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[Achievement Gap Solutions-- 4 short articles count as 1 rdg. for Rdgs. Notes & RDP’s]

Montgomery County Gives More Students A Chance At ‘Gifted’ Status

Kate McGee, WAMU [Public radio station at American University in DC]

http://wamu.org/story/17/05/24/montgomery-county-gives-students-chance-gifted-status/

May 24, 2017

A new program at the Montgomery County Public Schools is giving more kids a shot at enrichment programs.

After a 2016 report found white and Asian American students were more likely to be accepted and enroll in these programs than black and Hispanic students, or those from low-income households, the school district began re-examining the way it identifies gifted students.

A new pilot program aimed at redressing the imbalance has proved so successful that the school district plans to expand it system-wide in the fall. That means all third graders will be evaluated for enrichment programs. And the county will open three new enrichment centers to serve more students.

One big reason for the racial and income disparities, school administrators have concluded: parents.

Making them responsible for applying to have their children admitted to gifted programs “may have really been a barrier for families who couldn’t meet the timeline who may have even known about the process but didn’t know if their child was a right match for the program,” said Jeannie Franklin, who works for the school district.

At a school like JoAnn Lelack at Broad Acres Elementary School in Silver Spring, that can be a factor, agreed Principal Harold Barber. Nine out of 10 students there qualify for free or reduced-price meals, he said. Many come from households without strong ties to the school system. “We have a very transient population,” Barber said.

So, this year, the county tried something different. Instead of waiting for parents to apply, school officials reviewed every third grader at 39 elementary schools. The county notified parents if their child qualified to be tested for the program.

“Extremely bright children who would be great candidates for this would have the opportunity to be considered for it, whether or not their parents knew about it,” said the school district’s Lori-Christina Webb.

The pilot program also got rid of teacher recommendations.

“We found that when we did that we really changed the candidate pool,” said Webb.

As a result, the number of African American students admitted to the program increased by 44 percent. The number of Hispanic students jumped from four students last year to 21 students this year.

At Lelack, the difference was marked. Last year, just five third graders at Lelack applied to attend an enrichment center. This year, 57 students were tested and a few ultimately made it into the program. The principal is convinced that taking the onus off parents was key.

“With our community, especially our Hispanic parents, they rely a lot on the school to advocate for their students,” said Barber, “and they don’t really advocate as much.”

After-school program grant comes through

Wicomico at-risk students are taught 'how to learn' through hands-on approach

By Calum McKinney • Staff Writer • September 23, 2010

http://www.delmarvanow.com/article/20100923/NEWS01/9230359

SALISBURY -- After a nervous wait for grant funding, a Wicomico County after-school program for at-risk students begins this week.

The STARS program, funded by Maryland's 21st Century Community Learning Centers grants, aims to boost students' reading and math scores while providing a safe place after school, nutritious snacks and bus transportation home. Currently in its eighth year, the program for students who are at least a year behind in reading and math proficiency is dependent on the highly competitive state grants.

"I was sweating," said STARS coordinator Michael-Anne Yiannouris. "I went to the grant specialist in the accounting department; I said, 'Do we open these programs?' "

Her concern about funding was recently validated with news that Worcester County schools are receiving $1.2 million less in federal grants than it expected to get this year.

"The grant awards have been increasingly competitive; last year and this year we were concerned," Yiannouris said. "It's a testament to the program that we got re-funded. We do what we say we're going to do, and the children are improving. Originally, the very first year they awarded the grants, there were 11 counties that received funds. Last year, we were one of only three districts that got re-funded."

This year, only six of the many Maryland school districts that applied received a portion of the $6.4 million in Maryland 21st Century CLC funds…[Dunn cut for space reasons]. In all, more than 68 organizations applied for the grants. …[Dunn cut for space reasons].

Total funding for STARS is made up of three nearly equal parts: two 21st Century CLC grants and a contribution from the Wicomico County schools budget.

Yiannouris said the program serving nearly 1,000 middle and elementary students is evaluated on a yearly basis, though the grant is awarded for a three-year period.

"The grant requires a lot of reporting each year," she said. "I don't know that they've ever denied a second year of funding, but they certainly could."

She said she has some confidence that the program will continue to be funded due to the large improvements they've catalogued in students' reading and math proficiency. So far, the program has proved so popular that there is a wait to get in. Yiannouris said there is no need to drum up business for the program and there are schools they would like to have programs at but are unable to serve because of limited funding.

She credits the program's success to utilizing real-world activities to help students learn. In one program this year, students will research every aspect of designing, producing and selling T-shirts. Students will even call different print shops to compare prices and, if they form a successful plan, T-shirts will actually be printed and sold.

"We used to run a straight rigid reading curriculum," Yiannouris said. "But I've asked teachers to move away from that and be more creative and require more of that hands-on kind of thing. My challenge to my teachers this year is to have academics even more creative and more engaging than our partner activities."

The partner activities range from learning teamwork and basketball fundamentals with the University of Maryland Eastern Shore basketball team to learning about local species and habitats by engaging with live animals handled by Pemberton Historical Park rangers.

"The first year, no child in the program was proficient in reading or math when they entered the program," Yiannouris said. "Now 65 percent to 75 percent are proficient by the end of year. And we like to keep them in STARS unless they reach a very advanced level because the risk factors don't go away. ... We're teaching these kids how to learn."

As state increased school aid, grades went up

By Liz Bowie

January 8, 2009

Baltimore Sun

www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-te.md.thornton08jan08,0,6549206.story

Five years after Maryland increased spending by $2 billion to provide greater academic equity, students have made remarkable gains in reading and math, according to a report given to the Maryland General Assembly yesterday by an outside consultant.For every additional $1,000 spent per student, there was a significant increase in pass rates in both subjects. The improvement was twice as great for middle school students as for those in elementary grades.The report by MGT of America also confirms what most educators have intuitively believed for decades: Money invested in teachers appears to pay off. About 80 percent of additional local and state funding has been spent on the teaching staff - raising salaries, hiring more to reduce class sizes and requiring a highly qualified teacher in every classroom."I think it is a validation of a leap of faith that the legislature and the governor took to continue to fund it," said state Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick, referring to The Bridge to Excellence Act. Passed in 2002, that law put into effect the recommendations of a state education funding commission chaired by Alvin Thornton.
More money for schools

Since 2002, education spending in Maryland has risen in several categories:
•Funds from federal, state and local sources grew from $6.9 billion to $10.4 billion.
•Total state funds for local school systems increased from $2.5 billion to $4.6 billion.
•Total local funds rose from $3.8 billion to $5.1 billion.

Grasmick said the report points out the wisdom of the legislature's decision to pass the law, which required not just an 80 percent increase in the level of funding but targeted the money to provide the most help to special education and poor students and those learning English. Students in those categories did not make as much progress in learning math and reading as did the general population. The achievement gaps are still a matter of concern, she said. …[Dunn cut for space reasons].


There will never be equality in school funding, said Jerry Ciesla, a senior partner at MGT, because each local government will contribute more or less to its school system on top of what the state gives. But, he said, there is more equity since the Thornton law was passed. There is "fairness of state funding," he said. "Those that need it the most get the most."

State dollars account for, on average, about 44 percent of the school system budgets across the state.

The report's release came the same day Education Week ranked Maryland schools No. 1 in the nation, giving yesterday's press conference in Annapolis with Grasmick and Gov. Martin O'Malley a congratulatory air. Just one year after the governor said he wanted to get rid of the education secretary, the two appeared happy to share the announcement.

"They really deserve the No. 1 ranking," said Ciesla, whose company is doing 66 education studies in many states around the country. Educators in other states, Ciesla said, hold Maryland's schools in high regard. The combination of this positive report and the ranking will likely bring more attention to the state, he said. "I think Maryland is going to be bombarded by all the other states. . . . How did you do this?"

In the spring of 2002, Maryland became the first state in the nation to adopt a major reform of its school finance system to provide greater equity for all students without the pressure of a court order. The state, in part through an increase in the tax on cigarettes, began gradually increasing the amount of money given to local school systems for pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. …[Dunn cut for space reasons].

Part of the MGT analysis included a survey of 16,000 teachers in the state about their practices and their schools. The survey was an attempt to find out what practices worked best so that the information could be used to improve struggling schools. At high-performing schools, teachers collaborated on lesson plans, analyzed test data and believed their principal was a strong leader.

More of these best practices are being implemented in elementary and middle schools than in high schools. The report notes that the greater the number of qualified teachers in a school, the better students did and that the correlation was particularly true at schools with large numbers of economically disadvantaged students.

Why Asian American kids excel. It’s not ‘Tiger Moms.’

By Fred Barbash

Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/04/08/forget-tiger-moms-asian-american-students-succeed-because-its-expected-say-scholars/?hpid=z5

April 8, 2014

Why do Asian American students outpace everyone else academically?

The most publicized attempt to answer that question — a few years ago, by Yale Law School professor Amy Chua — set off a controversy that rages to this day.

Chua’s answer, originally set out in a 2011 Wall Street Journal opinion article “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” was that “tiger mothers” were prepared to coerce kids into doing homework and practicing the piano, in part by calling them names. Chua held herself and her academically successful children out as examples.

But a new study published in the journal “Race and Social Problems” by two California scholars takes on Chua, suggesting that with all the economic resources at her disposal — she and her husband are Yale professors with highly-educated parents — her children’s success is just as likely the result of socioeconomic and cultural advantages, generally cited by scholars as the main reason some children do better than others.

The authors of “The Success Frame and Achievement Paradox: The Costs and Consequences for Asian Americans” are Min Zhou, professor of sociology and Asian American Studies at the Univ. of California at Los Angeles, currently on leave at Nanyang Technological University, and Jennifer Lee, professor of sociology at the Univ. of California at Irvine.

A better way to understand Asian American academic success, they write, is to look at families who don’t have resources and succeed nonetheless.

That is exactly what they’ve done. And their findings are pretty straightforward: Young Asian Americans have all kinds of good role models to emulate. Their communities and families make sure they get extra help when they need it. Their families, even on limited resources, manage to seek out and move to neighborhoods with good schools. And they aspire to success with specific goals in mind: medicine, law, engineering and pharmacy. And they aim for the best schools.

It’s not about coercion or some mysterious ethnic gift, they write. It’s about the way they view their horizons, with extraordinarily high expectations — so high that kids who don’t rise to the occasion feel like “black sheep” and “outliers.”

Zhou and Lee studied Chinese American and Vietnamese American communities in Los Angeles without a lot of financial resources or parental higher education — factors that tend to skew other academic studies of success. They focused on two groups: the so-called “1.5 generation” — foreign-born immigrants who came to the United States prior to age 13 — and second-generation families. They conducted 82 face-to-face interviews to get a picture of why these communities are doing so well in advancing their children through high school and college.

Here’s what they found: Although their means are limited, Asian families in the study choose neighborhoods carefully to make sure schools offer honors and advanced-placement courses. To do this, parents use the “Chinese Yellow Pages,” which the researchers describe as “a two-inch thick, 1,500-page long telephone directory that is published annually and lists ethnic businesses in Southern California, as well as the rankings of the region’s public high schools and the nation’s best universities.” They also make sure their kids get plenty of supplementary help such as tutoring.