ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia ‘s largest school system has won the nation’s top prize in public education, which will provide $1 million in college scholarships for needy students in the district. Gwinnett County Public Schools snagged the Broad Prize for Urban Education, an award the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation gives annually to urban districts that show the most gains in student performance and closing minority achievement gaps. It’s the second year in a row the 150,000-student district was nominated for the prize. The district is 28% black and 25% Hispanic , with about half of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch. But last year in reading and math, Gwinnett County schools outperformed all other Georgia districts serving students with similar family incomes. The district has among the state’s smallest achievement gaps between black and white students at all grades in math, and the district narrowed that gap for middle school math by 8 percentage points between 2006 and 2009. In the same time period, the rate of black students taking the SAT college entrance exam rose 9 percentage points. Ninety-nine percent of the district’s schools met federal benchmarks in 2009, compared with 86% of schools statewide, and the superintendent has been in office nearly 15 years, providing consistency at the helm of the large district. Gwinnett County beat out Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina, Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, and Socorro Independent School District and Ysleta Independent School District in El Paso. Though Gwinnett County is in suburban Atlanta, the district meets the criteria for the Broad Prize because it has a high percentage of minority and low-income students. The prize, created in 2002 by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation in Los Angeles, is the nation’s largest education award given to school districts. It is designed to reward schools for increasing graduation rates, improving low-income students’ performance, and reducing differences in achievement rates between minority and white students. Winners are chosen from the country’s 100 largest school systems serving a large percentage of low-income and minority students. The prize money goes to college scholarships for students from each district. Runners-up win $250,000 for scholarships. The Aldine Independent School District near Houston won last year. Other past winners include the New York City Department of Education , Boston Public Schools and the Houston Independent School District. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

WARRENSBURG, Mo. (AP) — Zach Neff is all high-fives as he walks through his college campus in western Missouri. The 27-year-old with Down syndrome hugs most everybody, repeatedly. He tells teachers he loves them. “I told Zach we are putting him on a hug diet — one to say hello and one to say goodbye,” said Joyce Downing, who helped start a new program at the University of Central Missouri that serves students with disabilities. The hope is that polishing up on social skills, like cutting back on the hugs, living in residence halls and going to classes with non-disabled classmates will help students like Neff be more independent and get better jobs. In years past, college life was largely off-limits for students with such disabilities, but that’s no longer the case. Students with Down syndrome, autism and other conditions that can result in intellectual disabilities are leaving high school more academically prepared than ever and ready for the next step: college. Eight years ago, disability advocates were able to find only four programs on university campuses that allowed students with intellectual disabilities to experience college life with extra help from mentors and tutors. As of last year, there were more than 250 spread across more than three dozen states and two Canadian provinces, said Debra Hart, head of Think College at the Institute for Community Inclusion at the University of Massachusetts Boston, which provides services to people with disabilities. That growth is partly because of an increasing demand for higher education for these students and there are new federal funds for such programs. The federal rules that took effect this fall allow students with intellectual disabilities to receive grants and work-study money. Because details on the rules are still being worked out, the earliest students could have the money is next year. Hart and others expect the funds to prompt the creation of even more programs. “There is a whole generation of young people who have grown up under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, and to them it (college) is the logical next step,” Hart said. The college programs for these students vary. Generally the aim is to support the students as they take regular classes with non-disabled students. Professors sometimes are advised to modify the integrated classes by doing things like shifting away from a format that relies entirely on lectures and adding more projects in which students can work in groups. One program in Idaho offers classes in drama, art and sign language. Students on other campuses can improve their computer skills or take child development classes. Sometimes they’re paired with non-disabled students and advocates say the educational coaches, mentors and tutors who help them often are studying to become special education teachers or social workers and learn from the experience too. Disability advocates say only a small percentage of these students will receive degrees, but that the programs help them get better jobs. Historically, adults with intellectual disabilities have been restricted primarily to jobs in fast food restaurants, cleaning or in so-called “sheltered workshops,” where they work alongside other disabled people and often earn below-minimum wages, said Madeleine Will, vice president of the National Down Syndrome Society. With additional training, Hart said participants can go on to do everything from being a librarian’s assistants to data-entry work in an office. Much remains to be learned about what type of program works best, but Hart said that will likely change. Besides allowing for federal financial aid for these programs, Congress also has appropriated $10.56 million to develop 27 model projects to identify successful approaches. The infusion of federal money has generated some criticism. Conservative commentator Charlotte Allen said it’s a waste to spend federal tax dollars on the programs and insisted that calling them college dilutes the meaning of college. “It’s a kind of fantasy,” said Allen, a contributing editor for Minding the Campus , a publication of the fiscally conservative Manhattan Institute . “It may make intellectually disabled people feel better, but is that what college is supposed to be all about?” Oftentimes students with these disabilities stop their formal education when they finish high school, which is usually around the age of 21. Some districts have a partnership with colleges under which the district pays for their 18- to 21-year-old students to take higher education classes. In other cases, college costs are paid for by the parents. Their children previously haven’t been eligible for grants and work study money because they generally weren’t seeking a degree and wouldn’t have been admitted to college through the typical process. These programs look “at higher education for what it’s purpose in our community and our culture is — to provide opportunities for learning,” said Meg Grigal, a researcher who works with Hart. Back at the University of Central Missouri, Neff and another participant in the program for students with developmental issues, Gabe Savage, laugh with friends during lunch in their residence hall cafeteria. Savage, a 26-year-old from Kansas City, is grateful for it all — new friends, the chance to try out for a school play, brush up on his computer skills and even take a bowling class with non-disabled students looking to earn a physical education credit. “It’s an answer to my prayer that I am here,” he said. “I always wanted to do this.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

NASHVILLE — Offering middle-school math teachers bonuses up to $15,000 did not produce gains in student test scores, Vanderbilt University researchers reported Tuesday in what they said was the first scientifically rigorous test of merit pay. The results (pdf) could amount to a cautionary flag about paying teachers for the performance of their students, a reform strategy the Obama administration and many states and school districts have favored despite lukewarm support or outright opposition from teachers’ unions. The U.S. Department of Education has put a great deal of effort into prodding school districts and states to try merit-pay systems as part of its Race to the Top competition, although teachers’ unions have often objected on the grounds that they don’t have fair and reliable ways to measure performance. In most school districts, teacher pay is based on years of experience and educational attainment levels. The report’s authors, of the National Center on Performance Incentives (NCPI) at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education, stress that theirs is just one approach. The Nashville teachers who hit the mark based on their students’ test scores received a bump in their paychecks but no additional mentoring or professional development. Neither their principals nor fellow teachers knew who participated in the experiment or who received bonuses. Matthew G. Springer, director of the federally funded NCPI, said pay-for-performance is not “the magic bullet that so often the policy world is looking for.” At least in this experiment, Springer said, “it doesn’t work.” The study was conducted from 2006 to 2009 in partnership with the nonprofit RAND Corporation . A local industrialist and Vanderbilt benefactor, Orrin Ingram, put up the nearly $1.3 million in bonuses. Some 296 middle-school math teachers — two-thirds of the district’s middle-school math teachers — volunteered to participate in the experiment. Half were placed randomly in a control group, while the rest were eligible for bonuses of $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000 if their pupils scored significantly higher than expected on the statewide exam known as the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program. One third of the eligible teachers — 51 of 152, or 34% — got bonuses at least once. Eighteen teachers received bonuses all three years. Except for some temporary gains for fifth-graders, though, their students progressed no faster than those in classes taught by the 146 other teachers. The local teachers’ union in Nashville agreed to the experiment in collective bargaining, according to Erick Huth, president of the Metropolitan Nashville Education Association. He said the results were not at all surprising. “I’ve believed for a long time that what improves instruction is having an instructional leader who is able to get all players in a school to collaborate,” Huth said The bonuses amounted to as much as 30% of teachers’ yearly salaries here in the Music City, where the scale runs from $36,000 to $64,000, Huth said. The nation’s 3.2 million public school teachers earned $53,910 on average in 2008-09, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The study was released at a two-day conference, “Evaluating and Rewarding Educator Effectiveness,” at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College that drew participants from Colorado, Georgia, Tennessee, Washington, D.C. and other places conducting their own experiments with performance pay. Some states have moved to tie teacher and principal evaluations to student test scores. The study did not shake the faith of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in merit pay. “While this is a good study, it only looked at the narrow question of whether more pay motivates teachers to try harder,” said Sandra Abrevaya, a spokeswoman for Duncan. It did not address the Obama administration’s push to “change the culture of teaching by giving all educators the feedback they need to get better.” The Nashville experiment, known as POINT (Project on Incentives in Teaching), doled out the $15,000 bonuses to those teachers whose students performed “at a level that historically had been reached by only the top 5% of middle school math teachers.” Teacher performance was calculated by using a value-added model, which predicts how students will do in a given year based on how they performed in the previous year. The teachers had to hit the 80th and 90th percentiles to pocket the $5,000 and $10,000 bonuses, respectively. The study’s design, in which teachers were judged against percentile benchmarks rather than their colleagues’ performance, sought to preserve collaboration among teachers. In surveys about the program, most teachers said they were already effective without the incentive of additional pay. Eight in ten said they didn’t change the way they taught to improve their odds of earning a bonus. Many teachers came close to getting a bonus — so close that they would have qualified if their pupils answered two or three more questions correctly on the 55-question state exam. The Nashville math teachers, according to the study, “expressed moderately favorable views toward performance pay in general, though less so for POINT in particular.” The experiment ran smoothly, although the teachers became less enthusiastic over the three years. “They did not come away … thinking it had harmed their schools,” the study said. “But by and large, they did not endorse the notion that bonus recipients were better teachers.” The fact that many fifth-grade teachers teach multiple subjects to the same students may have been a reason for the positive impact of merit pay found in fifth grade, according to the study’s authors. But “the effect did not last. By the end of 6th grade it did not matter whether a student’s 5th grade math teacher had been in the treatment or control group,” the study said. The researchers said the Nashville experiment didn’t stir the negative reactions that have attended some other merit pay programs, but it “simply did not do much of anything.” Springer of NCPI said the study lays a foundation for further experiments on a topic that educators have been debating “for over a century.” Tennessee Commissioner of Education Timothy Webb said the Nashville study shows, “Money alone is not enough to encourage people to go into challenging schools and teach the most difficult students.” He stressed the importance of improving teachers’ working conditions, not just their pay. Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., said he does not believe the study says much of value and worries it will only confuse the issue. “The fact that that teachers don’t respond to cash bonuses like rats do to food-pellets does nothing to diminish my confidence that it’s good for schooling if teacher pay better reflects the contributions that teachers make,” Hess said. “Serious proponents of merit pay believe the point is not any kind of short-term test-score bump but making the profession more attractive to talented candidates.” William Slotnik, executive director of the Boston-based Institute for Compensation Reform and Student Learning at the Community Training and Assistance Center, has argued that performance-based compensation tied directly to the educational mission of a school district can be a lever to transform schools. But he said it will take more than financial incentives to improve student achievement and that merit pay “is hard to get right. … If all you are doing is focusing on money, there is no track record in that resulting in the kind of changes needed to do this work well.” Contributing: Christopher Connell is a freelance writer. Liz Willen contributed to this article. It was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonpartisan education-news outlet affiliated with the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Columbia University

BOSTON (AP) — They gather on statehouse steps with signs and bullhorns, risking arrest. They attend workshops on civil disobedience and personal storytelling, and they hold sit-ins and walk out of class in protest. They’re being warned that they could even lose their lives. Students fighting laws that target illegal immigrants are taking a page from the civil rights era, adopting tactics and gathering praise and momentum from the demonstrators who marched in the streets and sat at segregated lunch counters as they sought to turn the public tide against racial segregation. “Their struggle then is ours now,” said Deivid Ribeiro, 21, an illegal immigrant from Brazil and an aspiring physicist. “Like it was for them, this is about survival for us. We have no choice.” Undocumented students, many of whom consider themselves “culturally American” because they have lived in the U.S. most of their lives, don’t qualify for federal financial aid and can’t get in-state tuition rates in some places. They are drawing parallels between themselves and the 1950s segregation of black and Mexican-American students. “I think it’s genius,” said Amilcar Shabazz, chairman of the W.E.B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts . “If you want to figure out how to get your story out and change the political mood in America, everybody knows the place to start your studies is the civil rights movement.” For two years, Renata Teodoro lived in fear of being deported to her native Brazil, like her mother, brother and sister. She reserved her social contact for close friends, was extra careful about signing her name anywhere, and fretted whenever anyone asked about her immigration status, because she been living illegally in the United States since she was 6. Yet on a recent afternoon, Teodoro gathered with other illegal immigrants outside the Massachusetts Statehouse with signs, fliers and a bullhorn — then marched the streets of Boston, putting herself in danger of arrest by going public but hoping her new openness would prompt action on the DREAM Act, a federal bill to allow people like her a pathway to citizenship via college enrollment or military service. “I don’t care. I can’t live like this anymore,” said Teodoro, 22, a leader of the Student Immigration Movement and a part-time student at UMass-Boston. “I’m not afraid, and I have to take a stand.” The shift has been building, said Tom Shields, a doctoral student at Brandeis University in Waltham who is studying the new student movement. “In recent months, there has been an interest in connecting the narrative of their struggle to the civil rights effort for education,” Shields said. The movement has gained attention of Congress. Sens. Dick Durbin , D-Ill., and Richard Lugar , R-Ind., sent a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano in April, asking her to halt deportations of immigrant students who could earn legal status under DREAM, which stands for the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors act, and which they’re sponsoring. Last month, three illegal immigrant students demanding to meet with Arizona Sen. John McCain about DREAM were arrested and later detained for refusing to leave his Tucson office. High school and college students in Chicago and Denver walked out of class this year to protest Arizona’s tough new law requiring immigrants to carry registration papers. In December, immigrant students staged a “Trail of Dreams” march from Miami’s historic Freedom Tower to Washington, D.C., to raise support for DREAM. Similar student immigrant groups have sprung up at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Houston . By attaching themselves to the civil rights movement, Shabazz said, the immigrant students can claim the moral high ground and underdog status of the debate. “The question now is … can they convince moderate, middle-of-the-road, independent voters to support them?” he said. The Rev. William Lawson, an 81-year-old civil rights leader and retired pastor of Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church in Houston, called the student activists’ tactics courageous and said he’d like to meet them. But Lawson, who marched with Martin Luther King Jr ., cautioned student immigrant activists to prepare for peers getting arrested, deported or possibly killed. “You do have to expect consequences. Many civil rights activists faced injury, sometimes death,” said Lawson. “And I’m not sure how many of these (students) understand the fundamental philosophy of nonviolence.” Students have to keep in mind the audience they’re trying to win over, said Lonnie King, 73, a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the group responsible for sit-ins at segregated restaurants across the South in the 1960s. “They need to understand that the bulk of folks are in the middle,” King said. “They have to coach their message to make it broadly appealing.” In Massachusetts, hundreds of student activists have gone through training by Marshall Ganz, a public policy lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School and a former organizer with the late Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers movement. At special camps, students attend workshops on civil disobedience, storytelling and media outreach. Students who have attended the workshops even continue to use the well-known farm workers’ rallying clap at the end of organizing meetings. “They know that clap,” Ganz said, “because I taught them that clap. It’s all about the experience.” Teodoro said the training changed her life and showed her the cause was larger than herself. During the rally last week in Boston, she led a march from the Massachusetts Statehouse to Sen. Scott Brown’s office at the John F. Kennedy federal building, which also houses U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices. Along with Carlos Savio Oliveira, 22, of Falmouth, Mass., another illegal immigrant, the pair walked into the federal building to hand Brown’s staff 1,500 letters of support for the DREAM Act. Outside supporters wore T-shirts with the words “Brown is beautiful” — a pun referring to the Chicano movement chant and Brown’s well-publicized nude photo spread in Cosmopolitan magazine as a college student. Brown, whose office was previously the site of a sit-in by the same group, has not said whether he supports the bill. In September, Teodoro and a dozen other students also took a week-long trip from Boston to the South, with Shields driving. Along the way, they met with black former students who desegregated Clinton High School in Tennessee and Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. They visited civil rights museums and filmed the journey for a planned documentary. But the highlight was meeting Carlotta Walls LaNier , a member of the Little Rock Nine. Teodoro cornered LaNier at a book signing of her memoir, “A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School.” “I went up to her at the signing and told her my story and tried not to cry,” Teodoro said. “She listened. Then, she hugged me.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

This is a preview of a week-long video series starting Monday, May 24 about people who are veterans, single parents, full-time workers — and students, too. Click “see trailers” (above, left) now for the preview, and check back here, students2.usatoday.com , next week for the full video on each featured student. What comes to mind when you hear “college student”? To many Americans , it’s someone who goes to college straight from high school, lives in a dorm, and gets a degree four years later. But things have changed. Three-fourths of today’s students no longer fit that traditional model. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, about half of today’s students are financially independent; 49% are enrolled part-time; 38% work full time; 27% have dependents of their own. Almost half — 12 million — attend two-year community colleges rather than four-year schools. And most students who start college don’t finish. Only 56% of students at four-year colleges complete a degree within six years, and just 20% of first-time students at public community colleges get a degree or certificate within three years. In their own words A video project dubbed “Take America to College” aims to tell the story of today’s non-traditional college students in their own words and images. The project organizers in January put out a casting call and more than 200 nontraditional college students responded by sending in their stories; 78 uploaded audition videos. Five were chosen to represent the millions of students who struggle to complete a college degree. They are: •Dennis Medina, a police officer and a night student at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston; •Kathryn McCormick, a single mom who waitresses 35 hours a week and is enrolled at Valencia Community College in Orlando •Shane Burrows, who works full-time as a sales assistant while studying at Sierra Community College in Rocklin, Calif.; •Brandon Krapf, an Iraq war veteran studying at American University in Washington, D.C.; •Charnee Ball, a Navy veteran, also at Valencia Community College in Orlando The students each received $500 and won a trip to Washington, D.C., to meet with policymakers. Their stories are featured in a week-long series of videos airing online here at students2.usatoday.com starting May 24. The videos are produced by Purple States TV, a media company that uses both professionally filmed and self-filmed video footage to dramatize issues of public policy, in collaboration with DCTV and the Seattle-based social marketing firm Banyan Branch, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Kodak donated Zi8 Pocket Video Cameras used by the students to capture and share their stories. Real students, real stories More background on the five team members and their stories: •Dennis Medina — a Boston police officer chosen for the team in an online contest. “I’m not your stereotypical student,” Medina says. “I wear plain clothes with the Boston Police Department Youth Violence Strike Force also known as the gang unit. When I was employed by the corrections office, I started taking college classes, but money got tight, and life got in the way. When I moved to the Boston Police Department, I realized that without a college degree I couldn’t further my career. I can only take one or two classes a semester. Going to college is almost impossible … I have court during the day, then I have my regular shift which is 4 p.m. to midnight. I also have family obligations. I live with my wife, two sons and a daughter and my grandson also lives with us.” •Kathryn McCormick — A single parent and full-time waitress, studying to become a physician assistant. “Each year I take out about $15,000 in student loans to pay my bills. This is an incredibly large amount of money that is going to take me a long time to pay off when I get out of school,” she says. “It’s also not enough to pay my bills. I still have to work. The program I’m trying to get in is extremely competitive and I need every single ounce of my time that I can possibly squeeze out of my day to make sure that my grades are perfect. I’d love to see a change in financial aid as far as the one-size-fits-all cap that they have. It doesn’t matter whether you are a single mom of two kids and struggling and working and trying to do the best that you can. A person who’s a single person still gets the same amount of money as you do. That’s really hard.” •Shane Burrows — Works full time as a sales assistant while accumulating college credits toward an associates degree; he wants to be a music teacher. He is having trouble completing his degree because core courses aren’t available in the evenings, or are being cut because of California’s budget crisis. “When I turned 18, I dropped out of college and worked two jobs because I just couldn’t afford to pay for my education,” he says. “I lost my mom when I was only 7. My dad could only afford to provide a house over our heads, food, clothing, and basics to get by. I needed to work to live and unfortunately I had to put school on the side. After taking five years off school, I decided to go back part time at a junior college. I work full time and quit my second job so I could have time for school. I would love to take more than four classes a semester but I can barely afford to live let alone pay for classes and books. I’m drowning in debt and on the verge of filing for bankruptcy. With rising tuition costs and budget cuts cutting classes, I feel like I’ll never finish.” •Brandon Krapf — an Iraq war veteran, now in the Army reserves and a senior at American University, in Washington, D.C. “When you get the GI Bill it’s supposed to cover tuition but you end up living off of it. They don’t come and tell you, ‘Oh hey, listen, you also have to cover books, rent and your regular bills on top of that.” Luckily with the post 9-11 GI Bill it’s been a lot easier for student vets but there’s still been a lot of troubles with it, especially last semester when they had a huge influx of new applications for the GI Bill. Going to school’s probably put me in debt with student loans a good $100,000 dollars.” •Charnee Ball — Navy veteran who wants to be an aviation mechanic. She is not receiving GI benefits because she was discharged under the Pentagon’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy. “I know the people who make those decisions think it’s for the greater good, but believe me, there’s been so many qualified technicians and officers and people who went and did their job and served their country that have been discharged for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. I did my job. I served my country. And when I need it most, I’m not eligible (for benefits). So it’s really hard for me to make it through, to realize my dream of becoming an aviation mechanic. Right now I’m about $38,000 in debt from student loans. It is a struggle every day to find the money to make ends meet.” Have questions about the students’ college experiences? Leave them in the comments, or save them for a live discussion with Take America to College participants on May 26, 2010 at 1 p.m. ET. You can set an e-mail reminder for the chat in the window below. Chat with the students