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Education Week magazine released today its annual Quality Counts report, expanding its focus on examining state education policies to tracking state efforts to move students seamlessly from pre-K to college.

Find here a special report on North Carolina, which ranks toward the middle (between Virginia at the top and New Mexico at the bottom) when it comes to students' chances for success, education alignment between grade levels and elementary and secondary performance.

North Carolina's strengths (more accurately, above national average): its predominantly English-speaking parents, middle school mathematics, early childhood education and Advanced Placement Courses.

It's weaknesses: high school graduation, college readiness and participation, and middle school reading.

Evaluating states based on their "success indicators" seems to be fair for the most part, but I wonder how relevant some of the indicators will be 10 to 20 years from now. For example, full-time employment is one category, but it's possible that many adults will no longer have full-time jobs because of economic changes. Also interesting is how the homeschooling movement will play into this. If a state includes a larger percentage of parents who homeschool, will that make their score, say for preschool enrollment, go down?

What do you think of the report?

Here's a report from the federal government on teen drug use declining.

For another source on teen drug use, check out the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey (data from 1991-2005) compiled by the Centers for Disease Control.

The school board meets at 6 p.m. Tuesday, usual location (712 N. Eugene St.) Check out the agenda here.

A couple items of note:

Eastern Guilford: Specifically, requesting county commissioners to release money from state lottery funds and state public school building capital funds to combine with $5 million in insurance money to pay for the initial work to rebuild Eastern.

(Note: The insurance money is what the district has received so far. Eileen Townsend, chief of insurance with the state Department of Instruction, said Friday that no settlement amount has been reached yet. She doesn't expect that until mid-January at the earliest, but most likely late January. State adjusters are still cataloging the loss and the district still has to assess the damage and come up with what it feels is the loss amount, she said. The two will be compared and an amount settled, she said.)

In all, the $8 million for Phase I construction at Eastern would "cover design costs, soft costs (advertising fees, bid document reproduction costs, engineering/topography/boundary surveys, soil test borings), grading and parking," according to the agenda.

Also for Eastern, check out a proposed, revised calendar to bring the now separated campuses onto the same calendar. Under the proposal, neither campus would lose part of spring break due to make up school or work days and would share the same grading periods.

Here are the current calendars for underclassmen and upperclassmen.

Academy at Smith: District officials want to use alternative contracting methods to do work there. Based on the agenda, it looks like the alternative method (breaking down more of the work into smaller packages to bid instead of all the work at once) is being recommended as a way to increase minority/women business enterprise participation in the project.

Eastern Guilford High School has partnered with Barnes & Noble to raise money for the school's media center. North Carolina authors have agreed to come to Barnes & Noble at Friendly Shopping Center Jan. 14-19 to sign copies of their books with a percentage of sales going back to our the media center. Details about the fundraiser are here
and here.

North Carolina leads the country both in the number of new national board certified teachers and total number of teachers who have received the certification over time, according to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

The state had a total 11,325 certified teachers last year, with 1,525 teachers receiving their certification that year.

Four N.C. school districts ranked among the nation's top 20 in terms of the number of teachers who were certified last year: Wake is second with 186, Charlotte-Mecklenburg is fourth with 142, Guilford is 10th with 72 and Forsyth is 18th with 49.

The state has proposed a more stringent core course of study that would begin in 2008-09 (affecting this year's seventh-graders). Officials will conduct regional meetings to discuss the changes and gather comments from the public.

The meeting for our area hasn't been finalized, but will be either Feb. 15 or 22 from 6:30-8:30 p.m. at Randleman High School in Randolph County.

Just in case you missed it last night, the school board gave no inclination it will switch gears on plans to build a pod village for Eastern Guilford high school students to use in the fall. But some parents plan to argue their case once again before county commissioners, hoping to use the district's request for state funds as leverage to get the Carolina Corporate Center.

Not sure what the commissioners can do. If they deny request of the funds, that could delay the construction of a new high school, something parents don't want either.

In other news, board member Deena Hayes stood by her comments on Dec. 19 that referenced the historical period of slaves and slavemasters. She said parents mistook her comments for racist accusations against them when she was simply trying to make a point that the mingling of white and black students does not automatically signify a good relationship between the two. She said she was not calling Very Strong Needs students or parents slavemasters.

"If you have issue with that I suggest you check yourself on that," Hayes said Tuesday. "I meant what I said."

Education Week has opened its (online) doors; check out this noted education publication's stories and archives for free through Jan. 18.

Check out today's story on elevated levels of lead paint being found at McIver in October. Some parents are concerned that their autistic children may be at risk and want to know when the district will remove the paint.

UPDATE

High school students taking end-of-course exams for first semester will take the tests Wednesday through Monday in Guilford. The district originally planned to test students Tuesday through Thursday.

But Guilford and other districts added more time after finding out that it was taking students longer than predicted to finish the new tests. The state changed several end-of-course tests this year, making them tougher and longer. School districts that tested before winter break had some students who spent 3 1/2 or more hours on the exams. The state estimated it would take about 162 minutes.

UPDATE: Changes also affect sports.

Guilford County Schools invites parents to discuss a proposal to create a K-8 entertainment technology school in the High Point community.

The first meeting takes place from 4 to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 23, at the High Point Chamber of Commerce, 1634 N. Main St. The second meeting takes place from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Feb. 6. at Triangle Lake Montessori School, 2401 Triangle Lake Road.

Tony Lamair Burks II, director of magnet and choice schools, will facilitate the discussion and gather ideas from the community. Call 378-8832 for more information.

Check out this story in the Press-Register in Alabama. The ordinance applies to about 3,000 students attending schools in the city limits of Bayou La Batre, according to the story. Bayou La Batre is near the Gulf Coast, about 20 miles southwest of Mobile.

It will be interesting to see discipline data from these schools a year from now.

Guilford County Schools and the Guilford Education Alliance met today to discuss ways to improve local teacher working conditions. To jog your memory, the district participated in a state-commissioned survey to determine if teachers thought they had enough time and professional development to do their jobs well, adequate facilities and resources, empowerment and leadership.

The Center for Teaching Quality partnered with the Guilford Education Alliance to analyze the data. The local schools advocacy group later partnered with local teachers to make recommendations to the district.

What do you think of the Guilford Education Alliance's recommendations? (They are listed under the 'points for consideration' portions of the report.) Anything missing?

Commissioners on Thursday approved the release of $8 million in insurance money to begin the rebuilding of Eastern High, which was destroyed by fire Nov. 1.

About 80 or so parents, students and community members from Eastern showed up for Thursday's county commissioners meeting. They had a lo-o-ong wait. Commissioners didn't even get to the school issue until after 11 p.m.

Two parents spoke, telling commissioners that they feel the school board did not give serious consideration to using the Carolina Corporate Center (former Lucent Technologies building) as a temporary site. Instead, the board has pushed forward with plans to create a so-called "pod village," a series of modular classrooms that are bigger and sturdier than typical mobile classrooms that are used to create extra space at schools.

Several Eastern parents at Thursday's meeting were worried that the school system wouldn't be able to complete the pod village before the 2007-08 school year starts on Aug. 28.

The Guilford County Board of Education discussed this weekend a proposal by Superintendent Terry Grier to offer up to two years of college at GTCC free to graduating students. Check out stories that ran Sunday and Monday.

Board member Amos Quick said he thought the idea was "revolutionary."

What do you think of the proposal? Would you be willing to pay additional county taxes to expand higher education opportunities for this county's students?

What do you think of the decision by Welsh Education Minister Jane Davidson to scrap most standardized testing? Will American schools ever reach this point?

Check out this new report on dropouts by the Alliance for Excellent Education.

The report cites research by Cecilia Rouse, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, that shows dropouts cost the nation $260,000 over the course of their lifetime.

Looking at it another way, the nation’s economy would have benefited from an additional $309 billion in income over the lifetime of the 2006 dropouts.

The Southern Regional Education Board, whose member states include North Carolina, responds.

The Guilford Education Alliance recently posted a volunteer toolkit on its Web site. The alliance partnered with the Guilford County Council of PTAs, Guilford County Schools and Volunteer Center of Greensboro to create a 10-step toolkit designed to strengthen local volunteer programs.

Last week, Guilford County Board of Education chose to name a new elementary school after a person, instead of its routine of naming schools based on location on a map.

Although a project team recommended naming the 89,000-square-foot school Pleasant Ridge Elementary after the road on which it was built, the school board ultimately named it in honor of the late E.P. Pearce Jr.,
who served as superintendent of the old county school district from 1959 to 1978.

About 20 people supported the idea at a meeting Thursday. The public has 20 days to comment before the board makes it official in late February.

“I frankly could care less if we ever name a school for a direction,” Jeff Belton, board member, said Thursday.

The state on Wednesday released its annual dropout report.

Guilford's rate rose from 2.98 percent to 3.41 percent. When you look at how many students that represents, you see that 766 students dropped out, up from 644 the year before. That's 122 additional students. This is looking at just grades 9-12. The report also includes information for the 7-12 range and includes some elementary schools where students dropped out.

Check out individual schools here. (It's hard to read the report, which is tiny and not in Excel format. I apologize, but we didn't have time to convert it.)