed Sacratnent lunchroom, has the same
headache, multiplied by five. In addition to relocating her fore youngest to new schools,
she has to find anew job.

Miss Terrell is also sending out applications. In September she bought a house in
Hillside. Now, she said, she is ~vorded about paying the ~no~tgage.

"We’re N1 looldng for a position, but none of us has been hired. It’s nm~re-racldng, but I
am more wonied about my ldds," she said. "Some may end up in public schools. If they
do, they’ll be in for culture shock."
 Page 1414

Nonresponsiv
From: Yudof, Samara
Sent: April 12, 2008 6:22 PM
To: Cariello, Dennis; Aud, Susan; Davis, Jim; Tracy Young; Skandera, Hanna;Dunn, David;
Terrell, Julie; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ridgway, Marcie; Pitts, Elizabeth; Earling, Eric; Tucker, Sara
Martinez; MacGuidwin, Katie; Wurman, Ze’ev; Smith, Valarie (SRR); McGrath, John; Kuzmich,
Holly; Monroe, Stephanie; Scheessele, Marc; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Flowers, Sarah; Young,
Tracy; Mesecar, Doug; Truong, Anh-Chau; Lepore, Kristen; Eitel, Robert S.; Zoellick, Todd;
Jones, Diane; Colvin, Kelly; Toomey, Liam; Tada, Wendy; Gartland, Lavin; Cohn, Kristine;
Hatada, Tori; Talbert, Kent; Colby, Chad; Warder, Larry; Robb, Carly; Sentance, Michael;
Chleuber, Patdcia; Briggs, Kerri; Evans, Wendy; Private- Spellings, Margaret; Casarona,
Emily; Morffi, Jessica; Hancock, Anne; Foxley, Donna; Evers, Bill; Dmytrenko, Orysia;
Maddox, Lauren; Beaton, Meredith; Anderson, Christy; Yudof, Samara; Oldham, Cheryl;
Gribble, Emily
Subject: 04.12.08 In the News

Attachments: 0412081ntheNews.doc

041208lntheN ews.
doc (138 KB)
04.12.08 In the News

i) The New York Times: Fewer Options Open to Pay for Costs of College (Jonathan Glarer)

2) Washington Post: Sallie Mae To Charge For Loans To Students (David Cho)
3) United Press International: Parents struggle to finance kids’ college

4) Washington Post: N. Va. College Applicants Face Extra Hurdle; Abundance of Achievers
Stiffens Competition (Jay Hathews)

5) The New York Times: Yale Moves Away From Plans for Link With Abu Dhabi (Tamar Lewin)

6) The New York Times: Catholic Schools Face Changing Forttu]es (Fernanda Santos)

7) The New York Times: A Bittersweet Spring for Catholic Schools in Newark (H~ry Jo
Patterson)

The New York Times

April 12, 2008

Fewer Options Open to Pay for Costs of College

By JONATHAN D. GLATER
Parents will have to navigate unfamiliar and difficult terrain when it comes time to pay
for college this year, with student loan companies in turmoil and banks tightening their
standards and raising rates on other types of borrowing.

Lawmakers and the administration are trying to head off any crisis by making sure that
"lenders of last resort" stand ready to take the place of companies that have left the
federal loan program. Pi]d a growing n~maber of colleges have applied to participate in the
federal direct loan program, in which students borrow from the government.

But families often use a combination of resources to pay for college, drawing on savings,
federal loans, bank loans and home loans to plug the gap between college costs and
financial aid.
 Page 1415
Even if the government wards off problems in the credit markets and federal student loans
are easily accessible, other sources of financing will become less accessible as cons~ers
find themselves stretched thin and lenders get more choosy.

Turbulence in lending has complicated the efforts of people like Dawn R. Beaton of Hill
Valley, Calif., to pay for her daughters’ education. A single mother earning less than
$50,000 a year, she already h~s run into difficulty taking out a federal parent loan for
her oldest daughter, Nicole, to attend a nearby comm~t~ity college. Her original lender
pulled out of the market, and she is still waiting, months later, to hear from a
replacement lender on that $5,000 request. She anticipates having to borrow about $i0,000
to send her middle daughter to a private college in Ohio later this year.

"When I go to bed at night, I worry about it," said Ms. Beaton, who is a financial manager
for a vineyard.

"If you don’t have the money, there you are, in a serious, ulcer state. You feel
inadequate."

According to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, 70 percent of parents surveyed were
"very concerned’ about how they would pay for college; only 6 percent were not concerned.

To ensure continued availability of federal loans, the secretary of the federal Education
Department met on Friday with representatives of the state agencies and nonprofit
companies that guarantee federal loans on behalf of the government. The goal was to work
out how the guarantors would serve as lenders, if necessary. This emergenoy safety net has
never been pressed into widespread use.

Though there is no magor problem now, the lending industry is warning of a credit squeeze
without action. "I would say there is widespread belief," said Margaret Spellings, the
education secretary, "that we will have a real problem, that the lender of last resort or
some other solution will have to be used this year."

Last year, students and their parents borrowed nearly $60 billion in federally guaranteed
loans, a figure that has gro~n~ more than 6 percent annually over the last five years after
taking into accorunt inflation. In recent years, the growth rate has declined but may pick
up as the economy slows and as other borrowing options fade.

"I want to make sure we are going to do our part, and that students will be able to go to
college this fall," Ms. Spelling said.

La~emakers in Washington have proposed increasing the amou~]ts that students can borrow
through federal programs and authorizing the Education Department to purchase federal
loans, thereby providing banks with cash to make more loans. The House Eduoation Com~ittee
approved legislation this week that would allow dependent students to borrow a total of
$31,000 through federal programs to pay for their undergraduate education, up from $23,000
now.

Still, it is difficult to gauge whether a financing problem will emerge later this year
for students and, if so, how serious it might be. The disruption in the federal lending
program so far has mostly been from borrowers shifting to another lender. Ms. Beaton, for
example, expects her $5,000 loan request to eventually be-granted. "By the time I get the
money, school will probably be over," she said.
Fir~ncial aid ac~ninistrators say few students had been shut out. "I haven’t heard anything
about any sort of unusual trends so far, not to say that it isn’t going to intensify,"
said Daniel C. Walls, associate vice provost for enrollment management at Emory University
in Atlanta. "I suspect there’s going to be more negotiating around financial aid this year
than any other year that we’ ve experienced."

A@nitted students are ~ust now receiving financial aid awards from colleges, and the test
will come when tuition pa~nents for the fall term are due, aid administrators say.

"By ~d- to late June, certainly July, will be the months that we really begin to
understand the relative financial situations of families," said Jean HcDonald-Rash,
director of financial aid at Rutgers in New Jersey.
Students attending several expensive and wealthy colleges will engoy expanded financial
2
 Page 1416
aid, as those institutions move to replace need-based loans with grants. Harvard and Yale
recently announced expansions of aid to faa~lies making as much as $150,000, displaying a
degree of generosity that few institutions can match.

Some student advocates say lenders are exaggerating the obstacles they face in search of a
bai!out from Washington.

"Student lenders are trying to hype the current credit crunch to scare Congress into
providing them additional sr~sidies and to discredit last years’ hard won higher education
reform," said Luke Swarthout of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group in Washington,
referring to cuts lawmakers made last year to the subsidy payments to lenders of federal
loans.

Kevin Brims, executive director of America’s Student Loan Providers, dismissed such
criticism as baseless. "Lenders’ only goal is to get the administration to use its
existing authority to provide liquidity to the capital markets that fund federal student
loans," he said. "Lenders don’t need to overstate anything -- the facts spea]~ for
themselves."

There are clear signs of potential problems in the fall. It remains difficult for lenders
to sell securities backed by student loans, in turn making it harder to raise capital. One
guarantor of private loans, a nonprofit company called the Education Resources Institute,
filed for bankruptcy protection this week.
"Everything that’s happened in the capital markets with this credit crr~ch has caused the
fixed-income investor base to shrink, so there are fewer potential buyers of securities
backed by the loans," said Andrea L. Murad, senior director at Fitch Ratings in New York.

The House legislation seeks to address this situation by allowing the Education Department
to b<~ student loans itself. At least 25 loan companies -- including big lenders like the
College Loan Corporation; the Student Loan Xpress unit of CIT; and NorthStar Education
Finance -- have stopped making federal loans, according to the Education Department. Some
estinmtes put the n~nber at nearly twice tl~t.

Colleges generally say that more than 2,000 companies make student loans, and there are
plenty of lenders to stepinto the breach.

No doubt to sidestep any related problems, more than i00 colleges and universities have
applied to participate in the direct loan program since the end of February, according to
the department. Ms. Spellings, the department secretary, has said the direct loan program
could double the amount of new loans it makes to students, if necessary.

Some colmmereial education companies have already taken steps to ensure that their students
can find lenders, in some instances by preparing to make loans themselves.

Problems are more likely for those seeking private loans, which do not have any goverrmlent
backing. The terms of private loans, like other consumer loans, vary depending on the
credit histories of individual applicants and in some cases can top 20 percent.

In the last several months, rates on those loans have risen by nearly one percentage
point, according to research by Mark Kantrowitz, who publishes the financial aid Web site
FinAid. org. Lenders have also tightened their standards, making it costlier for those with
weak credit histories to obtain loans.

Private loans have gro~n sharply in popularity over the last i0 years, as families have
looked for ways to pay the difference between tuition, on the one hand, and their savings
and federal loan options, on the other. Last year, according to the College Board,
students took out more than $17 billion in private loans, up from ~ust $1.6 billion a
decade earlier.

"If the financial aid system had kept pace with inflation, there wouldn’t be any need for
private loans," said Paul Wrubel, co-founder of TuitionCoach. com and a consultant for
families trying to figure out how to pay for college.

Families also have closed the gap between college costs and federal loans by borrowing
against their homes -- and that is another option vanishing as house prices fall and
 Page 1417
lenders cl~m~p down. Millions of homeowners now owe more than their houses are worth,
leaving no equity to borrow against.

There is no data on how many parents may have used home equity loans to pay for higher
education, researchers and aid administrators said, but there is no doubt nmny did, to
take advantage of tax breaks and lower rates.

Tapping into home equity was always part of the college finance plan for Connie and Dave
Orient of Canonsburg, Pa. She is a paralegal at a law firm in Pittsburgh and he is in the
family construction business. Their older son, Christopher, is a sophomore at California
University of Pennsylvania, a public institution relatively inexpensive for in-state
residents. The younger son, Luke, a high school 9unior, wants to go to Virginia Tech,
which she said would cost three times as much.

"I believe that I am in an area that is not depressed or anything," Ms. Orient said. She
added that she hoped still to be able to borrow against the house she and her husband
built 25 years ago, but was t~sure how much equity she really ]]as in it and how much a
lender would be willing to extend.

"Nothing’s selling anywhere right now."

Alan Finder contributed reporting.

Washington Post
Sallie Mae To Charge For Loans To Students

By David Cho?Washington Post Staff Writer?

Saturday, April 12, 2008; DO1

Sallie Mae, the co~Itry’s largest student lender, anno~]ced yesterday that it will start
charging students who apply for federally backed loans and cut the type of loans
available, citing the turmoil in the credit nmrkets as a reason for this shift.

The Reston company said in a letter to schools and universities that it would immediately
stop offering loans that consolidate debt accumulated by undergraduate and graduate
students.

This has traditionally represented a major part of Sallie Mae’s business. The firm said it
would instead concentrate solely on lending to current students.

Starting next month, Sallie Mae will charge fees -- ranging from $35 for freshmen to a few
hundred dollars for gradrmte students -- to apply for federal loans. These fees had
largely been covered by lenders in the past, but most firms are now dropping this benefit.

Citing "severe credit market deterioration" and a decision by Congress last year to cut
subsidies to lenders, Sallie Mae President C.E. Andrews and Executive Vice President Barry
S. Feierstein said that one-third of the top i00 student lenders have left the business.
He warned that this means "loan demand will significantly exceed lender supply for the
upcoming academic year."
The trend is worrying some la~mkers and top federal education officials who are preparing
emergency programs to e~6Dle the government to make up the shortfall in student loans for
the coming school year.

Some education advocates remain skeptical of Sallie Mae and other lenders, accusing them
of using the disruption in the credit nmrkets to push for a restoration of the subsidies
that were cut last year.

"Clearly the loan industry has a long history of stretching the truth and the law to
maxindze their o}Tn profits," said Luke Swarthout, higher-education advocate for the U.S.
Public Interest Research Group. "Of course they are being opportunistic about this."
But Mmrk Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid, a Web site that provides financial advice for
students, said the exodus from the industry is an alarming trend and may lead to higher
 ", ,." ., Pa~e1418
borrowing costs for students.

Sallie Mae dropping out of the student-loan consolidation business is "fairly

significant," Kantrowitz said. "It shows the student-loan system is under extreme stress
when you have the largest stndent lender stopping the largest federal loan program."

Sallie Hae said in the letter that lenders who make federally backed loans would only be
able to meet student demand once their traditional sources of money in the credit markets
begin functioning normally again.

In addition to federally backed loans, private loans have also offered students a major
source of financing for college. Students will now face higher rates for private loans,
which they often need to cover tuition costs because there is a cap on the amount they can
borrow in federally guaranteed loans. A small percentage of students who have bad credit
or attend for-profit colleges with low graduation rates may be denied loans altogether,
analysts say.

For lenders ~king federally backed loans, the $50.4 billion consolidation business has
deteriorated the most. In a consolidation, students co~ine their various federal loans
into a single package and lock in a single rate after they graduate.

Lenders making up two-thirds of this market have exited in the past few months, according
to FinAid. Government officials have said that they will be able to fill the gap by
offering consolidation leans themselves.

Last year, Congress cut the subsidies it paid to lenders offering federally guaranteed
loans and used that money to lower rates from 6.8 percent to 6.0 percent for financially
needy students. This group borrowed $27.5 billion last year. The rates on all other types
of federally backed non-consolidation loans, which totaled $36.8 billion, were left the
same and range from 6.8 percent to 8.5 percent.

United Press International

Parents struggle to finance kids’ college

Published: April 12, 2008 at 11:04 AM

NEW YORK, April 12 (UPI) -- U.S. parents who pay for their children’s college educations
are facing new challenges this year as strained lenders increase selectivity, experts say.

Legislators are attempting to avoid a l~ajor crisis by securing "lenders of the last
resort" to fill in for companies that have checked out of government lending programs, The
New York Times reported.

"I would say there is widespread belief that we will have a real problem, that the lender
of last resort or some other solution will have to be used this year," U.S. Education
Secretary Margaret Spellings said.

Federal loan programs aren’t the only troubled resource, as parent’s savings accot~ts and
mortgages are also increasingly strained this year, the Times reported.

In an effort to ~ke sure student loans will be available, Spellings met Friday with state
agency and nonprofit organizations that guarantee such lending. The meeting reportedly
focused on figuring out how the guarantors would step in and provide loans in an emergency
situation.

Washington Post

N. Va. College Applicants Face Extra Hurdle

Abundance of Achievers Stiffens Competition

By Jay Mathews,?Washington Post Staff Writer?

 Page 1419

Saturday, April 12, 2008; A01

The news hit Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax County right after spring vacation. "Joe
Robinson got rejected by JMU?! Mow can that be?"

James Madison University in Harrisonburg is one of the best schools in Virginia, students,
teachers and counselors agree. Most students would have trouble getting in. But this was
Joe Robinson who got the thin envelope, the same Joe Robinson who had an SAT score of
2270, who was one of only two National Merit semifinalists in his class, who heads the
choral group, who writes fantasy novels in his spare time, who had some of the most
glowing teacher recommendations his counselor hmd ever seen.
"Everyone at Robinson who knows Joe" is "in disbelief," counselor Mitch Aydlette said in
written appeal of JMI]’s decision. The university had been his best hope, for the 17-year-
old m as rejected by the more selective schools on his list: the University of Virginia,
Dartmouth College, Boston College, the University of Notre Dame and the University of
Oxford.

This is a tough year for applicants to top colleges. Demographers say the nrnJoer of high
school graduates has reaehed a pea]{. Admission standards are higher, and well-regarded
public universities such as JMU, charging much less than private colleges of similar
quality, are particularly prized.

But Joe Robinson’s failure to get into a university his family and advisers thought a
cinch for someone with his record suggests to several experts that college applicants from
Northern Virginia are facing unusually stiff competition -- increasingly from one another.
The region, with an extraordinary concentration of high-performing schools and students,
might have to adjust long-held assmnptions about the power of scores and grades in college
a~nissions.
G94II spokesman Don Egle said the university’s ad~ission process is "very competitive," with
20,000 applications this year for a class of 3,960. The ~]iversity, he said, considers
test scores, awards, reco~u~endations, activities, grades and essays.

The one apparent flaw on Robinson’s application was his 3.4 grade point average, when the
O]~U average is about 3.6. Fairfax doesn’t use class rankings. He managed a 3.0 in ninth
and 1Oth grade, when he was preoccupied with troubles a friend faced, two of his great-
grandparents died and mononucleosis put him in bed for four weeks. Many selective schools
tell applicants that if they finish strong in high school, mediocre early report cards
won’t mean so mush. ~n the past two years, his GPA has been 4.1, and rising. With an SAT
score ~nong the top 10 percent for JMU students and literary skills that leave school
faculty awestruck, Robinson’s grades, Aydlette said he thought, would not be a problem.

"Among my 18 students who applied to JMU (7 admitted), I rate Joe as the finest overall
scholar," Aydlette wrote in his appeal. Robinson Secondary, with about 4,000 students from
grades 7 to 12, is the state’s largest public school.

But Shirley Bloomquist, a former guidanee director at the Thomas Jefferson High School for
Science and Technology in Fairfax who is now a oollege-a~nissions consultant, said many
Northern Virginia families overlook that large numbers of students in the region have high
test scores and good grades. Many of them, she said, are in competition with each other.
The top state undergraduate institutions, such as U-Va., the College of William &amp;
~ry, Virginia Tesh and JMU, also "cannot take all of their students from Northern
Virginia," Bloomquist said. "They have to leave room" for students from other parts of the
state.
On the role of geography in admissions, JHU’s Egle said, "We are interested in the best
high school students from all of the regions across the state." Greg Roberts, associate
dean of admission at U-Va., said through a spokesman: "Our primary goal is to enroll an
academically strong and diverse class of first-year and transfer students each year. As
state institution, we are interested in enrolling students from all areas of the
co~mmonweal th. "

Robinson’s SAT score of 2270, out of a possible 2400, looked terrific compared with the
JMU average of about 1710. But experts said JMU’s admissions officers expect high scores
from Fairfax and will probably take just as close a look at a hardworking student with a
lower SAT score from a place such as Galax, to the southwest, or Petersburg, south of
6
 Page 1420
Ri chmo nd.

The competition for spaces in state tu~iversities is also intensifying. "I believe the
do~¢nturn in the economy this year has made public schools hotter th~n ever, " said New
York-based educational consultant William Short. David Hawkins, director of publ’ic policy
and research for the Alexandria-based National Association for College Admission
Cotu%seling, said JMU is an exanqole of what many top students have long considered a good
"safety" school. But he said, "We can see that it is not, in fact, a sure thing for these
students anymore. "

Bloomquist said she has expunged the term "safety school" from her vocabulary and speaks
instead of "likely schools." In the past few years, she said, "I have become very
conservative." Even for students with records as good as Robinson’s, she said, she might
suggest adding to their lists state universities such as Christopher Newport in Newport
News or George Mason in Fairfax, just north of Robinson Secondary. That would force
students to apply to more colleges, but several experts said expanding the pool of likely
a~nissions prospects seems better than what happened to Joe Robinson.

In the meantime, some Virginia lawmakers have called for tighter limits on the number of
out-of-state students. But the higher out-of-state tuition, $8,693 this year at JMU
compared with $3,333 for in-state students, helps pay faculty salaries as the state
government grapples with lean budgets ~nid a difficult economy. The governing boards of
each state university in Virginia decide how many out-of-state students will be a@nitted.
At JMU, the ratio is 70 percent in-state and 30 percent out-of-state.

Students in Robinson’s situation are not without options. Often, they can seek admission
in the late spring to colleges that still have openings. If his appeal to JMU is denied,
Robinson said, he might spend a year at a colmmunity college and then try again, focusing
next time on Notre Dame. His school’s principal, Dan Meier, a former counselor, said he
has talked to Robinson about his rejections and wonders why more room for Virginia
students can’t be fot~d.
"I have been frustrated by this for many years," Meier said. "We have such wonderful state
colleges, but it is so difficult for our students to get into them."

The New York Times

April 12, 2008

Yale Moves Away From Plans for Link With Abu Dhabi

By TAMAR LEWIN

After more than a year of talks, Yale University has backed away from its plan for an arts
institute in Abu Dhabi, involving Yale’s art, music, architecture and drama schools.
The stumbling block, ultimately, was Abu Dhabi’s insistence that Yale offer degree
programs at the institute, and Yale’s refusal to grant its degrees in Abu Dhabi.

Yale’s art institute was to be part of Abu Dhabi’s development of Saadiyat Island as a
cultural center, including outposts of the Louvre, the Gugge~heim and other museums.

"From the beginning, we were clear that degree progr~ns were not what we were talking
about," said Linda K. Lorimer, secretary and vice president of Yale. "’We were exploring
exciting plans for programs that would be value-added for cultural development. But in the
end, they wanted degrees. And at this point in time, we just don’t think we could mount a
faculty of the same quality we have here, or attract students of the same caliber."

The collapse of the talks was first reported in The Yale Daily News on Friday.
Almost every major American research university has recently become intent on globalizing,
with many starting branches in the Persian Gulf, while others pursue research partnerships
and joint-degree programs around the globe.

But the Ivy League universities -- with the exception of Cornell’s medical school in Qatar
 Page 1421
-- have been notably unwilling to offer their home degrees through overseas progr~s.
Yale, for example, has dozens of foreign programs in China and elsewhere, but none offer
Yale degrees.

"It is understandable that some of our elite and most selective universities are not eager
to increase si~lificantly the nus~ber of degrees they award ar~nually, here or abroad," said
Dr. Edward Guiliano, president of the New York Institute of Technology, which offers its
degrees in China, Canada, Jordan, Bahrain and Abu Dhabi. "Selectivity is part of their
value equation as well as the pride of their alumni. Plus, of course, it is standard
currency with rating and ranking surveys."

The Abu Dhabi project would have been Yale’s first major venture in the Hiddle East. Abu
Dhabi, the oil-rich capital of the United Arab Emirates, has recently invested heavily in
importing educational and cultural institutions from the West. In 2006, the Sorbonne
opened a liberal-arts campus in Abu Dhabi. New York University is planning a full-fledged
liberal arts campus on Saadiyat Island. And Abu Dhabi paid $529 million for the right to
use the Louvre n~mle, part of a deal worth nearly $1.3 billion to create a branch of the
Louvre.

Last year, Yale’s president, Richard Levin, told the Yale alumni magazine that he hoped to
complete the university’s Abu Dhabi agreement in the summer of 2007. Each of Yale’s arts
graduate schools was planning activities -- master classes, design workshops and
elementary school programs -- for the Abu Dhabi institute, all of which were to be paid
for by the emirate’s government.
With its Abu Ohabi plans proceeding, New York University earlier this month ended its
talks to absorb the American University of Paris.

"As we got closer to the merger, the trade-offs became more apparent," said Jo~] Beckman,
a spokesman for N.Y.U. "What we were hearing from the A.U.P. people, consistently, was
that they were worried about maintaining the distinctiveness of their identity, and what
we were hearing from our students consistently was that they felt the academic experience
between the two institutions was incompatible."

The New York Times

April 13, 2008

Catholic Schools Face Changing Fortunes

By FERNANDA SANTOS

BREWSTER, N.Y.

THE grammar school at St. Lawrence O’Toole Roman Catholic parish here opened in 1926, in a
two-story building at the crest of a gentle slope near the train station. For decades,
nuns lived in the rooms upstairs and taught their students in classrooms on the first
.floor.
In 1968, when Brian Ledley entered first grade, most classes were still taught by nuns and
about 400 students attended the pre-K-through-eighth-grade school. But by the time his
daughter Deirdra entered first grade in 2005, the nuns had long been replaced by lay
teachers and enrollment stood at 220, with no sign that it would climb back up anytime
soon, said Mr. Ledley, a local caterer and a father of i0. Five of his children attended
the school, and four are currently enrolled.

Now, like many Catholic schools around the region in recent years, St. Lawrence O’Toole is
facing the prospect of closing its doors.

With 130 students this school year and only 88 students co~itted to returning in
September, the school would have to raise $850,000 to pay its teachers and another
$200,000 for a new boiler if it were to open this fall, according to the parish.

Gazing at his yellowing eighth-grade graduation picture in an old family alb~n, seven of
his 10 children huddled with him around a kitchen table, Hr. Ledley, 45, said, dejectedly,
 Page 1422
"We’ re going to have to fight a real hard fight if we want our school to survive. "

Under a plan announced last month by the Archdiocese of New York, St. Lawrence O’Toole and
five other Catholic schools -- two each in Westohester and Rockland Counties and one in
the Bronx--would close at the end of the school year. This will bring the total number
of schools closed to 15 since the archdiocese rolled out a reorganization plan in 2007
that also called for closing 21 parishes.

On Long Island, the Diocese of Rookville Centre closed four schools in 2004 and 2005,
including one in Levitto~rn and another in Cedarhurst.

After significant declines, enrollment now seems to be holding on the Island, according to
Sean P. Dolan, a spokesman for the diocese.

Mr. Dolan said that elementary school enrollment had declined by about 8,000 students or
27 percent from 1995 to 2005. But he said the rate of decline hmd slowed in the last two
years since the diocese put in place an intervention team made up of lay and religious
educators who go into schools facing difficulties and recommend solutions.

"We have become a lot more attuned as to the health of our schools, so we know when
they’re reaching a challenging time and we’re able to go in and make adjustments before it
is too late," Mr. Dolan said.
Across the country, more than 1,260 Catholic schools, mostly elementary schools, have
closed since 2000, according to the National Catholic Education Association, based in
Washington. The reason cited in most cases is declining enrollment, making it difficult
for schools that rely heavily on tuition to meet expenses.

The forces behind declining enrollment are varied, and include demographic shifts over the
last few decades, as well as rising tuition, which administrators attribute largely to an
increase in costs because of the transition from an all-religious faculty to a primarily
lay faculty. Catholic schools also face competition from solid public school systems in
some communities where parents are paying high property taxes.

Ellen Ayoub, superintendent of schools for the Diocese of Metuchen, in New Jersey, which
has closed six schools in the last six years, explained it this way: "Seventy percent of
our budget comes from tuition and the rest comes from fund-raising and from the parish, so
when you don’t have enough students, you don’t have that 70 percent coming in, which means
you’ll need more money from the parishes, but the parishes are already struggling."

When Pope Benedict XVI arrives in the United States on Tuesday, he will find a Catholic
Church that with 65 million melJoers in the country is bigger than it has ever been. But
that church is in the midst of a profound transition as it tries to catch up with three
decades of changes that pushed its base from the cities to the far suburbs and from the
Northeast to the West and South.
While the demographic shifts depleted some congregations, leaving struggling parishes and
some schools that could no longer sustain themselves, the population growth in some areas
has led to new churches and expanded parishes.
As an ex~nple, Ms. Ayoub said that a consultant hired by the Hetuchen Diocese said that
the population growth in Munterdon County, N.J., would support a new elementary school.

Underscoring the financial crisis faced by some Catholic schools, one union representing
teachers in the New York Archdiocese --which covers Manhattan, Staten Island,
Westchester, Rockland, Put1~am and five other counties -- staged a two-day strike early
this month, while another has threatened to go on strike during the pope’s visit and
picket papal events. At the heart of the protests are the higher health-insurance premi~ns
proposed by the archdiocese and the L~ions’ desire for bigger pay raises.

There are 2.27 million students enrolled in Catholic schools nationwide this year ~ 56
percent less than in 1960, when enrollment peaked at 5.25 million, and 14 percent less
than in 2000, when it was 2.65 million, statistics by the Catholic education association
show. And for every new school that opened last year, 43 of them in all, 4 schools closed,
the figures show.
 Page 1423
There are now 7,500 Catholic schools in the country; in 1960, there were 13,000.

"There’s still great interest in Catholic education, but there are also problems -- with
enrollment, with finances and with the fact Hispanics, the fastest-growing segment of the
Catholic population and of the American population as a whole, are still underrepresented
in our schools," said the Rev. Ronald J. Nuzzi, director of the Alliance for Catholic
Education, a graduate program for Catholic school teachers and administrators at the
University of Notre Dame.

"It took us some time to understand the depth of the great social changes of the ’60s and
the ’70s, and it has taken us some time to admpt to those changes, to figure out where we
need to grow and where we need to sacrifice," Father Nuzzi said.
Responding to the recent shifts in demographics, the Catholic Church has built new
churches in places that have experienced significant population growth, but not every
church has been accompanied by a new school.
"There was a time in history when the bishops told the pastors that when they built a new
church, they should build a new school, but that had ended by the time we were
experiencing these changes," said Karen Ristau, president of the Natioi~al Catholic
Education Association. "What happened was that the families moved, but the schools did
no t. "

What has resulted, Dr. Ristau explained, is a lopsided distribution of resources, with
empty schools abounding in some parts of the country and schools bursting at the seams in
others parts. For example, in the West -- an area that includes Texas and Arizona, where
the Catholic population more than doubled between 1965 and 2005, and Nevada, where it
sextupled during the same period -- about half of the more than 1,400 Catholic schools
have waiting lis~s, she said.

"School closings draw a lot of news coverage, but they’re only part of the story," Dr.
Ristau added.
"The sad part of the story."

Catholic schools face many challenges aside from adapting to population shifts. In
affluent communities, where the cost of education is not an issue, it may be elite private
schools. In middle-class suburbs, it may be other Catholic schools or a solid public
school system. And in ironer-cities, it is most likely the price of tuition, or, in some
cases, other alternatives, like charter schools.

The six Catholic elementary schools in Bridgeport, Conn., had struggled for more than
decade to meet enrollment goals. Tuition kept them out of reach for at least the one in
five local families who lived below the poverty line, and their rising operating costs
strained the finances of parishes already struggling to make ends meet.

In 2004, Bishop William E. Lori, who had replaced Cardinal Edward M. Egan as head of the
Diocese of Bridgeport, issued a call to action. He enlisted the help of retired chief
executives and fund-raising specialists, who then recruited patrons for the schools or
school progects, like maintenance and library renovation. He met with pastors of various
African-American churches and told them that their children were welcome in the Catholic
schools. And he advertised to Latino families on Spanish-language radio.

Then, the schools were brought under one administrative umbrella kno~rn as the Cathedral
Cluster, which principals said has made it easier for them to trade ideas and share
resources like books, laptops, teachers and even the math and literacy consultants who
work a few hours a week in each of the schools, their salaries paid through private donors
and grants.

"We study together; we look at student work together; we do planning together; we meet
every month to find out where we need help," said Maria O’Neill, principal of St. Andrew
School, on the north side of the city. "If there’s an issue going on in one of our
buildings, we feel very comfortable calling one another."

Enrollment at the six Bridgeport elementary schools has increased by i0 percent since 2004
-- to 1,399 this school year from 1,270; ii percent of the students are non-Catholics,
 Page 1424
about 10 percent are black and about 10 percent are Hispanic, said Margaret A. Dames,
superintendent of schools. Nationwide, 12 percent of Catholic elementary school students
are non-Catholics, 13 percent of them are Hispanic and 7 percent are black, according to
the Catholic education association figures.

Since 2005, the Bridgeport Diocese -- which stretches from Danbury and Brookfield on the
north to Greenwich in the south-- has controlled all of its 39 schools. Under this
arrangement, parishes contribute 8 percent of their offertory collections to a general
fund that is then divided among the schools; the diocese gives each school an additional
$12,000, Dr. Dames said.
"The idea was to avoid placing too much of the burden on one person or one institution,"
she said.

"What we did in essence was reinvent ourselves so as to reflect the original mission of
Catholic schools, which is to provide education for everyone, and not ~ust those who can
afford it."

On a drizzly afternoon here in Brewster, Mr. Ledley, the local caterer, wondered where
exactly things started to go wrong for St. Lawrence O’Toole and whether parents might have
taken too long to try to develop a rescue plan.

"We knew the school wasn’t doing well, that the enrollment was declining, but we thought
that St. Lawrence was safe because it’s the biggest and the oldest of~ the other Catholic
schools around," Mr. Ledley said.

Mr. Ledley and other parents began to join forces two years ago, conducting Sunday open
houses and organizing movie nights to woo new families. One mother, Linda High&m, mailed
handmade Christmas cards to the parents of each of the babies baptized at the parish
church in 2006 and again last year, reminding them to consider the school once their
children are old enough. In recent months, the parents wrote to residents here and altmu]i
everywhere, asking for donations. To this point they have raised about $i00,000, far from
enough to save the school.

MRS. HIGHAM conceded that she has visited another Catholic school ~ust in case she needs
to enroll her ll-year-old daughter, Laurel, a fifth grader at St. Lawrence O’Toole,
elsewhere in the fall. The girl is crushed; she is an only child and her school friends,
she said, are for the most part the only friends she has ever had.

"I don’t want to have to leave them, but it seems like everybody is going to go to a
different place," Laurel said as she left school, hauling a black and pink backpack
weighed do~l with books.

Mr. Ledley has wh~t may be a tougher task -- to find a new school for his children, when
St. Lawrence O’Toole is the only school he has ever known. His grandfather, Thomas
Farrell, was a member of one of its first graduating classes. His father, Daniel Ledley,
graduated in 1952, and Mr. Ledley himself did so in 1976.

His five older children-- Brian, 24; Brendan, 22; Patrick, 19; A~]e, 18; and William, 16
-- went to St. Lawrence O’Toole, and four younger ones are there now: Gerard, 14, in
eighth grade; Andrew, 12, in seventh; Deirdra, i0, a fourth grader; and Sean, 6, in
kindergarten. (The youngest, Mary, is 3.)
"We could have really nice cars, we could be traveling to nice places on vacation, we
could be saving up for a good retirement," Mr. Ledley said. "But Catholic education is
something we believe in. It’s a priority to us."

Seated next to him on the couch, his wife of 25 years, Patricia, dabbed her eyes.

"Of course the religion is a big part of it," she said, "but there’s also a really warm
feeling of family."

The New York Times

April 13, 2008
 Pa~e 1425

A Bittersweet Spring for Catholic Schools in Newark

By MARY JO PATTERSON
NEWARK

ALICE TERRELL opens the door to Miss Hargrove’s first grade at Blessed Sacrament School,
where nine children sit attentively at desks arranged like pieces on a checkerboard.

The room is huge and they are tiny, but the 92-year-old school was built when Catholic
education was flourishing and a typical classroom held 40 students. These days, with a
total enrollment of 95 in Grades K-8, Blessed Sacrament is a ghost of its former self.

"Good morning, " says Miss Terrell, the academic director, who, as a Methodist, cannot hold
the title of principal.
"Good morning Miss Terrell, and God bless you," nine high-pitched voices reply in unison.
Such are the daily ritt~Is at this school, which are about to end. With enrollment far
below 225, considered a healthy ntumber for a school in the Archdiocese of Newark, Blessed
Sacrament will close for good in June. A charter school plans to take over the building.

As the weather warms and Catholic schools in New Jersey prepare for Pope Benedict XVI’s
impending visits to Washington and New York, it is a bittersweet spring for Blessed
Sacr~nent’s shaken f~nilies and staff. Many h~ve no idea where they will go.

The closing has also left others in Catholic education with a lump in their throats.

"It’s a loss for all of us -- a door for evangelizing has closed," said Everlyn Hay,
principal of Queen of Angels Schoo!, about a mile away.
With about 200 students, Queen of Angels is not in danger; its enrollment may even grow if
it absorbs some of Blessed Sacrament’s stranded students. But over the last decade the
archdiocese, covering Bergen, Hudson, Essex and Union Counties, has closed one-fourth of
its schools. After Blessed Sacrament closes, the archdiocese will have seven elementary
schools.

Mrs. Hay, an usher at Queen of Angels Church, founded in 1930 as the first African-
American Catholic congregation in Newark, is a realist.

"I’ll be truthful -- the moment enrollment starts dipping, we start worrying," she said
early this month. "Right now we have families losing their jobs left and right. We ask
each other: ~Who’s next?’"
Blessed Sacrament, in the city’s South Ward, and Queen of ~]gels, in the Central Ward, are
close cousins in many ways. But only one will survive past the end of this school year.
Both schools have proud histories and fiercely loyal a~lerents. Even though they are not
likely to be Catholic, many African-American parents who live or work in Newark consider
the two schools preferable to public schools. Ask why, and the parents are likely to say
the Catholic schools are safer and academically superior. They also praise teachers as
"like family" and unusually dedicated.

"The public schools are too dangerous," said Charles Treadwell, a transportation company
owner in Newark who graduated from Queen of Angels in 1984 and sent all four of his
children there. "A teacher cannot effectively teach when she has one or two children who
constantly disrupt the class. At Queen of Angels, that is not going to happen. It’s run
the old-school way, caring but stern. If you go there you’re going to stay focused, you
will learn, and you will succeed."

Fewer than i0 percent of students at Blessed Sacrament and Queen of Angels are Catholic,
and fewer still attend their school’s parish church. Still, religion permeates both
places, through instruction in faith and twice-daily prayers.

Both schools struggle without subsidies from the diocese. They receive certain services
and supplies from the State Department of Education, but they are financed largely through
 Page 1426
tuition and other fees.

Both employ lay staff and could use more. Blessed Sacrament has no librarian or music
teacher, and the gym teacher is part time; at Queen of Angels, Mrs. Hay herself grabs a
crossing guard’s vest, whistle and stop sign to lead students to the playgroru~d, a barren
patch of sloping blacktop across a street. A volrtnteer travels daily from Manhattan to
help at lunch.

As for the buildings, they are hopelessly obsolete, with a history of few renovations.
Dusty sports trophies from the 1940s crowd the tops of towering bookcases at Blessed
Sacrament. Queen of Angels, built in 1887, houses pre-K through eighth grades in a
confusing warren of rooms attached to the church.

MISS TERRELL, a 30-year-old Newark native, says high fees and the lure of free charter
schools killed off Blessed Sacrament.

When she arrived in 2005, "we were already in a danger zone, though I didn’t know it," she
said.
The school had 159 students then. Tuition %~s $2,700 per child, and families had to raise
an additional $300 through candy sales.

Mis6 Terrell, who had been teaching at a public school, came to Blessed Sacrament with a
master’s degree and principal’s certification, and dreams of an ideal educational setting.
She landed the director’s position.

"The particular public school where I taught previously, in East Orange, was very rough,’"
she said. "I wanted a focus on education, not discipline. Coming here was a joy."

But Blessed Sacrament had problems of its ownu financial ones.

In 2006 the parish raised the tuition to $2,900 and the fund-raising mandate to $400.
Enro!lment nose-dived, Miss Terrel! said. This year the church again raised tuition, to
more than $3,000. The fund-raising obligation swelled to $900, causing more parents to
withdraw their children.

Meanwhile, the current tuition at Queen of Angels is $2,900, and the fund-raising
requirement is $300.

Miss Terrell said she did not understand that Blessed Sacrament was in trouble until last
November, when a group of strangers showed up for a tour. The school year had opened on an
anxious note when fewer pupils than expected showed up, but parish leaders told parents at
a meeting that the school would not close. Miss Terrell felt reassured too, t~til the
strangers appeared. The custodian called her after they left.

"Are you sitting down?" she recalled him asking. "That was a charter school. They want to
move in." Later an appraiser showed up, but official notification of the closing did not
come until February. Families grew emotional. Miss Terrell said she was grief-stricken.

The bureaucratic machinery to close Blessed Sacrament was actt~lly activated at the end of
December, when the church’s pastor, the Rev. Anselm I. Nwaorgu, wrote the archdiocese
asking for permission to close the school, said James Goodness, the spokes~m~n for the
archdiocese. The letter cited an operating deficit this year of $270,000 and noted there
were only 97 students. The archdiocese granted Father Nwaorgu’s request on Jan. 21.
By last week, those at the school seemed to have accepted its fate, but the the calm
atmosphere belied the amxiety some of the children and the adults were feeling.

"Everything’s up in the air," said Carissa Chase of Newark, a worried mother of two. Her
eighth grader has been accepted at Marist High School in Bayonne, a Catholic school, Ms.
Chase said, but she has no idea about her fourth grader. The charter school moving into
the building told her it had no room for h~@, she said.

Michelle Maycock-Smith, who has a son in second grade at Blessed Sacrament, said she and
her husband were also in limbo.

"It’s horrible, what’s happening," she said. "The teachers here have been very caring, and
Christopher loves school. This was a positive place to be. We l~ve been to a couple of

~3
 Page 1427
charter schools, but really, we’re most interested in Catholic schools."

Patricia Neblett of Orange, who works in the Blessed Sacrament lunchroom, t~as the same
headache, multiplied by five. In addition to relocating her four youngest to new schools,
she t]as to find a new job.

Miss Terrell is also sending out applications. In September she bought a house in
Hillside. Now, she said, she is worried about paying the mortgage.

"We’re all looking for a position, but none of us has been hired. It’s nerve-racking, but
I am more worried about my kids," she said. "Some may end up in public schools. If they
do, they’ll be in for culture shock."
 Page 1428

Nonresponsiv
From: Ruberg, Casey
Sent: February 15, 2008 8:25 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Casarona,
Emily; Chlouber, Patricia; Cohn, Kristine; Colby, Chad; Colvin, Kelly; Davis, Jim; Dmytrenko,
Orysia; Dunn, David; Earling, Eric; Eitel, Robert S.; Evans, Wendy; Evers, Bill; Flowers, Sarah;
Foxley, Donna; Galko, Vincent; Gartland, Lavin; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Hancock,
Anne; Hatada, Tori; Hervey, Tina; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly; Lepore, Kristen;
MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; Private- Spellings, Margaret; McGrath, John; Mcnitt,
Townsend L.; Mesecar, Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Oldham, Cheryl; Pitts, Elizabeth; Ridgway,
Marcie; Rosenfelt, Phil; Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Sentance, Michael; Skandera,
Hanna; Smith, Valarie (SRR); Tada, Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toomey, Liam; Tracy
Young; Truong, Anh-Chau; Tucker, Sara Martinez; Wright, Christopher; Wurman, Ze’ev;
Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara; Zoellick, Todd
Su~t: Student Lenders Scale Back, but Not All Agree They Face Crisis (Chronicle)

Student Lenders Scale Back, but Not All Agree They Face Crisis
Chronicle of Higher Education
February 15, 2008
By PAUL BASKEN

With each passing day, the student-loan industry issues new warnings about the twin dangers of federal subsidy cuts and
turmoil in the credit markets stemming from the crisis in subprime mortgage lending.

"It fees to me we are headed to a real crisis in the student-loan world," Richard Shipman, director of financial aid at
Michigan State University, told The Detroit News this week after the state’s student-loan authority canceled a program for
offering private student loans (The Chronicle, February 13).

Industry officials have repeatedly cited such cutbacks in both private and federally subsidized lending as evidence that
Congress went too far last year in cutting the subsidies on government-backed loans at a time of overall economic peril.

The College Loan Corporation has said it will stop offering federally subsidized loans, Nelnet Inc. has said it will not write
any new consolidation loans, and Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest student-loan company, has said it will be more restrictive
in all categories (The Chronicle, January 24).

Several lenders also reported in recent days that they were unable to continue financing their student loans through asset-
backed securities, as the mortgage crisis had left investors less willing or able to afford packaged student debt.

Yet one of the nation’s largest student lenders, JP Morgan Chase & Company, doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo.

The bank’s student-loan division, Chase Education Finance, has announced plans to cut borrower rates, including
eliminating the origination fee on all federally guaranteed student loans.

A Different Strategy

Chase also said in its announcement that it will eliminate origination fees on its private loans, meaning those that carry no
federal subsidy, while offering interest rates "as low as 1 percentage point below prime."

Most college students rely on loans, and "reducing fees and interest rates for qualified applicants will make it easier for
them," Danny C. Ray, president of Chase Education Finance, said in the statement.

Chase’s position stands in sharp contrast with the warnings that others in the industry have been issuing since Congress
voted last September to increase student aid by some $20-billion and finance it by cutting the subsidies paid to lenders in
the government-backed guaranteed-student-loan program, known as the Federal Family Education Loan Program, or
FFEL (The Chronicle, September 10, 2007).

Chase and other large banks can afford to buck the induslry trend, said a company spokesman, Thomas A. Kelly, because
they have their own substantial assets and don’t need to rely on securities or other forms of outside investment to finance
their student lending.
 Page 1429

’~Ne’ve been putting the loans on our own balance sheet," Mr. Kelly said in an interMew, "and so we don’t need to go to the
secondary market if we don’t want to or if the market’s not good."

Rather than leave the student-loan market, Chase has been increasing its investment in it, through actions such as
purchasing Collegiate Funding Services, a company that originates and services student loans, and hiring workers laid off
by Nelnet.

’"¢~e have made a strategic decision," Mr. Kelly said, "and continue to believe that the student-lending business is a good
business."

That, however, isn’t stopping the student-loan industry from warning colleges and their students of the dangers they still
may face.

Full Effect Unknown

Not enough is known about the levels of service that would be provided by Chase and other large banks "to know what the
impact would be on borrowers" who can’t use lenders that have scaled back, like College Loan Corporation, Nelnet, or
Sallie Mae, said Kevin Bruns, executive director of America’s Student Loan Providers, an industry lobby group.

’~/iewing it from Mars, yeah, I would agree that it probably doesn’t make much difference to students," Mr. Bruns said. "But
that’s just conjecture and irrelevant. What matters is what happens at the consumer level. It actually may matter a great
deal to individual consumers."

Sore e industry leaders have warned that colleges may find too few lenders to offer governm ent-subsidized loans, and may
be forced to use the smaller direct-loan program, in which students borrow directly from the Education Department.

Harris N. Miller, president of the Career College Association, which represents for-profit colleges, has said his members
fear that the direct-loan program might not be able to handle a sudden surge in demand.

But a spokesman for the association, Luke Thomas, said the group had no data to support that "conjecture." The
assodation’s fear, he said, is based on comments from member colleges that tried the direct-loan system during the
1990s "and were extremely frustrated and left, because of what they considered maladministration."

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has repeatedly said she has seen no solid evidence that the subsidy cutbacks or
the mortgage-lending crisis threatens to harm student borrowers.

A department spokeswoman, Samara Yudof, expressed confidence that the direct-loan program could handle any
increase in demand, though she did acknowledge some concern about the overall effects from a reduction in private
lenders.

The competition between the bank-based FFEL program and the direct-loan program "has resulted in innovations, higher
quality services for students and families, and lower costs for students and taxpayers alike," Ms. Yudof said.
While the direct-loan program "could accommodate additional schools and the students and families they serve," she said,
"the department is concerned the benefits of the FFEL program could diminish as a result of fewer lender partidpants."
 Page 1 of 2
Page 1430

~Nonresponsiv
From: Evers, Bill
Sent: February 04, 2008 1 t :00 AM
To: Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Briggs, Kerri; Cariello, Dennis; Cohn,
Kristine; Colby, Chad; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Farace, Meredilh; Flowers, Sarah;
Friedland, Bruce; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Jones, Diane; Kuzmich, Holly;
MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar,
Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Pitts, Elizabeth; Private- Spellings, Margaret; Rosenfelt, Phil;
Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Spellings, Margaret; Tada,
Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toner, Jana; Toomey, Liam; ’Tracy Young’; Tucker,
Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara
Subject: see comment that follows article

Bush to Seek $1-Billion for Controversial Reading First Program

Reading First, a federal program that provides grants to improve reading instruction
at low-income elementary schools, would see its full $1-billion budget restored in
the 2009 fiscal year under the spending blueprint President Bush will present
tomorrow, according to The Washinqton Post.

Democrats in Congress had slashed the program’s funds for this year to about
$393-million after it came under sharp criticism. Several university-based
consultants who advised states on how to spend their Reading First grants have
been accused of financial conflicts of interest. The consultants have strenuously
denied any wrongdoing.

The U.S. secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, told reporters on Friday that
Mr. Bush was "going to work hard to get that funding restored, to ask for the billion
dollars and help Congress see the error of their ways," according to the Post.

In another provision reflecting a disagreement with Congress, Mr. Bush again will
propose eliminating funds for the Robert C. Byrd Honors Scholarship Program, the
newspaper reported. Mr. Bush has made similar proposals in his last three
budgets, but Congress has continued to support the program, which received about
$40-million this year. The program is named for one of the president’s harshest
critics in Congress, Sen. Robert C. Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat.

Information about the president’s budget began leaking out on Friday, when the
Associated Press reported that Mr. Bush would seek a $2.6-billion increase for the
Pell Grant program. ~Chartes Huckabee
i:’.::;s.t:ed or’, Su!-’,da:~y l:’e[;rL~m-y 3, 200,9 Permalink i

Comments

06/05/2008
 Page 1431 Page 2 of 2

I want to express my heartfelt thanks, that here, in the years just before my
death, I managed to squeeze into my short lifespan deep personal
experience of the worst President our nation has ever had. No more effective
way to undermine "conservatism" and "republican party" stuff has ever been
devised. Nothing beats personal experience of evil combined with deep
incompetence. The nice thing about evil is it is petty, providing endless
entertainments like the above issues. It is not that Satan is powerful and hurts
all, it is like the movie Satan some decades ago, sitting in some Dallas or
Kennebunkport basement stripping random pages out of books hung on
clotheslines, as his daily bread. I thought that that movie Satan was fiction till
this boob, front man to Cheney, was "elected". Americans deserve richly
every single bad thing that happens to them. They twice chose evil
incompetence over incompetent goodheartedness.

Richard Tabor Greene Feb 4, 08:59 AM

Note from Bill Evers: I circulate articles within ED that are pertinent to
educational policymaking. Articles are circulated because they are of
interest, not because I or OPEPD or anyone else in ED agrees with them.

06/05/2008
 Page 1 of 4
Page 1432

Nonresponsive

From: Evers, Bill

Sent: February 07, 2008 9:31 AM
To: Jones, Diane; Anderson, Christy; Aud, Susan; Beaton, Meredith; Bdggs, Kerri; Cariello,
Dennis; Cohn, Kristine; Colby, Chad; Dunn, David; Evers, Bill; Farace, Meredith;
Flowers, Sarah; Friedland, Bruce; Gribble, Emily; Halaska, Terrell; Kuzmich, Holly;
MacGuidwin, Katie; Maddox, Lauren; McGrath, John; Mcnitt, Townsend L.; Mesecar,
Doug; Morffi, Jessica; Pitts, Elizabeth; Private- Spellings, Margaret; Rosenfelt, Phil;
Ruberg, Casey; Scheessele, Marc; Skandera, Hanna; Spellings, Margaret; Tada,
Wendy; Talbert, Kent; Terrell, Julie; Toner, Jana; Toomey, Liam; ’Tracy Young’; Tucker,
Sara Martinez; Williams, Cynthia; Young, Tracy; Yudof, Samara; Schaumburg,
Amanda; Mesecar, Doug; McDermott, Erin; Flawn, Tyrrell; Hill, Paula; Oliver, Iris;
Woodsome, James; Santy, Ross; Scott, Kelly; Aud, Susan; Wurman, Ze’ev
Subject: HEA debate

Note from Bill Evers: I circulate articles within ED that are pertinent to educational
policymaking. Articles are circulated because they are of interest, not because I or OPEPD or
anyone else in ED agrees with them.

Inside Higher Ed

Feb. 7

Today’s the Day for HEA

Posturing, panicking and backpedaling and, of course, politicking -- all of those were in ample supply
Wednesday as lobbyists, lawmakers and other players prepared for today’s House of
Representatives debate over legislation to renewthe Higher Education Act.

Developments were fast and furious on an array of fronts. Among the most significant:

The White House announced in a "Statement of Administration Policy" that it "strongly

opposed" the legislation crafted collaboratively by the Democratic chairman and senior
Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee, but stopped short of threatening a
veto, as Statements of Administration Policy often do. The White House cited numerous
objections, led by the fact that the legislation would prohibit the U.S. Education Department
from issuing federal regulations governing higher education accreditation.
A day after introducing it, Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), under heavy pressure from colleges,
withdrew an amendment that would have required every college, regardless of size or wealth,
to spend at least 5 percent of its endowment assets each year. College associations went all-
out in opposing the plan, prompting scores and even hundreds of calls and e-mails to
Congressional offices. But echoing warnings by other members of Congress, Welch vowed to
continue pressing college leaders on whether they are doing enough to contain their spending
and, in turn, their prices.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, in an op-ed published today in the Washington
political publication Politico, blasted Democratic lawmakers and colleges for colluding to stop
the Bush administration’s efforts to strengthen the quality control aspects of accreditation. She
said Democrats had sided with "old structures and entrenched stakeholders" -- presumably
traditional colleges and accreditors --who are "insular, clubby, and wish to be accountable to
no one but themselves." The op-ed reportedly angered some members of Congress.
House Republican leaders said they would use today’s vote on the Higher Education Act
legislation to ramp up their campaign against earmarks. Minority Leader John A. Boehner of
Ohio and House Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri said that as part of their larger effort to compel an

06/05/2008
 Pag~ 2 of 4
Page 1433

"immediate moratorium on taxpayer-funded" directed spending by la~nakers, they would try to

attach legislation that would ban earmarks from future bills to the Higher Education Act
renewal. The higher education bill is a target mainly because it is thefirst piece of legislation to
pass through the House in recent weeks, but the Republican leaders’ statement also noted that
the college legislation authorizes the "Fund for Improving Post-Secondary Education" (close
enough on the name), which they called a ’taxpayer-funded slush fund for higher education
earmarks." The Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, the agency in
question, was designed to award projects on a competitive basis but has been larged up with
earmarks, known as pork barrel spending, in recent years.
The House Rules Committee late Wednesday cleared the way for the House to consider 27 of
the 61 amendments that were submitted by House members. (A list of the amendments the
House will consider, with links to the text of the amendments, appears here. In addition to the
amendment l~at Welch withdrew, one other controversial amendment, aimed at exposing
potentially illegal affirmative action in college admissions, won’t be considered because the
Rules Committee rejected it.)

Those elements and more should help ensure that today’s debate and vote over the Higher Education
Act renewal is more eventful than it might otherwise have been, given that it has bipartisan support
and should pass by a wide margin.

The legislation was approved by a 44 to 0 vote of the Education and Labor Committee in November,
and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the panel’s chairman, and Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon, its
senior Republican, have worked closely together since then to refine the bill so that it retains
Democratic and Republican support alike. McKeon, in a meeting with reporters on Wednesday, said
that he is "personally pretty happy" with the bill and that he believed it would garner significant
Republican support.

GOP support may be muted, though, by the White House’s opposition to the legislation. Assessing
the true meaning of administration statements on legislation is a little like deciphering ancient texts.
But it’s fair to say that the fact that the White House did not threaten to veto the Higher Ed Act bill, as
it did the House budget reconciliation legislation and the omnibus appropriations bill last fall, is
meaningful; the White House wants changes and a seat at the table in future negotiations over the
bill, but is unlikelyto go to the mat and veto a bill that is seen as helping families afford college and
cleaning up the student loan program.

The unusually lengthy and detailed Statement of Administration Policy lays out a series of objections
to the House legislation, including the fact that it would create dozens of newprograms (higher
education lobbyists estimate more than 50), "many of which are narrow in purpose, duplicative,
burdensome, and poorly targeted;" that it would make receipt of some federal funds contingent on
how much colleges raise their tuitions (or not); and that some of the new programs it would create
(like those that would direct funds to predominantly black and Asian-serving institution s) ’~would
pdodtize or restrict eligibility to institutions or groups defined by racial or ethnic criteria," provisions
"that raise significant constitutional concems."

But the administration’s pdmary reason for opposing the bill is its much-debated provision that would
bar the Education Department from promulgating regulations to govern howaccreditors hold colleges
accountable for student learning. This stems from an intense fight between the department, colleges
and Congress over lhe administration’s efforts last spdng to negotiate newfederal rules for
accreditation while Congress was considering legislation dealing with some of the same issues.
Members of Congress, led by Sen. Lamar Alexander of Spellings’s own Republican party, injected
provisions into various pieces of legislation that barred the department from carrying out its objectives
for accreditation, and Spellings has carded a grudge ever since.

Just how much vitriol she has retained was clear in the Politico piece. In the op-ed, headlined
"Congress digs a moat around its ivory tower," Spellings writes that instead of attacking problems as it
has in other industries "in crisis," like toy manufacturers and subprime mortgage lenders, lawmakers,
in writing the Higher Education Act, have embraced legislative fixes that "amount to digging a moat
around the ’ivory tower’ instead of knocking down the very baniers that block access to an affordable
post-secondary education and to information that can guide a student’s decision-making process."

06/05/2008