Fast Report
Harder GED reflects standards movement
• Just as states and school districts have raised their academic standards, the American Council on Education (ACE) has come out with new harder-to-pass GED (General Educational Development) tests.
The GED is used to confer a high school credential on adults who have not graduated from a traditional high school.
All of the new tests will have more business-related texts, ACE reports. The writing test will have an increased emphasis on organization, and the social studies test will have at least one excerpt from the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, or the Federalist Papers. Test-takers will be required to use a calculator for the math test.
The GED is "changing for one really big reason: Every state has undergone or will undergo a standards initiative, and we have to mirror what the states are doing," says Lyn Schaefer, director of test development at the GED Testing Service, a component of ACE.
More minority teachers needed
• America's schools do not have an adequate supply of minority teachers, and the existing supply is expected to diminish further, according to a report by the Atlanta-based Southern Education Foundation.
According to Policy Perspectives on Diversity in Teaching and School Leadership, "The demographic mismatch between students and teachers has reached the point that many students of color can go through 13 years of public education without meeting a single teacher from their same racial or ethnic group."
Currently, minority teachers comprise 13 percent of the nation's teaching force, a figure that is expected to drop to 5 percent or less by 2005. By contrast, nearly 40 percent of public school students in the U.S. are minorities, primarily African American and Hispanic.
Even in central cities, minority teachers comprise only about a third of the teaching force. Outside of urban areas, 91 percent of teachers are white.
The study cites research studies that show:
• Minority teachers bring an inherent understanding of the backgrounds, attitudes, and experiences of minority students–and thus can help inform majority teachers about effective ways to interact with students of color.
• The presence of minority teachers in mostly white schools deflates stereotypes and creates positive role models.
• African-American pre-service teachers are more likely than their white peers to integrate culturally relevant material in the classroom.
• African-American teachers are more likely to describe African-American male students as "intellectually capable."
Many high-poverty schools succeed
• There are thousands of high-performing public schools in the United States that enroll large proportions of poor or minority students, according to a new report by the Education Trust.
Dispelling the Myth Revisited identifies schools in each state with math or reading achievement levels in the top one-third of all schools that also ranked in the top one-third of the state for poverty levels and African-American and Latino enrollments.
Among schools that meet this criteria, there are:
• 3,592 high-performing, high-poverty schools;
• 2,305 high-performing, high-minority schools; and
• 1,320 high-performing, high-poverty, and high-minority schools.
As a group, these schools educate more than 2 million public school students.
According to the Education Trust, many of these schools share the same characteristics, including the extensive use of state or local standards to design the curriculum, assess student work, and evaluate teachers.
They also spend more time on reading and math, invest substantially in professional development, have comprehensive systems to monitor individual student performance and assist struggling students before they fall behind, and involve parents in helping students meet the standards.
NSBA will study after-school programs
• NSBA has received a grant of nearly $500,000 from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation to develop a comprehensive resource to encourage local school boards to provide extended-day learning opportunities in public schools.
One of the key steps in the project involves identifying successful school-based, after-school programs.
School board members with information about such projects or school board policies on extended learning and after-school programs are encouraged to contact Mike Wessely at NSBA, (703) 838-6760.