It’s been a busy few weeks for Connecticut, culminating in Governor Dannel Malloy’s signing of the comprehensive education reform law earlier today. The signing ceremony took place at the state’s Capitol building where the Governor was surrounded by legislators from both sides of the aisle who worked together to hammer out the compromise bill which will raise education funding in the state by over $100 million.

The law’s provisions also include a new plan to turnaround failing school districts and a new tougher teacher evaluation system which will allow districts to link tenure decision to teacher performance. Although the Governor, who made education reform one of the primary goals of his administration, didn’t get everything he asked for in the original proposal he submitted to the legislature, during the signing, he called the final law “meaningful.” Whatever its impact, even getting it in front of Malloy’s pen should count as an achievement of sorts, as the negotiations process to reconcile the views of both parties and the Governor was difficult, long and often fraught.

Both sides of the education debate can take away a sense of victory from the bill’s final form. Charter school advocates will see a substantial funding increase for charter schools and other programs favored by supporters of school choice. The per-student grant to charter schools is set to increase to $11,500 for the 2014-15 school year from $9,400 currently. The bill will also expand the early childhood programs to create an additional 1,000 slots specifically for kids from low-income families.

Some of the provisions from the Malloy’s original version that didn’t make the cut were the new increased powers for his appointed education commissioner to deal with underperforming schools and unsatisfactory teachers. Instead, these decisions will be spread among the members of the newly-created Commissioner’s Network which will take charge of turnaround plans for the 25 schools in the state currently considered chronically underperforming. The Network will also be in charge of putting together an evaluation system for administrators and principals, who, along with the teachers, will be assessed on an annual basis going forward.

The co-chairs of the education committee, Sen. Andrea Stillman, (D) Waterford, and Rep. Andrew Fleischmann, (D) West Hartford, came up with a bill legislative leaders used as a basis for negotiation with Malloy’s assistants.  What emerged gave the governor enough that he could stand alongside the legislators and declare victory.

“We will not fix what’s broken overnight. We can’t,” Malloy said. “But with tonight’s activity, we begin.”

Stillman also spoke at the signing ceremony, expressing her pride in the final bill and the effort put in by lawmakers to get it passed before the legislature recessed for the year. The last three months of this year’s session were designated by Malloy for the debate on the education bill, and he said he expected to see a version on his desk before the state lawmakers left town. The final vote on the bill took place only last Tuesday.

The timing couldn’t have been tighter, as the legislative session is scheduled to conclude tomorrow.

Synapses are the connections made by the brain’s information-carrying cells, neurons, that “wire” our experience into knowledge, skills, and emotions.  Synapses build neuronal strings that form a foundational network that starts in utero and continues after birth when life experiences flood the baby’s brain.

Julia Steiny

Eventually, a typical 22-year-old male has about 105,000 MILES of neuronal strings in his brain.

The problem is that bad early wiring inevitably produces problems later on.

The way Dr. Charles Zeneah puts it, “The brain grows from the bottom up.  If we can establish lower-level capacities, the rest is easier.  Like a house, if the foundation is well constructed, it’s a whole lot easier to fix, if you have to.  As time goes on, the window of opportunity to change the child’s trajectory starts to diminish, and the cost of correcting a maladaptive brain goes up.”

Zeneah was in town to address Rhode Island’s Infant Mental Health Association, on:  “When is it too late?  Intervening after early adversity.”

A professor of psychiatry at Tulane, Zeneah is a board member of Zero to Three.  They collaborated on Neurons to Neighborhoods, a seminal book, fully 2 inches thick, presenting evidence that shows how failing to nurture healthy infant brains, right from the start, has dire consequences.

So even if you only care about tax dollars, know that fabulous mothering at the outset radically reduces the cost of special education, residential placement and prisons.

Still, policy-makers and the public are having a horrible time wrapping their heads around the importance of strong mother/child attachments.  But a healthy young brain is precisely what establishes a resilient, creative, trusting foundation for the inevitable adversities that all children will face when older and more independent.

Zeneah always shows videos, often heart-breaking ones, to make his points.  Today we’ll hang out with “Harold.”  We meet him at 15 months old.  He’s in child-protective care because Mom dropped him off at a neighbor’s and said she’d be back in an hour.  After several days she hadn’t shown up.

In Louisiana Zeneah created an Infant Mental Health Team program that works with child-protective services, the courts, and kids like Harold.  The Team supports both child and mother, if possible, to salvage that relationship.  When they can’t, after plenty of trying, they recommend the termination of parental rights to release the child to a loving mother as soon as possible. (All states need these teams.)

Zeneah insists that all kids need a mom, one specific person committed to the child, who’s nurturing and responsive, over time.  Babies must be “the apple of someone’s eye.”  Food, shelter and clothing are by no means enough.

In the video, Harold is weird.  He sit frozen in an uncomfortable-looking posture.  His biological mother tries to engage him with bubbles, conversation and toys.  He watches her intently, but is otherwise non-responsive.

Often, when researchers observe mother/child relationships, Mom leaves the child alone for a minute and then returns.  When Harold’s mother steps out, he crawls awkwardly to the door, gurgling a creepy, desperate cry.   When Mom returns, Harold acknowledges her with a little smile, but heads right past her out the door.  Not much attachment there.  She picks him up, but he can’t be comforted.

That video was taken when he was living with a first foster mom who was overwhelmed with caring for too many challenged people.  So they gave Harold a new placement where he could get more individualized attention.

The next clip shows us Harold at 18 months, after only 6 weeks with the new foster mom.  He thinks she’s a blast.  He’s walking, chasing the bubbles this time, smiling, verbalizing.  And when she returns after the minute of absence, he throws himself into her arms.

Six weeks.

“Harold’s a new man.  He’s in love, and he’s all right.”

With the right nurture and responsiveness, those 50,000 synapses a minute built Harold a new attitude and approach to life.

Infant brains are hardwired to attach to a mom.  If that early attachment gets screwed up, the child is not “securely attached.”   After 22 months, building a strongly-attached relationship gets harder and harder.  It’s critical to get it right the first time.

Zeneah laments, “The biggest disappointment in my career was in the 1980s, when relationships and relationship disorders were getting attention, but little research was done.  We still don’t have good descriptions of relationships themselves, so we can’t communicate effectively about the problems we are dealing with.  Even so, we know quality parenting matters.  But when it comes to foster care parents, we’re desperate.  Please take this kid.  Do you have a pulse?  Instead, we should figure out who’s really good at mothering and use marketing to recruit them.  So much involves the commitment to the child.  That’s one thing we can improve.”

He recommends finding and paying super-moms.  By all means, do everything you can to improve mother/child relations.  But if and when that fails, intervene with someone really good.

Harold’s behavior tells us his second foster parent has the super-mom chops.  Support more of the likes of her.  Create professional super-mom jobs AND develop a healthier bunch to join the workforce later on.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears at GoLocalProv.com and GoLocalWorcester.  She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island.  She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data.  For more detail, see juliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.

Sir Michael Wilshaw, the head of UK education body Oftsed, has doubled down in the face of criticism from teacher and head teacher unions. Sir Michael has slammed whining heads and teachers and said that they don’t know what the true meaning of stress really is, noting that the problems of the malcontents dwarfed in comparison to those faced by more than one million young people who had been failed by the school education experience and were now left jobless and hopeless.

He said that failure to improve the education system risked a return to the days in which heads were not prepared to tackle poor teaching.

“We need to learn from this and challenge those who have power invested in them to make the difference, but too often make excuses for poor performance – it’s just too hard, the children are too difficult, the families are too unsupportive, this job is far too stressful,” Sir Michael said.

Sir Michael further commented that head teachers should be grateful for their privileged position and recognize that they have more power, freedom and financial compensation than ever before and that the country had no need for leaders whose first recourse during problems was to blame someone else.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the latest salvo in the ongoing, increasingly acrimonious, war between Sir Michael and the union reps did little to ease tensions.

Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: “Already fatally damaged in the profession’s eyes, Ofsted risks losing any remaining credibility it has if it continues to focus on failure.”

Christine Blower, Bousted’s opposite number at the National Union of Teachers, concurred:

“Yet again Michael Wilshaw is choosing to attack and undermine schools. Teachers coping with the minority of pupils who display persistent unruly behaviour need the support of their colleagues and leadership teams, not thinly veiled threats from a punitive inspection system.”

The National Association of Head Teachers recently held their annual conference at which they threatened to hold a ‘vote of no confidence’ in Sir Michael and call for his sacking.

Sir Michael hasn’t been afraid to take a confrontational stance with the unions since first being appointed January this year. Almost immediately he said that a quarter of head teachers in the UK were underperforming and shouldn’t be allowed to continue getting away with shoddy work justified with tired excuses of poverty and deprivation when exam grades were called into question.

Critics of Sir Michael who think his concern for children is a cover for attacking unions should note that upon appointment he also derided poor parents that considered the school as a pseudo-babysitter rather than an educational establishment and the taint of celebrity culture which had eroded old fashioned values such as honesty and hard work.

Teachers at Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools haven’t had a pay raise in four years after the state froze teacher pay in 2008-9 due to budget concerns. Interim Superintendent Hugh Hattabaugh has presented the county with a request for $355.9 million, $27.5 million more than the school officials asked for last year, primarily to fund a 3% raise for the 18,000 employees who have seen their wages fall in real terms over the last half decade.

Hattabaugh is already on record as saying that it’s time to redress the imbalance that led to a pay freeze for teachers while city and county employees got their standard pay increases,

“We’re at a critical juncture,” said Hattabaugh, arguing that as enrollment continues to grow, CMS should reward teachers for their increasingly difficult work with fewer resources.

“We come here today not (for) a handout, but because we’ve done more with less – a lot less,” said school board chairman Ericka Ellis-Stewart.

However Republican Commissioners such as Neil Cooksey say that if recruiting effective teachers and providing them with fair compensation really is a priority for the school board then this should be reflected in the board’s base budget.

“From this side of the table, it looks like you’ve kind of secured the fortress of the existing programs,” said Cooksey. “And then whatever additional things you deem to be important that have some political appeal or…sympathy value, you put on us, and then make us the bad guys.”

Republican at-large Commissioner Jim Pendergraph echoed Cooksey’s concerns. “It does put us in a bad position,” he said.

As Caroline McMillan of the Charlotte Observer notes, the Commissioners seem unwilling to cede too much ground after last year’s debacle where the county approved a $26 million funding increase for CMS based on estimates of state funding being cut by 15% and ultimately learned that state funding was only cut by 6.8% allowing CMS a real budget increase of 1.7% on the previous year.

While CMS may protest that the fault lies with the budgeting system and not with them, one can hardly fault the county commissioners for feeling swindled.

The CMS request for an additional $27.5 million to pay for salary increases is especially controversial considering that just prior to the request they spent $10 million on iPads for their classrooms.

“I think it’s unanimous in this room that we are proud you have a system that is well-respected throughout our nation,” said Commission Chairman Harold Cogdell, Jr. “We all agree…we would love to see improved outcomes in the communities. The only disagreement is how we get there.”

County commissioners will submit their proposed budget by the end of this month.

Summer classes used to be the exclusive domain of those students seeking to catch up with their peers, and a superior alternative to being forced to repeat a grade. However, that is increasingly no longer the case. Now, summer school is also an opportunity for students seeking a head start on their studies, as well as those looking to expand their education beyond the subjects offered in most traditional schools.

This is especially true for high school students seeking to gain a competitive advantage in the college admissions process. For students seeking to unlock the genius within, lately, the best choice has been The Dwight Global Leaders Academy, a two-week “immersive” program that will not only offer an academic leg-up, but also allow its students to develop their leadership skills. The program, which will take place between 27th of July and the 10th of August on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, will focus on hands-on and personalized learning and community service.

The Dwight Global Leaders Academy is more than just a summer program.  This seasonal institute is a comprehensive, hands-on leadership program open to high school students from around the world. The academy’s educational model transforms student potential into action. It challenges the traditional, passive notion of leadership and champions innovation, enthusiasm and the unstoppable energy of young people to create beneficial change.

Last year, the academy played host to students from over 25 countries, and from every part of the United States. The participants in DGLA have gone on to attend some of the top colleges and universities both in the U.S. and abroad, such as MIT, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Oxford.

Notable personalities such as Wyclef Jean, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, tennis star Monica Seles and former professional football player Dhani Jones have participated with The Dwight Global Leaders Academy, speaking to and mentoring the students.

The DGLA is affiliated with the Dwight Family of Schools, with satellite campuses and programs in cities around the world. There are Dwight Schools located in London, New York, Vancouver Island, Beijing and Seoul. The Dwight Schools focus on on producing the next generation of leaders and innovators who will then go on to make contribution in their local communities, on the world stage, and in every facet of the future.

The DGLA provides students critical leadership skills so that every young leader can plan, execute and promote their own unique service project and, in the process gain, critical life skills essential for university admittance and beyond.

Two years ago 46 states and the District of Columbia adopted the Common Core national math and reading standards, but the debate over whether they’re appropriate rambles on.

The academic standards have been heavily promoted by the current Obama administration and are widely perceived as a prerequisite for successful application to its Race to the Top education grant program. While not a strict precondition, states adopting the voluntary common standards do receive bonus points in their application.

Conservative opponents of the standards claim that they represent an unjustifiable federal intrusion into education matters that should the sole domain of the States concerned.

“The Common Core takes education out of the hands of South Carolina and parents, so we have no control over what happens in the classroom,” said Michael Fair, a Republican state senator who plans to introduce a measure that would bar his state from spending money on activities related to the standards, such as training teachers and purchasing textbooks.

It’s not a clear partisan divide however as some on the left are against the measures because of the extra work burden they place on already undervalued teachers, while some on the right, such as the right-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, accept that the Common Core standards are of themselves widely superior to the standards currently in use in the majority of states.

One supporter of the measures on the ground is teacher Jahn Owens who, despite acknowledging the concerns of some of her union peers other the extra work caused by their implantation is happy that her students are benefiting:

“These standards take students much deeper into the subjects and force them to do more critical thinking,” Ms. Owens said. “It’s been hard work for the teachers because the implementation was so quick, but we are now more purposeful about student learning.”

There is also a group who believe the implantation is a waste of time as the common standards will have no effect. A researcher from the Brooking Institution think tank released a study this year that showed there was no correlation between quality of standards and improvement of national math and reading scores; states with high and low standard showed the same rate of improvement from 2003-09.

Common Core standards are a result of a push from the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to describe the skills that all students should possess as a result of a world class education. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the high profile funders and the standards set specific detailed goals so progress can be accurately and quantifiably compared in different districts.

A remarkable coalition made up of over 100 pioneers in education and other fields has come together to advocate for extend classroom time in order to reverse the academic decline in low-income schools. Expanded learning, adopted via a redesigned school schedule, including multiple shifts, longer school days, and lengthened academic calendar, is an approach that has been successfully tested in many low-income communities in both United States and abroad. There are pilot expanded learning time programs being tried in Chicago, Boston, New York, Newark and many other localities. The positive results being achieved by these limited test cases are what motivated the formation of the Time to Succeed coalition whose goal to see the number of schools taking advantage of similar tools double over the next two years.

The Obama administration is supporting the expanded time experiments with over $4.6 billion in federal funding, with additional money being allocated at the state and local level.

Luis A. Ubiñas, President of the Ford Foundation and one of the first signatories to the coalition charter, explained that there although there have been many changes in the American day-to-day life in the past century, the school days are still structured to accommodate a way of life that no longer exists.

“To build a vibrant future as a nation, we have to equalize learning opportunities for all children,” said Ubiñas. “Afterschool programs, while engaging and educational, are not available to all kids, and are not enough to solve the core problem. What is needed is a strategic redesign of the school day, where teaching practices are modernized to accommodate the unique needs of today’s world, today’s economy, and today’s family life.”

The Coalition is focusing its effort on low-income communities and disadvantaged schools, where achievement is hampered by inadequate time for learning and a dearth of opportunities outside of school for engagement, and growth.

Research into the reconfigured and expanded school calendar showed that a well-designed school day amplifies the effectiveness of other improvement strategies. In addition, more hours of class time, means that there is less of a tradeoff between time dedicated to bring kids up to class level in literacy and numeracy, and teaching them other essential subjects such as science, music, history, and even physical education.

The coalition co-chair Chris Gabrieli sites the results shown by one of Arizona’s poorest school districts as an example of what can happen when students get more time to learn:

The Balsz Elementary School District #31 in Phoenix, Arizona, has expanded the school year by 20 days for all its students. With the expanded time, the students—90% of whom qualify for free or reduced lunch—are seeing dramatic gains on their reading skills. By the time a kindergärtner in this district reaches eighth grade, they will have received an additional year of school.

A woman from Minnesota and her live-in boyfriend are in jail after allegedly shaving the head of her 12 year old daughter and parading her up and down a street in a diaper. Apparently, this was a punishment doled out for not bringing home satisfactory grades.

Police arrived at the Fridley neighborhood Monday to find a crowd of more than 50 people watching the girl as she ran along the block in nothing but a diaper and a tank top, said Fridley Police Lt. Mike Monsrud. Her hair had also been completely shaved off, Monsrud added. Officers believe she had been outside for about half an hour before a neighbor alerted police.

“When the officer found her, she was crying and hysterical,” Monsrud said.

It is unclear why it took half an hour for neighbors to alert the authorities. The accused, 38 year old Stephanie Ann Broten and 34 year old Darnell Alan Landrum, were arrested by police on suspicion of gross misdemeanor malicious punishment of a child. Lt Monsrud condemned the intentional humiliation of the child as an unacceptable exercising of parental discipline.

“They told her if she didn’t, they would shave her head and put her on ‘diaper duty,’ which I guess meant running up and down the street and cleaning up trash as a form of public humiliation,” Monsrud said. He added that Broten and Landrum questioned the police’s decision to intervene.

“Through the whole contact, and even on the way to jail, both were laughing and thinking it was ridiculous police would get involved in what they said was their parental decision,” he said.

While Broten doesn’t have a criminal record, her partner does have one conviction for disorderly conduct from 1999 and it is reported that police have referred previous cases of physical abuse to child protective services before the current incident.

Broten and Landrum were looking after the 12 year old and three other younger children, who have all now been placed in foster care. They did reportedly warn her that she would be placed on what they termed ‘diaper duty’ if she failed her classes and her mother lived up to that promise when her daughter came home with an ‘F’ grade on her report card Monday.

The two accused were being held in custody at Anoka County Jail as of Tuesday, and Monsrud expected them to be formally charged on Wednesday.

Do video games have the potential to aid learning? That is the question that the technology teacher in Oconomowoc  Area School District, in Wisconsin, is trying to answer by introducing his students to a game world called Quest Atlantis. It allows kids to participate in missions which make use of their knowledge of different academic subjects, and submit work to the almighty Council for approval. If approval is granted, the students get to progress to the next level of the game, or take on additional quests.

The district is considered a technological pioneer and has been experimenting with game-based learning models for several years. In addition, it is one of the only districts in the nation that offers up-to-date courses like game design in their high school curriculum.

At a time when rapid changes in technology, greater expectations for student achievement and tighter fiscal environments are challenging schools, the district is one example of how to rethink traditional models of education, the focus of a new series, “The Changing Classroom.”

Although a lot of teachers welcome the challenge, not all district’s efforts in that direction meet universal acclaim. Particularly controversial is its recent plan to reorganize its workforce for the coming year by reducing the number of teaching positions by 15 and offering bonuses of up to $14,000 to those who remain if they commit to taking on additional work.

Another initiative that more eagerly awaited is the launch of the new $800,000 fiber-network upgrade and the recently introduced “Bring Your Own Technology” pilot program being evaluated in several area middle and high schools.

A lot of the changes are the brainchild of the district’s instructional technology administrator Dani Herro. The poplar game design class, for example, was a product of Herro’s partnership with district’s technology teachers. Next year will see Herro take on a faculty position at the School of Education at Clemson University where he will be overseeing the rollout of the advanced level of the games course.

Herro was also the one who brought Quest Atlantis to the district after he heard the game mentioned at an education conference.

Now at Arizona State University, the game is poised to get more attention thanks to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has given $2.6 million to support the development of Quest Atlantis Remixed.

That more sophisticated version will incorporate national Common Core State Standards, academic benchmarks that have been adopted by most states, including Wisconsin.

Still, some remain weary of the touted benefits of video games. School principals in New Zealand recently issued a statement saying that excessive gaming actually lead to bad academic outcomes, while the supposed educational benefits are either insignificant or entirely ephemeral.

[Secondary Principals' Association President Patrick] Walsh is concerned that parents tend to overestimate the positive impact of gaming on their kids, and cast doubt on the assertion that they have any educational benefit at all. Instead of being seduced by the labels on the box promising improved academic outcomes, parents should be wary and limit gaming time until they can be sure that their kids grades aren’t being adversely effected.

Michigan is exploring the possibility of using online exams for student assessment in order to better gauge each test-taker’s achievement level. The implemented system would be adaptive to the skills of every student, substituting questions on the fly based on the difficulty of the question the student had answered correctly during the course of the exam. Michigan is one of 26 states in the U.S. working to develop and roll out the system, which they hope will go live after the 2014-2015 school year. The new system is thought of as a replacement for the Michigan Education Assessment Program, which will be retired.

Not only will the new system give districts a better idea of academic outcomes, the data provided will also go to helping the teachers better tailor lesson plans to their students’ particular strengths and weaknesses. As part of the rollout, so-called “interim tests” will be given throughout the year, in part to provide that kind of teacher guidance.

“It’s something that I think all teachers want,” said Kristen Karbon, coordinator for curriculum and assessment for the 12,000-student Troy public schools. She is looking forward to the addition of “formative” tests that teachers could use to “pre-assess” a classroom’s knowledge level.

Moving to a computer-based test will also speed up the grading, as the state expects to be able to grade all the exams in less than 48 hours. The tests will also be administered in the spring instead of in the fall. The new system will allow students to retake the tests in which they performed poorly, since the window for exam taking will be expanded to 12 weeks rather than one day.

Although the system sounds ideal, a great deal will depend on the company with which the states will partner in order to design questions for their exams. A recent controversy in New York, and elsewhere, over questions written by the Pearson Foundation, which were deemed nonsensical by both students and their parents, raised concerns over the overall quality of high-stakes exams. Pearson, which has a $32 million contract with New York, and likewise contracted with other states, has also gotten into hot water over free trips it provided to education commissioners, especially those who were in a position to guide district business to the company.

The trips are solely educational, says the foundation’s officials, claiming they have no business purpose. The foundation’s tax forms leave blank the line for listing “payments of travel or entertainment expenses for any federal, state or local public officials”.