PEER Review

Volume 1, Issue 3 April/May 1996

PEER Day at TAPP South Regional

Change was the thread that ran through the workshops and general discussions at the TAPP South Regional Meeting, held in Flat Rock, North Carolina, from April 17-20, 1996. The Parents Engaged in Education Reform (PEER) Project’s day-long session on school reform provided another forum for discussion about change--this time in the context of school restructuring. Dr. Jacque Davis, PEER Project Coordinator, and Eileen Ordover, Esq. from the Center for Law and Education led a lively discussion whose primary focus was standards-based reform efforts and the relationship of Title 1 of Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994, Goals 2000, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to these efforts.

Jacque and Eileen asked participants to respond to the following:

What I think about school reform in general is...;
What I think the school reform policies and practices can do to improve the quality of education for children with disabilities is...; and
What I think is important for me to know about school reform is....

Responses included:

Parents are being left out of planning processes, and there is a train wreck ahead because of it.
There is absolutely a lack of information from educators; state and local level about how children with disabilities fit into the process of reforming schools.
My state is leaving parents and students with disabilities out of the process; there are no incentives for local education agencies (LEA’s) to do the right thing.
My state is also leaving parents and students with disabilities out of the loop; and we worry about quality of education because we have such a low percentage of certified teachers working.
There are systems change activities in my state, but the state education agencies (SEAs) have excluded all other stakeholders, and moving to a voucher seems to be happening to get a quality education.
The state is leaving children with diverse needs behind in conception and implementation of all school reform plans.
We are very far behind on other issues; definition and examples of reform really, truly happening are unclear; we need to learn from other states so that we can be one step ahead when the time comes; one thing is clear, reform must happen in the context of community. At the national level, reform efforts are political and without substance and without impact on the local level. More information for all parents is needed.
Money is an issue in my state, there is less tagged money for children with disabilities, and the legislature is looking at charter schools. Parent knowledge and involvement in these decisions are critical.
Prior reform efforts did not lead to real change; children with disabilities were not even mentioned; there were inadequate responses to parent advocacy to have them included; school finance is an issue; litigation did not lead to real change to make schools better; reform practices have been attempts to patch the system because no one seems to know how to make real change for the better happen; and ultimately in the end parents and children have been blamed.
There is potential for more harm than good with school reform because the children with the most to lose are not at the table for discussion, and their losses will be severe.

These responses demonstrated a wide range of policies for standards-based school reform efforts being used from state to state. In addition, the responses demonstrated variety in those identified as stakeholders in the discussions about standards-based education reform policies and practices.

The discussion of the relationship of laws to these efforts highlighted the inter-connectedness of standards-based efforts to educational practices that are central to Title 1 of Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994, Goals 2000, IDEA, ADA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Acts of 1973. Eileen Ordover provided numerous examples of how these laws addressed the involvement of students with disabilities in the process of defining content and performance standards. Specifically, the emphasis on how the laws assist parents and educators in the process of ensuring that the question, What do we want all students to know and be able to do? includes students with disabilities.

As the discussion indicated, individual states have used various strategies to plan for students with disabilities in the processes of developing content and performance standards. The length of the session provided enough time to only get this discussion started. The discussion will continue in future conference calls and fact sheets that are forthcoming from Mary Falvey from California State Univer-sity and Barbara Buswell from PEAK.

Thanks to the support of PAVE and TASK, the PEER Project conducted a day-long session on school reform at the TAPP West Regional Conference in Anaheim, California, in which forty people attended. The June ‘96 issue of PEER Review will let you in on the details.

Souhegan H.S.--From a Parent’s Perspective

Souhegan High School in Amherst, New Hampshire, is a fascinating place. It is a fairly new school which was designed with community and student input to meet students’ needs. Souhegan approaches curriculum and instruction in innovative ways, and, from the start, supports for students with disabilities have been a natural, integrated part of the school rather than a specialized, separate entity. Barb Buswell, a parent from Colorado, observed Souhegan High School in January of this year. Following are her reflections from visiting this site.

In its school profile, Souhegan states that its goal is to attempt “to craft a culture born of respect, trust, and courage, based on the principles of the Coalition of Essential Schools, where the spirit of teaching and learning is driven by student inquiry, reflection, and passion.” This profile identifies how implementation of this goal is approached. Practically speaking, this means that most seniors are enrolled in a 110-minute, interdisciplinary, team-taught Senior Seminar; all students are participating members of advisory groups that meet daily for 25 minutes to attend to both academic and personal issues; all seniors are required to create, develop, and publicly exhibit a final Senior Project; all students have been encouraged to become involved in the creation of a student majority governance structure for the school (Community Council); and all seniors have been called upon to exert their leadership in setting a tone of civility, reciprocity, and excellence in a school that is free of bells, bathroom passes, and study halls.

Souhegan is a member of the Coalition of Essential Schools, spear-headed by Dr. Ted Sizer at Brown University. Therefore, it is organized around several key essential considerations and questions. These impact the way that curriculum is developed and teaching and learning are approached. In interdisciplinary teams, teachers outline key questions that they want students to address and then structure learning experiences so that the students pursue these questions vigorously.

Instruction is lively and interactive at Souhegan. Rather than lecture being followed by questions from worksheets or textbooks, there is small group exploration, research in the resource center and via telecommunications, and intensive work on projects. Teachers structure learning activities to be vigorous and exciting.

Interesting things of note to a visitor:

Students are not tracked into high or low level classes. They are grouped heterogeneously which means that all students--even those who have disabilities-- learn together in general education classes. Students who receive advanced placement credits do not take special “AP” classes. Instead they assume responsibility for doing more complex, in-depth exploration of course material and completing additional independent projects guided by the teachers.

The school is organized on a block schedule, and many courses are taught in an interdisciplinary fashion. When students are not in class, they are expected to assume responsibility for their work. Some students study in the resource center using the reference materials there; others use the internet via computers. Still other students go to the school gym to shoot baskets. Students might go to the music area to pick a few songs on a guitar or practice for an upcoming performance. Or a student might stretch out on a carpeted bench in a corner of the building to read quietly. Students can go to the school store to purchase a cup of espresso. Students appear to use their time well--not goofing off, being noisy, or distracting others.

The discipline code is interesting at Souhegan as well. Rather than developing policies to try to control the 10% of students who typically don’t follow rules easily, the policies at this school are designed for the 90% of the students who are focused on coming to school to learn.

Technology is an important dimension of this school. Each student upon registering gets an email account. Students use email throughout their day to communicate with each other and with teachers. Furthermore, only half of the resource center’s resources are in print form since there is significant, more current information available via technology.

A visit to classrooms revealed peer teaching. In an English-social studies classroom, groups of students were giving reports (their exhibitions) to the class. They demonstrated their knowledge to their peers, teaching them what they had learned. Their classmates, and the teachers, listened attentively and then questioned the presenters about concepts and issues. The reports were creative, fun, filled with important information, and taken seriously.

Students with and without IEPs receive support from the special education teacher. Since there are no separate special education classes, it is not easy to locate those students in the school who are receiving special education supports. For each grade level team, a teacher with special education credentials is assigned to provide case management. This teacher, who is an equal team member, then shares responsibility for curricular and instructional tasks for that grade level. In addition, he or she is a resource to all the students on the team for tailoring learning activities for particular students. Accommo-dations for student differences are made for all students, not just students who have identified learning problems. Teacher assistants in the school serve the primary teachers and the classes as a whole as well as provide particular supports that an individual student requires.

The school building was designed with broad input from the community, and students were an integral part of this process. They were asked by the architects and administration under what conditions they felt they could learn most effectively. What would the feel of the building be? What kinds of spaces did the students want, quiet ones? noisy ones? Based on this input as well as that of the leadership and teachers, the architects designed a building to meet these learning needs. For students who like a quiet, private place to study and work, there are many crannies in the building at the end of a hall where a carpeted bench is placed. Also, there are a number of gathering places where small groups of kids can talk, and computer areas are interspersed throughout the building.

Visiting Souhegan High School was exciting. Though Souhegan had the advantage of being able to design a new building and school community from the ground up, the processes they used in doing so reflect carefully planned decisions. The development of the school, its culture, curriculum and instructional strategies involved all of the major stakeholders in the community, including students and families. This approach can also happen in buildings that are not brand new. Visiting innovative schools such as Souhegan can trigger new ideas, affirm existing ideas, and consider ways to think about creating change in a school’s culture, classrooms and curriculum approaches. Learning from the experiences of other educators, parents and students is a powerful and important tool for creating schools that educate ALL children well.

For information about the Coalition of Essential Schools, contact:
Box 1969, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912

For information about Souhegan High School, contact the principal, Robert Mackin, 412 Boston Post Rd., Am-herst, NH 03031 or call 603-673-8786.

The PEER Project is planning site visits to schools modeling innovative reform and restructuring practices for ALL children. If you know of such a school, please let us know.

Ed Reform and the New Media

On Tuesday, June 4, 1996, The American Prospect Magazine is sponsoring a one-day conference entitled, “Educational Reform and the New Media,” at the MIT Media Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The purpose of the conference is to explore the impact of the new media on learning and whether or not the new media is a diversion from education’s real problems. One activity at the conference will be a public forum.

Participants in the public forum will include: Howard Gardner, Graduate School of Education, Harvard; Mitch Kapor, founder, Lotus Development; Kathryn Montgomery, Center for Media Education; Mitchel Resnick, MIT; Sherry Turkle, MIT; and Seymour Papert, MIT. The panel will be moderated by Paul Starr, coeditor of The American Prospect.

“Today’s efforts to transform the schools with new technology are haunted by the failures of the past,” Starr said. “Many of us are persuaded that something different is happening now, but we need to ask some hard questions about how the new media ought to develop to best serve our children and our communities.

The American Prospect is a bimonthly magazine founded in 1990 by Robert Kuttner, a syndicated columnist; Robert B. Reich, now Labor Secretary; and Starr, who is a professor of sociol-ogy at Princeton and Pulitzer Prize winner for his book, The Social Trans-formation of American Medicine.

For more information about the conference or the public forum, please contact Neerja Sharma at The American Prospect at (617) 547-2950 or by email to tap@world.std.com

Cybercolumn

by Carolyn Romano

This issue’s cybercolumn on email netiquette is courtesy of Kaitlin Duck Sherwood from “A Beginner’s Guide to Effective Email,” an internet document in the public domain. Sherwood provides useful pointers on email context, layout, intonation and gestures.

Sherwood on Context

With email, you can’t assume anything about your correspondent’s location, time, frame of mind, mood, health, marital status, affluence, age, or gender. This means, among other things, that you need to be very, very careful about giving your reader some context.

Instead of sending email that says: "yes", say:

>Are you going to have the left-handed thromblemeister specs done by Thursday?
yes

The ">" here is a relatively standard convention for quoting someone else’s words.

The rule of thumb [is] that half of the lines in an email message should be your own. (If you must include the whole message that you are replying to, include it after your response.)

Sherwood on Page Layout

Use Shorter Paragraphs. Frequently email is read in a document window with scrollbars. While scrollbars are nice, it makes it harder to visually track long paragraphs. Consider breaking up your paragraphs to only a few sentences apiece.

Keep Line Length to 75 Characters. Most software to read mail does not automatically wrap text (adjust what words go on what line). Some mail readers truncate everything past the eightieth character. A good rule of thumb is to keep your lines under seventy-five characters long. Why seventy-five and not eighty? Because you should leave a little room for the indentation or quote marks your correspondent might want if he/she is going to quote a piece of your email in his/her reply.

Keep it Short. My rule of thumb is that you should try to keep everything on one page. In most cases, this means twenty-five lines of text.

Sherwood on Intonation

While you cannot make your voice higher or lower, louder or softer to denote emphasis, there are games you can play with text to convey vocal inflection.

If you want to give something mild emphasis, you should enclose it in asterisks, e.g., I *said* that I was going to go last Thursday. You can also capitalize the first letter only of words to give light emphasis: “While Bob may say that you should never turn it past nine, this is not Cast In Stone. It will explode if you turn it up to eleven, but anything under ten should work just fine.”

If you want to indicate stronger emphasis, use all capital letters and toss in some extra exclamation marks. For example, if someone asks, “Should I just boost the power on the thrombo?”, your reply might be “NO!!!! If you turn it up to eleven, you’ll overheat the motors and IT MIGHT EXPLODE!!” Note that you should use capital letters sparingly, as it conveys the message that you are shouting.

Sherwood on Gestures

While you are unable to accompany your words with hand or facial gestures, there are several ASCII stand-ins for gestures. The most common three are

:-) (I’m happy.)
;-) (I’m kidding.)
:-( (I’m sad.)

To understand these symbols, look at them sideways. Other gestures:

%^P (I’m ill.)
>:-< (I’m angry.)
:-o (I’m astonished.)

You are only limited by your imagination.

Join PEER’s Listserv

The PEER Project has just created a listserv (an Internet discussion group) for anyone interested in discussing school reform and restructuring and its impact on students with disabilities. If you would like to subscribe to the listserv (i.e., receive email messages from others interested in the topic), send an email message to scrane@fcsn.org with the words Subscribe First Name LastName in the body of the message.

To post a message to the discussion group, send your thoughts to peer@fcsn.org, and your message will be distributed to the rest of the group.

If you have any questions, please contact Carolyn Romano at 617-482-2915 or email cromano@fcsn.org.

Hot Websites

...on school reform and restructuring, education, government

Parents Engaged in Education Reform (PEER) Project

NICHCY

Center for Education Reform

Two Inner City Schools Try to Reform

Daily Report Card

Internal Revenue Service

U.S. House of Representatives

...on other useful resources

Yellow Pages

Census Bureau

PBS

The American Prospect

Programs, Projects and Publications

The PEER Project is collecting information from organizations, agencies and projects actively involved in improving education and school services for all students. The emphasis of this collection is on (1) parent-school collaboration and partnerships, (2) parent involvement in school restructuring efforts, (3) parent participation in improving equity and excellence in education, and (4) community involvement in school reform and restructuring.

Programs & Projects

National Coalition for Parent Involvement in Education (NCPIE); Family Involvement Partnership for Learning (FIPL). NCPIE is dedicated to family, school and community partnerships in schools throughout the United States. In 1994, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Education, it established the FIPL to focus on ways in which community members can support children’s learning. Now in continuing collaboration with the Department of Education, FIPL and other organizations are developing a center to provide resources and technical assistance that help families, communities and schools to establish effective ways of working together to positively impact opportunities for learning by their children.

For more information about NCPIE, FIPL and the new center, contact Sue Ferguson at the Institute for Educational Leadership, 1001 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 310, Washington, DC 20036 or call 202-822-8405.

The Right Question Project, Inc. The Right Question Project is a national non-profit organization that works to increase active decision-making by community members to build stronger involvement by parents in being active stakeholders in their children’s education and to provide training that builds capacity in communities and organizations.

For more information, contact Director, The Right Question Project, Inc., 167 Holland Street, Somerville, MA 02144 or call 617-628-4070.

Center on Families, Communities, Schools and Children’s Learning (at Boston University, Johns Hopkins University, Wheelock College, Yale University, University of Washington, Temple University, and Michigan State University). The Center on Families, Communities, Schools and Children’s Learning is a consortium of organizations doing work to identify strategies and examples of the benefits to students of active parent and community collaboration with schools.

For more information, contact: John Hollifield, Dissemination Director, 3505 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218. Phone: 410-516-8800.

Publications

Darling-Hammond, L., Snyder, J. Ancess, L., Einbender, A.L., Goodwin, & MacDonald, T.M. (1993). Creating Learner-Centered Accountability. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools and Teaching.

Viadero, D. & West, P. (1993). Standards Deviation: Benchmark Setting is Marked by Diversity. Education Week, 12, 38.

Ysseldyke, J.E., & Thurlow, M.L. (1992, Fall. Outcomes are for Special Educators too. Educational Leadership, 24, 1.

Upcoming Activities

May 30, PEER Project workshop on school reform at TAPP Northeast Regional Conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

June 4, “Educational Reform and the New Media” Conference, at MIT Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (See Ed Reform and the New Media, above).

June 9, PEER Project workshop on school reform at TAPP Midwest Regional Conference in Bloomington, Minnesota.

July 11, PEER Project focus group at the Experimental Projects’ Leadership Retreat on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Letters to the Editor

The process of state-wide assessment is one of the cornerstones of standards-based education reform policies and practices being used in the restructuring of schools. Have you heard any discussions that included the following statements:

"All students must pass Algebra I to graduate.";

"School Reform holds only students accountable, not the educational systems and teachers educating them.";

"We plan to get waivers for all students with disabilities, so that they do not have to participate in the new state-wide testing."?

Please let the PEER Project know what is happening in your state in terms of assessment. Send your thoughts and/or quotes about assessment of students with disabilities to Jacque Davis, PEER Project, Federation for Children with Special Needs, 95 Berkeley Street, Ste. 104, Boston, MA 02116. Fax Jacque at 617-695-2939 or email her at jdavis@fcsn.org. You may also post your thoughts on the PEER Project’s new Listserv (See Join PEER’s Listserv, above). To do so, send comments about assessment in your state to peer@fcsn.org.

If you require this newsletter in an alternative format, please contact Susan Crane at(617-482-2915 or scrane@fcsn.org

The PEER Project is at the Federation for Children with special Needs, and is funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (H029K50208). Opinions or points of view do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Department of Education or Offices within it.

Web Page by Carolyn Romano cromano@fcsn.org

Last updated 6/7/96
URL: http://www.fcsn.org/peer/pr/pr3.htm