With another summer ending, the time has come to ask the perennial question: Could this be the year higher education finally embraces the e-book? Some think that developments since the last buying cycle, particularly the arrival of Apple ‘s iPad computing tablet, might foreshadow an especially good year for electronic texts. CourseSmart, an e-textbook consortium comprising five major publishers, says it has sold four times more e-textbooks in 2009-10 than it did the previous year (although it would not provide the number of copies). CourseSmart would not disclose how e-book sales are going so far this season, saying it was too early, but that it is optimistic. “We expect triple-digit growth to continue,” says Heather Shelstad, director of the consortium. UNTESTED: Can students learn as well on iPads, Kindles? SAVING MONEY: Rent, don’t buy college textbooks Others are more skeptical about whether e-books will finally boom after years of stalled progress. “They’ve been saying that for the last 10 years,” says Nicole Allen, an advocate for the Student Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs). One reason it is difficult to parse the prospects for e-books this year is that many other things are happening in the textbook market that make “traditional textbook vs. e-book” a false dichotomy. These days, traditional books have electronic supplements; some electronic texts have print-on-demand options; and for many students, textbook decisions have more to do with renting vs. buying than print vs. digital. The iPad and the e-book It has been a truism for years that e-books are massing at the gates. For the most part, officials are no longer arguing if the college library will transform from a warehouse of bound volumes to a nexus for accessing various digital resources, but when; in last year’s Campus Computing Project survey, 76% of senior campus technology officials predicted that e-books “will be an important source for instructional resources in the next five years.” The explosive growth of online education seems to imply a mainstream acceptance of the computer screen as medium for instruction. And then there is the widely accepted argument that printed textbooks, like other analog vessels, belong to an economic model that no longer makes sense (at least not to many students). Despite the hype, e-books have remained on the fringes of higher education. In 2008, the first year the Campus Computing Project survey started asking about e-book use, respondents said the electronic texts were used in 2.2% of classes. Last year, that percentage “jumped” to 3.5. According to the Student Monitor, a group that does market research on student behavior, e-books accounted for only 2% of textbook sales last year. And while publishers have been increasing the number of titles available in digital, half of students surveyed last spring remained unaware that e-books are even an option. What’s more, the percentage of students who were aware of e-books actually dropped from the previous spring, according to that survey. Digital add-ons, such as Pearson’s Mastering software, have become very popular among professors and de rigueur among publishers. But for the most part, professors are using them alongside print textbooks, not e-textbooks. The only places where e-books are dominant are for-profit institutions such as University of Phoenix , where administrators have required instructors to assign them. (Neither the Campus Computing Project nor Student Monitor data account for students at those institutions.) However, the e-book market has seen some auspicious developments in recent months. In July, Blackboard announced changes to its popular learning-management platform that would allow professors to assign electronic texts more easily — a potential coup for e-books, since Blackboard boasts by far the most popular learning-management platform in the industry and is well-positioned to influence how professors provide course materials to students. ON THE WEB: Blackboard deal aims to galvanize e-texts INSIDE HIGHER ED: ‘The Text Generation’ But the most buzzed-about development with implications for e-books has been the unveiling of the iPad, which, among many other functions, is popular as a reading device. The last version of Amazon ‘s Kindle e-reader was ill-suited for academic reading, according to a handful of institutions that tried it out. But the iPad is touted as a more hip, versatile breed of e-reader — one that college kids are apt to buy for general purposes. And once they own e-readers, they will be more likely to buy e-books, suggested Eric Weil, managing director of Student Monitor, in a July interview with Inside Higher Ed. Half the students who responded to Weil’s spring survey either already owned an e-reader or were interested in buying one. The CourseSmart consortium of publishers, for its part, sees the iPad as a “game-changing” device, equating it to the laptop. “As the iPad captures the imagination of the next generation of students, it will raise additional awareness for the digital benefits and cost savings related to e-textbooks,” says Shelstad. In addition to the iPad’s cachet, Apple ‘s arrival on the e-reader scene portends an avalanche of apps, including ones that could offer academic readers that elusive “added value” that many — including Campus Computing Project director (and Inside Higher Ed tech blogger) Kenneth C. Green — argue are absent from the current generation of e-books. Nick Bilton, a technology writer for The New York Times and adjunct professor at New York University , last week wrote about a new app, called Inkling, that lets students interact around passages of digital text. The app also supports dynamic content from publishers; for example, a three-dimensional model of a molecule that students can navigate via the touch screen. Allen, the Student PIRGs advocate, says that a lack of such features — that is, the tendency of e-textbooks to be “flat representations of print books” — has contributed to students’ apathy toward them in the past. Still, it would be easy to overestimate the effect devices such as the iPad will have on e-book adoption, especially in the short term, says Joseph Esposito, a longtime scholarly publishing consultant. Professors will not assign e-textbooks simply because of the values added by iPad apps, since the majority of students (at institutions that have not arranged iPad giveaways) will not have the iPad, and no professor in his right mind would require his students to buy the $500-and-up device, Esposito says. E-books will probably see a bump in adoption — perhaps a significant one, if CourseSmart is moving as many digital copies as it says it is. But if e-books do win significantly more users this year, it will be primarily because there are significantly more titles available, says Esposito. “We shouldn’t be dismissive of incremental gains by digital text,” he says, “but we shouldn’t be looking for revolutionary gains.” Analog innovations Actually, the textbook-delivery trends that stand to see the greatest gains in 2010-201 have less to do with technological innovation than with economic creativity. Textbook rental services — which give students the option of securing the savings of temporary ownership upfront, rather than taking their chances in the fickle buy-back market — have been around for a while, but they are now viral. The National Association of College Stores says rental programs have increased fivefold among its members since last fall, with about 1,500 campuses now offering the rental option. In a recent press release, the association dubbed 2010 “The year of the rental.” Another novel mode of delivery for dead-tree textbooks that appears to be gaining traction is print-on-demand. Flat World Knowledge, a company that offers digital copies of its customizable textbooks for free and printed versions for relatively low prices, has dramatically broadened its reach, winning over at least one professor at each of 800 different colleges this fall, up from 400 a year ago. Flat World uses generous royalties to persuade “top authors” to write textbooks that subscribing professors can then add to and tweak to their liking; students are then given the choice of getting access to an HTML version of the customized textbook for free, buying a color PDF version for $25, ordering a black-and-white paperback version of the textbook for $30, or ordering a color version for $60. Just like the mainstream publishing houses, Flat World offers a buffet of digital add-ons, such as interactive quizzes, digital flash cards, and the like. These supplements have proven popular among Flat World customers, as they have among users of Pearson and others — a reminder that while e-books might still be on the fringes of academe, e-learning tools have made substantial inroads. This is not to say e-textbooks will fail to become increasingly relevant, even to people like Frank. This fall, Flat World is introducing an e-book version formatted for e-readers. It will cost almost the same as its analog opposite, the black-and-white printed version. Frank says Flat World will be watching with interest to see which option students pick more. As far as how Flat World users have opted to receive their textbook content so far, the least fancy formats have been the most popular. Half have chosen the free, HTML version. Of those who choose to pay, about 70% chose the $30 black-and-white printout, while 15% sprang for the $25 color PDF, and only 3% bought the $60 color paperback. It’s the sticker price, stupid What to make of those decisions? On the one hand, the popularity of the HTML version suggests that students are willing to use screen-borne texts. On the other hand, the HTML version was free. Price, not format, is still the top driver of student textbook-buying behavior, says Allen. E-books have not caught on simply because they are not, in most cases, the cheapest option, Allen says. “From what I’ve been able to tell, the print rental prices are [generally] lower than the e-book rental prices,” she says. And since all e-textbooks are essentially rentals — with access typically expiring after one or two semesters (sometimes less) — they offer no added value over renting a printed textbook as far as permanence of ownership. That, more than a lack of built-in frills, is why rentals are blowing up while e-books are merely slouching toward wider adoption, says Eric Frank, the co-founder of Flat World. “[Textbook companies] are saying, ‘We need all these bells and whistles — then we’ll sell more,’ ” Frank says. But that’s not the key, he says; bells and whistles are fine for the students who are willing to pay for them, but currently that is a decision most publishers are either making themselves or putting in the hands of professors. Students should only have to pay for the frills they want, agrees Allen. Accordingly, Student PIRGs is throwing its weight behind the Flat World model, she says. One major public system is exploring the idea of reducing the cost of textbooks to students by limiting student choice, rather than broadening it. The California State University System announced on Monday a pilot program in which professors in 32 course sections would require their students to buy e-textbooks. As a result, the system would be able to make larger purchases from the publishers at a discount, which would then be passed on to the student. This strategy of buying e-books in bulk in order to save students money on course materials has been used by for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix, and community colleges such as Rio Salado have pursued similar strategies with printed textbooks. In effect, students involved in the pilot would not have the choice between print or electronic, but they would be spending less than if they were allowed to choose. For now, the California State move is just an experiment, and a spokesman would not speculate on whether it could lead to broader proscriptions against printed textbooks in the name of savings. But if there comes a time when California State and other institutions decide to address the high cost of course materials by mandating bulk purchases of electronic texts, that would be a bully year for e-books indeed. For the latest technology news from Inside Higher Ed, follow @ IHEtech on Twitter .

Robert Neuman says he has seen “every student problem imaginable” in his 25 years as an associate dean of academic advising at Marquette University in Milwaukee. Now retired, he shares strategies to help middle school and high school students avoid common problems in Are You Really Ready for College? One secret, he tells USA TODAY’s Mary Beth Marklein, is to start early. Q: What’s your core message? A: College is a world very different from high school. College demands that students possess a solid, basic body of high school knowledge. They must also come equipped with the self-management skills to control the learning process. And lastly, in college, there’s no time to learn how to learn. Q: Why is “really ready” in the title? What’s your point? A: Many students enter college clueless about the level of work required of them. They believe college will be high school away from home and have a false sense of the effort needed to earn high grades in college. Studies of college-bound high school students prove the point: High school seniors study not much more than they did in middle school, yet more than half graduate with A averages. This is due, in large part, to the rampant practice of cramming that serves so many students too well in high school but fails them in college. Q: What’s wrong with cramming? A: Mistakenly, students think they’re learning because cramming often produces good grades. Yet it yields only short-term knowledge. It lasts long enough to pass the test but fades long before teens get to college, where professors expect a solid background at the outset of their courses. Furthermore, in college, fewer tests are given, and they cover much more material, making cramming impossible. Grades plummet. Cramming is one of several student deficiencies. Q: You make a distinction between study and homework. A: For many high school students, simply doing homework earns them acceptable grades. Why do more? Merely doing homework does not lead to real learning. On the other hand, studying does, but it entails more: preparing for every class, besides doing homework, by rereading chapters; taking, organizing and refining notes; memorizing and reviewing; and working beyond minimum expectations. Study takes time and produces learning excellence. Q: Why do students need to “practice” talking? A: Talking must evolve from overused teen-speak to speaking and listening with intelligence and purpose to teachers, counselors and adults in general. Why? Private studying aside, learning is a social activity. Contributing to class discussions, asking provocative questions and listening carefully to teachers and other students are crucial to maintaining an interest in every subject. Plus, talking privately with teachers and counselors covers everything, from getting needed advice to clarifying academic goals or career paths. An articulate student excels in college and the workplace. Q: How do students get the most from guidance counseling ? A: Students must schedule more than one appointment per semester with the guidance counselor. Good counseling sessions require good talking skills. Yet these meetings are often perfunctory and unproductive because students lack the ability to communicate. Students who just sit waiting for the guidance counselor to read their minds and then tell them what to do will be disappointed. Productive counseling sessions require good questions as well as good answers for both students and counselors. Q: Could all this advice end up stressing kids out even more ? A: Much of everyday teen stress comes from being unprepared and disorganized, not having enough time, and not knowing how to handle problems. My strategies actually help relieve stress, giving teens ways to take control. Teenagers who don’t learn these lessons now will become a part of the dismal statistics that universities know so well and that are becoming a topic of the national conversation. I have seen student stress firsthand in college. It’s demoralizing for students and carries serious life consequences. Q: Where do parents fit in ? A: Parents do whatever they can to equip their children for college, buying microwaves, laptops, calculators and so forth. But helping teens develop these skills to succeed academically early — as early as middle school — is the best equipment of all.

PHOENIX — A promise kept is a precious gift. And then it becomes a responsibility. That transformation is happening this week at Grand Canyon University here for 15 incoming freshmen. They are at the school because 10 years ago a promise was made to them. VIDEO SERIES: Arizona Republic shows lives changed At the time, they were third-graders at Granada Elementary School in west Phoenix. Many were poor, and most of their families probably didn’t consider college an option. When university officials brought them and their parents together to promise the students that they could go to the college for free, none of them really understood what it meant. Now, it is the students’ time to fulfill that promise. A teacher gunned down “Sydney’s Kids” were named after Sydney Browning, a Phoenix native and a Grand Canyon graduate. On Sept. 15, 1999, she was sitting in Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth when a gunman walked in and started shooting. Browning was the first of seven to die. In life she was committed to educating the less fortunate. She taught at Success High School, a Fort Worth public school that brought former dropouts back to the classroom. Sydney’s Kids were chosen to honor her. Two days before the shooting, a group of students from Granada Elementary visited GCU to sing Happy Birthday for the school’s 50th anniversary. The students impressed GCU administrators who, the next year, made them a promise: If their grades and test scores were good enough to get in, they would go to the university free. Armando Rivera was one of those students. Now 18, he remembers the parents being more excited than the children. “Honestly,” he says, “at the time, I didn’t understand it.” On Thursday, freshmen Jessica Reyes, Cameron Stafford and Daron Beck chatted in Daron’s dorm room. Jessica, like Armando, plans to be a doctor and will major in biology. Daron will study business. Cameron is thinking of business or marketing. They are all aware that being one of Sydney’s Kids comes with responsibility. “It’s a special gift,” Cameron says. “Now, I have to fulfill it.” Some kids can’t be found On freshman registration and move-in day, faculty and school administrators helped freshmen move into their dorms. Among them were people who helped make the promise and keep it. Joyce Hatch is GCU vice president of financial aid. “I was here when they came and sang,” Hatch says. “I was here when the promise was made.” For a while, the promise seemed in doubt. In the early 2000s, GCU was in dire financial shape. It severed its ties with the Arizona Southern Baptist Convention. In 2004, a venture capital firm bought GCU and turned it into a for-profit institution. But GCU remained committed to Sydney’s Kids. Three years ago Jennifer Hatch, Joyce’s daughter and an admissions counselor, began looking for them. Of the 60 students offered the scholarship, 15 are taking advantage of it. One more will start next semester, and a 17th will enroll next year. Some of the other students hadn’t kept up their grades. The rest moved away or just fell through the cracks. GCU was unable to find some of the students. The promise is still open to them.

The kindergarten class of 2010-11 is less white, less black, more Asian and much more Hispanic than in 2000, reflecting the nation’s rapid racial and ethnic transformation. The profile of the 4 million children starting kindergarten reveals the startling changes the USA has undergone the past decade and offers a glimpse of its future. In this year’s class, for example, about one out of four 5-year-olds will be Hispanic. Most of today’s kindergartners will graduate from high school in 2024. More Hispanic children are likely in the next generation because the number of Hispanic girls entering childbearing years is up more than 30% this decade, says Kenneth Johnson, demographer at the University of New Hampshire ‘s Carsey Institute. “It’s only the beginning.” U.S. MAP: County-by-county look at diversity DIVERSITY: Minority births drive growth in U.S. CENSUS 2010: Full coverage A USA TODAY analysis of the most recent government surveys shows: •About 25% of 5-year-olds are Hispanic, a big jump from 19% in 2000. Hispanics of that age outnumber blacks almost 2 to 1. •The percentage of white 5-year-olds fell from 59% in 2000 to about 53% today and the share of blacks from 15% to 13%. “This is not just a big-city phenomenon,” Johnson says. “The percentage of minority children is growing faster in the suburbs and in rural areas.” In Lake County, Ind., a Chicago suburb, the under-20 population went from 51.8% white in 2000 to 47.1% in 2008, Johnson’s research shows. In rural Nebraska’s Colfax and Dakota counties, the share of Hispanic youths is rising while young whites are down from 60% to about 45% in the same period. •Schools face linguistic challenges. The share of 5-year-olds who speak English at home slipped from 81% in 2000 to about 78%. The share of Spanish speakers grew from 14% to 16%. “That makes issues of language development and how to teach them even more important than 10 years ago,” says W. Steven Barnett, co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. “In some districts, 40% of their kids are Latino, and 4% of their teachers are. It’s a huge gap.” Educators are grappling with the challenge, and “we really have a long way to go before we understand what the best methods are,” says Lisa Guernsey, director of the Early Education Initiative at the non-profit New America Foundation . Today’s kindergartners are tomorrow’s high schoolers, and “we need to know what their needs are.” •Kindergarten enrollment is up, from 3.8 million in 2000 to about 4 million.

If community colleges were to find all the formerly enrolled students whose academic records qualify them for an associate degree and retroactively award them the credential, then the number of associate degrees awarded in the United States would increase by at least 12%. This compelling projection by the Institute for Higher Education Policy is one of the primary reasons why it is working with the Lumina Foundation for Education to roll out the three-year, $1.3 million Project Win-Win. This initiative will financially support 35 community colleges and four-year institutions in six states — Louisiana , Missouri, New York , Ohio , Virginia and Wisconsin — so they can track down and retroactively award qualified students associate degrees who, for whatever reason, never received one. It also will help these institutions identify students who have recently dropped out who are “academically short” of an associate degree by nine credits or fewer and re-enroll them to finish a degree. ON THE WEB: Movement, but miles to go MORE FROM INSIDE HIGHER ED: Why reverse transfer? “Project Win-Win has the potential to make a considerable down payment on increased degree completion goals set by state governors and the Obama Administration,” said Michelle Asha Cooper, IHEP president, in a statement. Last year, nine of the project’s institutions ran a pilot of this program during a seven-month period; they awarded nearly 600 associate degrees and identified almost 1,600 students who were just shy of earning one. The pilot, however, revealed a number of difficulties that institutions face when attempting to retroactively award degrees. “It’s not as easy as it sounds,” said Stephanie Tarver, dean of enrollment management at McNeese State University, which awards associate degrees as well and was part of the pilot program. “We were kind of bumbling around in the dark a bit. When you pull data, it doesn’t always match up like you thought it would. You have to have a lot of staff to dedicate to a project like this to keep it going.” Then, even when candidates for degrees and those just shy of them were identified, reaching them proved just as challenging. “At that point, we don’t have as much control as we do in the other areas because these students have been out for a while,” Tarver said. “We didn’t know if the contact information we had for them was accurate. We didn’t know how to get accurate information without spending lots of money to find it. Also, when we finally did make contact, some of the students were leery of us. ‘You’re calling me out of the blue and saying I’m qualified for a degree and want to offer it to me? What’s the catch?’ ” Eventually, though, McNeese awarded about 15 associate degrees, out of approximately 150 former students who met degree requirements. Officials also tracked down about 300 students who were just short of graduation and are in the process of helping those who wish to complete find a way to do so. “A lot of the students who dropped out of school didn’t realize just how close they were to finishing,” Tarver said. “The success stories we’ve had are truly heartwarming, especially for those who didn’t realize they were qualified for a degree. We made an immediate impact on their lives. Rarely have I felt we’ve impacted students as we did through this project.” Though many of the institutions participating in the project had never before made efforts to retroactively award degrees, a few of them have been doing it for a while and have found ways to integrate this into regular degree audits for current students. Anna Flack, registrar at Suffolk County Community College, in New York, noted that her institution has made it a point to search for these “lost graduates” at least once every year for the past decade. “We did this on a small scale,” Flack said. “It was really part of office procedure. {hellip} We made it part of the daily responsibilities of the degree audit staff.” With students who are just a few credits short of earning an associate degree, Flack said, the college has adopted a no-pressure approach in approaching them. “We’ve just sent letters to students, saying that can finish if they’d like to,” Flack said. ” ‘Here are the different ways you can reach that degree.’ There’s no convincing, no strong-arming, no sales pitch. ‘We just see this, and we’d like you to know about it.’ ” Those pushing the project at the national level argue that, despite some of the challenges in the degree audit process, this is a relatively easy way to boost graduation rates around the country. “This is an issue that hasn’t been raised,” said Cliff Adelman, senior associate at IHEP. “We’re saying to these institutions, ‘Hey, guys, you haven’t paid attention to people based on your criteria who’ve crossed the degree threshold. You’ve been asleep at the wheel.’ There’s all this talk about awarding these degrees, but they’re just making a lot of noise. This is low-hanging fruit.”

Two years of cuts in state support saddled the Natomas Unified School District in Sacramento this spring with what school board president B. Teri Burns calls “horribly painful” choices: fewer teachers and larger classes, or keeping teachers but cutting athletics, counseling and after-school programs. Like many districts across the nation, Natomas chose to lay off teachers. So for every three classes of 20 students each that the schools had last year, this year they’ll put 30 students in two classes. The teaching staff in this 10,000-student district will be cut by 100 to 340 next fall. No one’s happy, Burns says: “We have to make choices, and none of them are good.” Conventional wisdom says the smaller the classes, the better the education, because teachers can pay more attention to each child. But while smaller classes are popular, decades of research has found that the relationship between class size and student outcomes is murky. LAYOFFS: Federal funding won’t save many teacher jobs “The research doesn’t show that you get significantly different student outcomes when you go from a class of 25 to a class of 30,” Burns says. With state and local budgets still in flux, it’s hard to know exactly how many teachers will lose jobs this year. But even with $10 billion in additional federal money, part of the $26 billion bill President Obama signed recently, the struggling economy is expected to reverse a decades-long trend toward smaller classes. Education statistics show that school personnel were hired at twice the rate that student enrollment grew from 1999 to 2007. An experiment drives change In the early 1990s, when many states were flush with cash, policymakers championed the findings of a 1985 experiment in Tennessee. The Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) project compared academic achievement in small classes of 13 to 17 low-income students with that of students in classes that had 22 to 25 students. The experiment found modest but lasting gains for impoverished African-American students in the much smaller classes in kindergarten and first grade. States extrapolated from those findings to justify spending billions to make relatively modest cuts in class size in all schools, not just in those serving the poor. About three dozen states now fund either voluntary or required class-size reduction programs. In 1996, California launched the first and largest such effort, eventually providing incentives for school districts to lower class size to 20 in kindergarten through third grade at a cost of $20 billion. In 2002, Florida voters approved an amendment to the state constitution that reduced class size over time in all grades. The state estimates that it will cost an additional $353 million this year, on top of the $16 billion the state has spent so far, to meet the requirements. In November, Florida voters will be asked to loosen those requirements to avoid massive spending cuts. A study released in May by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University found that the Florida program had no effect on student achievement. Research on California’s program also showed no gains in achievement attributable to smaller classes. Michael Kirst, an emeritus professor at Stanford University , says excitement over the program resulted in school districts hiring “all sorts of teachers just off the street” who lacked any formal training. Space shortages forced schools to hold the newly created classes in hallways and closets and on auditorium stages. Nonetheless, Kirst says, the program was popular. “One lesson from California is that with parents, smaller class size is overwhelmingly favorable, and they don’t give a fig about the research that says this is not going to help their kids,” he says. “They intuitively believe that small class sizes will allow more individual attention.” Slippery slope? Dan Goldhaber of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington-Bothell says that “the effects of class-size reduction are pretty marginal,” except in the early grades for disadvantaged students. With rampant teacher layoffs, Goldhaber says, “it probably makes sense … to focus not so much on class sizes but on making sure that the teachers you are keeping are really effective.” But Kirst says school districts are facing “a very dangerous period. We are increasing class size to extremely high levels. “I don’t worry about going from 20 to 25 students that much, or 15 to 20,” he says. “But when you go from 20 to 35 in a year or two, I don’t think we don’t know the effects of that.” Contributing: Susan Sawyers of Hechinger

For months, pink-slipped teachers across the USA have waited for long-sought federal funding to save their jobs. And Congress finally appropriated $10 billion this month to bring back thousands of teachers, nurses, bus drivers and others. But as the school year begins, many educators are still waiting for the phone to ring. “As far as I know, I’m not going to get my job back,” says Kirsten Jensen, 31, a sixth-grade teacher in Hillsborough, N.J. She was laid off last spring, one of about 3,900 pink-slipped New Jersey educators. “I haven’t heard anything,” she says, “but I’m not very hopeful at this point.” Many school districts might not get the money in time to bring back teachers. Others, fearing even worse economic times over the next two years, are simply planning to put a large share of their money in the bank to ward off further cuts next spring. “It looks to me like we’re not going to get any of this new money for the 2010-2011 school year,” says Joe Gertsema, the Yankton, S.D., schools superintendent, who’s trying to patch a $1.5 million deficit. He tapped cash reserves to keep teachers on the job this fall but says his tiny district “will have to make some tough decisions” if the money doesn’t come through next year. The cash is “a welcome relief at a time when state budgets are being cut,” says Gene Wilhoit of the Council of Chief State School Officers , which represents state superintendents. But he and others say the timing of the aid — states face a Sept. 9 deadline to apply for their share — makes it unclear whether they’ll get money in time to save many jobs this fall. And rehiring thousands of teachers may, in fact, produce its own set of problems, says Jack Jennings of the Center on Education Policy. “It’s a real dilemma, because if you bring somebody back, you may have to lay them off again next year.” But National Education Association president Dennis Van Roekel says Congress wanted districts to use the money to save jobs now, “not as a savings account for next year.” Districts have spent the past few years trimming payrolls, trying to limit the number of classroom teachers they let go. In Cupertino, Calif., superintendent Phil Quon says a week-long furlough and “massive” local fundraising staved off layoffs, saving 107 teaching jobs. So any cash he sees from Congress will keep people on the payroll next fall. “There are no more ‘edges’ to our budget,” he says. Jensen, the New Jersey sixth-grade teacher, worked nine years before getting pink-slipped in May. “It was pretty devastating,” she says. “I never in a million years expected it to happen.” She has been watching job postings but can’t imagine doing anything but teaching. “I have no idea what else I would do. I’m used to being around children every September.”

Since first lady Michelle Obama planted a garden at the White House in the spring of 2009 and invited schoolchildren to help tend and harvest the produce, more school gardens have been sprouting up across the country. Today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announces it will award $1 million in grants for eligible high-poverty schools to start community gardens. The goal: to teach students about gardening and nutrition and to provide fresh produce for school meals. Some of the harvest may also be given to students’ families, as well as to local food banks and senior-center nutrition programs (www.fns.usda.gov). Improving nutrition in schools is part of the first lady’s Let’s Move! initiative to fight childhood obesity. OBAMA’S PROJECT: More on the Let’s Move! campaign SCHOOL LUNCHES: Chefs help make them healthier LATEST NEWS: Keep up with fitness and nutrition developments School gardens “give kids exposure to where food comes from and encourages them to try foods they might not otherwise try,” says Kevin Concannon, USDA undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services. They give teachers an opportunity to talk about soil, water, sun, health and science, and the gardens can be used for math and art programs, he says. Concannon has visited school gardens from Maine to Missouri to California. When a second-grade girl took him on a tour of her elementary school’s 2-acre garden in Riverside, Calif., she waxed eloquent about strawberries, he says, pointing out that they contain vitamin C. “This was music to my ears,” he says. Estimates suggest that about 15% to 20% of schools across the country have gardens, says Mike Metallo, president of the National Gardening Association, a non-profit group that provides gardeners and teachers with information and resources. Since 1982, the gardening association has given out 9,310 grants and awards worth $3.7 million, reaching 1.4 million young gardeners, he says (kidsgardening.org). “We’ve supported everything from small herb gardens at inner-city elementary schools to large, raised-bed vegetable gardens in middle schools,” Metallo says. The group is taking applications for its youth gardening programs, which are financed by corporations. “In most areas of the country, schools can do a spring garden and fall garden and get parents, kids and community volunteers to maintain them throughout the summer,” Metallo says. The gardening association also provides money for indoor gardening projects with light tables and curriculum, he says. “It teaches students about roots and stems and the process that is going on. A lot of times, they can grow lettuce and herbs quite easily. “Kids love to plant seeds. They love to watch them sprout and grow. It’s magical.”

The Washington Monthly has yet again irked some educators, as it did three years ago, by ranking what it calls “America’s Best Community Colleges” using openly available student engagement survey data. Using benchmarking data from the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) and four-year federal graduation rates in an equation of its own making, the magazine attempts to rank the top 50 community colleges in the country in its latest issue. Though the periodical’s editors say they only hope to highlight “what works and what doesn’t” at these institutions by ranking them, CCSSE officials have denounced the use of their data in this way and argue it may do more harm than good. “Community colleges are often underrecognized,” said Kevin Carey, author of the magazine’s community college rankings and policy director at Washington-based think tank Education Sector. “But there’s been a lot of attention paid to them, thanks to the president’s recent effort [with the American Graduation Initiative]. Since he supports investing and improving community colleges, we felt like it was a good time to ask, ‘What do good community colleges look like?’ If we’re going to spend a lot of money, let’s see what reflects best practices out there.” STUDENT ENGAGEMENT: Community colleges must expect more, report says PART-TIMERS EXCLUDED: Graduation rate data paint an unfair picture, critics say Carey admitted that such a ranking of community colleges would not be possible without data from CCSSE, a survey run by the University of Texas at Austin that goes out to students at around 650 two-year institutions and uses the results to judge the colleges on broad categories such as “active and collaborative learning,” “student effort,” “academic challenge,” “student-faculty interaction” and “support for learners.” Though every participating college’s survey data are made public, institutional officials are encouraged to compare their benchmark scores only to national averages and those of large peer groups, such as institutions of similar size or in a similar geographic area. Despite warnings from CCSSE officials that its data sets were never meant to be used to generate college rankings, Carey defended the decisions to do so and to have CCSSE data count for 85% of a college’s ranking. “We always equate admissions selectivity with quality,” Carey said. “Well, all community colleges have the same admissions policy, but they aren’t always as good as one another. Part of this was to find a way to talk about excellence in the sector. We’re publicizing information about best practices. We’re talking about it here, and this is an interesting and long-overdue conversation that we need to have at the federal level.” Carey noted that these rankings could encourage some community colleges to seek out the best practices of others, starting something of a domino effect of reform initiatives. He also added that the list could serve as something of a consumer tool for students looking for a community college. “I think there are some people who can’t choose their community college, but some can,” Carey said. “For instance, take our top college, Saint Paul College. Well, there are other community colleges in metropolitan Minneapolis-Saint Paul that aren’t listed. If you’re a student and have no information about which community college is better, you’ll probably go wherever is most convenient. But, if you do have some information, you might drive an additional 20 to 30 minutes to get to another community college. It might be worth it.” Those without much choice in the matter of where to attend a community college, given their location, may also consider taking online courses from those institutions ranked higher in the list, Carey added. Repeating his stance that only the best community colleges ought to be lauded for their good work while encouraging others to essentially replicate their success by taking similar reform measures, Carey noted that he never considered listing the “50 worst” community colleges in the magazine or continuing his list beyond number 50. He mused that some of the worst-performing community colleges may not have even participated in CCSSE, and that listing the bottom-performing institution that did would be an unfair punishment. Still, he did acknowledge that, conversely, some of the best-performing institutions might not have participated in CCSSE, though he considers this less likely. Kay McClenney, CCSSE director, criticized Washington Monthly’s use of CCSSE data in creating a ranking of community colleges, calling it both “inappropriate” and “unauthorized.” She noted that she turned down the publication’s request for a more user-friendly version of the open-source CCSSE data sets, adding that it likely pulled the data in what must have been a very tedious process from CCSSE’s website. CCSSE, McClenney argued, is a tool best used when its results are reviewed internally. She added that it does not make sense to compare one community college directly to another, given the significant differences in missions, socioeconomic status of students, budgets and other factors. She said that using broader benchmarks and peer groups is a better way to judge. “Benchmarking is a process that is entirely different from rankings,” McClenney said. “Our major issue here is that ranking just oversimplifies what’s going on in these colleges. It doesn’t take into comparison major variables. And, from a statistical standpoint, there isn’t that much of a difference between, say, number one and number 15 on the list. It creates a false impression.” Though she disagrees with Carey’s usage of CCSSE data, McClenney did at least find value in his reason for doing so. “I grant that [Carey] has positive purposes here,” McClenney said. “He’s attempting to do something he believes is for the cause of goodness. I sympathize with the idea of institutions learning from one another. That’s something we promote in our work. We just disagree that ranking is the way to go about it.”

ATLANTA (AP) — The U.S. Education Department said Tuesday that nine states and the District of Columbia will get money to reform schools in the second round of the $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” grant competition. Florida, Georgia , Hawaii , Massachusetts , Maryland , New York , North Carolina , Ohio , Rhode Island and Washington, D.C ., will receive grants, department spokesman Justin Hamilton said. The amounts for each state were expected to be announced later. The aim of the historic program is to reward ambitious changes to improve schools and close the achievement gap. The competition instigated a wave of reforms across the country, as states passed new teacher accountability policies and lifted caps on charter schools to boost their chances of winning. Tennessee and Delaware were named winners in the first round of the competition in March, sharing $600 million. The applicants named winners Tuesday will share a remaining $3.4 billion. Another $350 million is coming in a separate competition for states creating new academic assessments. The historic program, part of President Obama’s economic stimulus plan, rewards states for embarking on ambitious reforms to improve struggling schools, close the achievement gap and boost graduation rates. “New York’s schools have made strong strides toward excellence and this grant will accelerate that progress,” said U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer , D-N.Y., who met with Education Secretary Arne Duncan on New York’s proposal. “This is great news for parents, teachers, and taxpayers across the state.” Thirty-five states and the District of Columbia applied for the second round of the competition. The Education Department named 19 applicants finalists in July. More than a dozen states vying for the money changed laws to foster the growth of charter schools, and at least 17 reformed teacher evaluation systems to include student achievement. Dozens also adopted Common Core State Standards, the uniform math and reading benchmarks developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association. “The change unleashed by conditioning federal funding on bold and forward-looking state education policies is indisputable,” the Democrats for Education Reform said in a statement. “Under the president’s leadership, local civil rights, child advocacy, business and education reform groups, in collaboration with those state and local teacher unions ready for change, sprung into action to achieve things that they had been waiting and wanting to do for years.” In a speech announcing the finalists last month, Duncan called the change a “quiet revolution.” Between both rounds of the competition, a total of 46 states and the District of Columbia applied. While the program has been praised for instigating swift reforms, the competition for many states was an uphill battle, with teacher unions hesitant to sign on to reforms directly tying teacher evaluations to student performance on standardized tests, and education leaders concerned winning meant giving up too much local control. A number of states that did not win the competition said they still planned to proceed with the reforms they had proposed, though they acknowledged change would take place at a slower pace. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.