Federal investigators are in the process of visiting all of Christina’s schools and have requested detailed discipline data for at least the last two academic years.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan first mentioned districts were being investigated at a conference in late September hosted by the Department of Education’s civil rights office and the Department of Justice’s civil rights division. Besides Delaware, the school districts under review are in New York, North Carolina, Utah and Minnesota.

One of the other districts, the San Juan School District in rural Utah, is being investigated for alleged gender disparities without respect to race or ethnicity, according to a school official.

Christina district officials acknowledged that a disparity exists in the discipline rates for black male students that they are working to correct, according to district spokeswoman Wendy Lapham. She added that the district has been cooperating with the federal investigation.

Statewide, black students made up about 32% of the public school population last year, but they accounted for about 55% of students who were suspended or expelled, according to an analysis by The News Journal published in June that compared discipline statistics provided by the state to school enrollments.

The discipline rates for all students in Delaware are higher than the national average: 21,690 of the state’s 126,801 students — about one in six — were suspended or expelled in the 2009-2010 school year, which is down slightly from the year before. Those numbers include in-school suspensions. Counting only expulsions and out-of-school suspensions, the number dips to 14,368 students, or about one in nine.

The Christina School District had the highest rate among the state’s 19 school districts in the 2008-2009 and the 2007-2008 school years. However, the district’s numbers went down in almost every school in 2009-2010.

Lapham said the decrease is the result of an effort to better train teachers, help students learn to deal with conflicts and the elimination of a zero-tolerance policy.

She said the district has been analyzing its data internally and has been “working to address any issues of disparity by working with teachers at the classroom level, increasing training for para-professionals, reviewing and discussing data at the school level and significantly reducing suspensions and expulsions.”

In 2009, a 6-year-old boy brought a Boy Scout tool to a Christina school to eat his pudding at lunch. Under the district’s zero-tolerance policy, the boy faced a punishment of suspension or expulsion. The policy did not allow educators to make a punishment judgment call based on the context of the incident or age of the child.

But after public outcry and widespread media attention, the school board decided to amend its policy as it pertained to kindergarten and first-grade students.

Parents and officials point to that outcome when they complained about Christina’s high rate of punishment among black males. The 6-year-old was white.

Wanda Stanley said she read about the boy’s case with interest because her 11-year-old daughter was expelled after a box cutter fell out of her jacket pocket at Pulaski Elementary School in Wilmington. The girl did not know how the box cutter got in her pocket and had no intention of hurting anyone, her mother said. Police were notified by the school but did not file charges.

School officials told her there was no room for debate about the expulsion because of the district’s zero-tolerance policy, Stanley said. From her perspective, Stanley saw that a white boy went unpunished while her black daughter was put out of school.

“I am hurt because I know my daughter is totally innocent and I don’t want this to follow my daughter through her schooling,” Stanley said.

The district and state boards of education ruled that the expulsion was justified. The district’s board amended the zero-tolerance policy further last school year.

A complaint against the school board is pending before the state Human Relations Commission, alleging that the district discriminated against Stanley’s daughter on the basis of age and race.

Studies show that minorities are punished at higher rates than their peers, but there’s not evidence that these children misbehave more, said Dan Losen, a former teacher who now works for the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. The government under President George W. Bush did not investigate many schools for these issues, which are now getting attention under the Obama administration, he said.

Typically, reviews from the office of civil rights are used to help districts find solutions and to monitor progress, Losen said, because “the preference has historically been to enter into a joint problem-solving approach rather than issuing violations.”

Helen Spacht, principal at Christina’s Wilson Elementary, said programs like the district’s Day of Caring help reinforce the importance of kindness and how to treat others with respect. The school is certified under the Anti-Defamation League‘s No Place for Hate program, which means staff and students have undergone training on diversity issues. Also, teachers have been meeting to share ideas and literature on better classroom and bullying management, she said.

“It’s really changing the strategies and how they work with students,” she said.

But the district has not made enough progress in dealing with these issues, said New Castle Councilman Jea Street, who organized a rally in April to protest the discipline rates.

“The fact is that (the office of civil rights) is once again going to have to do what local officials refuse to do,” Street said. “Nobody would listen to me when I claimed Christina was discriminating when it changed policy to accommodate one child and knew full well that the same policy had been used overzealously for others.”

Discipline rate of black students in Del., elsewhere is probed

The settlement, which must be approved by a judge, would shield up to 45 underperforming schools from teacher layoffs for budget reasons. It also stipulates that vacancies be filled as quickly as possible, and contains a commitment to explore incentives, such as bonuses, to recruit and retain teachers and principals at poorly performing schools, with additional incentives if the school’s academic performance improves.

The agreement stems from a lawsuit by American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California over teacher layoffs at three inner-city schools. The group had filed a class-action suit against the Los Angeles Unified School District in February, saying that mandated seniority-driven layoffs led to the three schools shedding some two-thirds of their teachers, which left students largely in the hands of substitutes.

The ACLU said students were being denied their state constitutional right to a fair and adequate education. It won a temporary injunction in May that prevented more layoffs of first- and second-year teachers who form the bulk of faculties at these schools in improverished areas, which more experienced teachers tend to avoid.

“Any principal wants a mix of new and experienced teachers, you don’t want any schools skewed,” said John Rogers, director of the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access and the University of California, Los Angeles. “You need a set of measures to keep teachers at a school. If they had done this, seniority-based layoffs wouldn’t have been an issue.”

With the recession spurring teacher reductions across the nation, the issue of how layoffs are determined has become especially contentious. Teachers’ unions have fiercely opposed most moves to change seniority policies to a system based on performance and other factors.

Some education reformers lauded the proposed settlement because it seeks to correct the root problem: a lack of ways to keep more experienced teachers at schools, which leads to high turnover and thus staffs largely new to the profession.

“The reform train is moving,” said Emily Cohen, district policy director of National Council of Teacher Quality. “Districts aren’t as afraid of unions anymore.”

But the city’s teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles, said it would be meeting with the school board and the ACLU to review the terms of the proposed settlement and to voice its objections. “When the district makes a long-term policy that’s detrimental to students, we are obligated to challenge it,” it said.

The settlement shields teachers from layoffs at the city’s 25 lowest ranking schools according to the Academic Performance Index, a state score based on standardized tests, and another 20 chronically underperforming schools showing improvement, with the idea being that layoffs would set back advancement at these schools instead of boosting them, said LAUSD Deputy Superintendent John Deasy.

Other schools would not be disproportionately affected because layoffs will be capped at the district average for each school.

The union said it was concerned that the agreement would leave low-performing schools with a higher concentration of less experienced teachers. It also said “state law already gives schools districts flexibility in layoff procedures to best meet the needs of students” and “the settlement does nothing to solve ongoing staffing problems at hard-to-staff schools.”

California is one of a handful of states where seniority-based teacher layoffs are mandated by law. LAUSD’s settlement takes advantage of a loophole that allows seniority to be circumvented to meet special staffing needs and to meet the state constitutional right to a fair and adequate education.

Seniority-based layoffs are especially thorny in urban districts, where teachers often burn out early at tough, inner-city schools.

In Connecticut, the Hartford Public School System has asked the state board of education to change the seniority-driven layoff mandate because the young teaching staffs at its schools in high-povery areas are being decimated. The teachers union has accused the district of “union-busting.”

The issue “focuses the question on whether these students are less deserving of a stable set of teachers than students in a more affluent school,” said Mark Rosenbaum, chief counsel for the ACLU. “It’s about fairness and equality.”

The “last hired, first fired” layoff model has long been a sacred cow for the vast majority of teachers’ unions. In a study earlier this year, the National Council on Teacher Quality found that of 100 large school districts, only 25 considered factors other than seniority in teacher layoffs. In 16 districts, performance carries more weight than seniority.

Two bills to eliminate seniority-based layoffs in California died in the past year. Moves in other states have succeeded: Arizona approved a law prohibiting seniority-based layoffs, while Rhode Island said layoffs at low-performing schools must be determined by school need, not seniority.

Analysts said LAUSD’s settlement is important because it will give other districts a model to follow.

“It’s a good compromise,” said Cohen, of the National Council on Teacher Quality in Washington, D.C.

L.A. teachers union aims to prevent layoffs at ‘bad’ schools

Under an integration plan the U.S. Supreme Court struck down in 2007, the Jefferson County School District required every school across greater Louisville to have an enrollment that was 15% to 50% African-American. The goal was to make schools in the district, where the student population is about two-thirds white and one-third black, racially diverse throughout.

The Supreme Court’s decision ended that.

Now, Louisville is taking another swing at school integration. Under a new student-assignment plan that’s tied to household income and dependent on increased cross-town busing, elementary schools slowly are being integrated in a different way. Yet the district that lost its case before the high court has fallen short of its goals of having a mix of students from higher- and lower-income areas and a blend of races in all classrooms.

Its situation reflects the new landscape for school integration that’s coming into focus three years after the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling. The new reality tests the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education— the landmark high-court decision that struck down the doctrine of “separate but equal” schools more than a half-century ago — as school districts decide whether to continue to make integration a priority or return to neighborhood schools, whose enrollments often reflect communities’ racial divide.

“I think that minority schools are going to be even more isolated,” says education professor Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at University of California-Los Angeles, which supports integration. “For very large communities, there is going to be no integration experience available. … Segregation perpetuates itself.”

The 2007 decision, the first of a series of conservative blockbusters under Chief Justice John Roberts, came as many districts already had been backing away from race-based integration.

Supreme Court rulings in the 1990s and shifting political winds had stalled school desegregation, which began with the 1954 decision in Brown and continued until the late 1980s. The court’s new ruling in paired cases from Louisville and Seattle more definitively challenged the integration efforts of previous decades.

For educators seeking to mix students of all races, the decision has led to complex new approaches based on income level and other factors. At the same time, it also has generated attempts to create more magnet schools and strengthen academics.

The Supreme Court said districts could not look at the race of an individual student but did not bar districts from broadly considering race in certain communities. Under the new Louisville plan, parents list their top four choices for schools, some of which can be near home and some of which are supposed to be in other neighborhoods. Officials consider parents’ requests and other factors, such as a sibling already in school, as they try to meet diversity goals. The plan has taken effect in kindergarten through second grades. It will be phased in to include all of elementary school over the next three years and will start to take effect in middle school next year.

“No retreat” has become the official mantra of Jefferson County School Superintendent Sheldon Berman and other school administrators in Louisville. In other places, most recently Wake County, N.C., school boards have moved back to neighborhood-school plans, which can mean plentiful resources for students in affluent areas but the opposite for students in low-income places.

Education researchers such as Orfield note blacks and Hispanics do better in racially integrated schools. Students of all races who go to integrated schools are more inclined as adults to live in integrated communities.

Focusing on class, rather than race

Yet, Richard Kahlenberg, who has worked with schools in Chicago and elsewhere on approaches that integrate students based on income and other non-race factors, says students ultimately may be better off without exclusively race-based methods.

“The things we’re looking for in a school — such as peers who will be positive role models and parents who are actively involved in the school — track closer by class than race,” says Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, which researches economic and social issues.

Kahlenberg notes that before the ruling, Louisville’s Roosevelt-Perry Elementary, for example, “was beautifully balanced (racially) but was a disaster” academically since it was nearly “100% poor.”

Today, classrooms in the two-story brick school have been modernized with technology themes such as robotics. Principal Pamela Howell has spearheaded the reinventing of Roosevelt-Perry as a magnet school that focuses on math and science. She says the upside to discarding race-based plans is that school officials must be more innovative to draw parents’ interest across neighborhood lines.

Her message to parents reluctant to try the near-downtown location: “No matter where you live, no matter what you had to do to get here, you will get a high-quality education once you get here.”

Yet the school is still in a run-down urban strip where the area’s average household income is about $20,000 annually and the population is mostly African-American.

The principal-led transformation works for some parents — but not others.

Brandy Schad, who protested her 5-year-old son’s assignment to the magnet Roosevelt-Perry, says the promise of better academics could not persuade her to accept a school that was an hour from her home and had comparatively low test scores. “I certainly understand the importance of diversity,” she says, “but not at the expense of a 5-year-old.”

The 2007 ruling revealed a young Roberts Court flexing its conservative muscle on social issues.

John Roberts became chief justice in 2005, and conservative Justice Samuel Alito succeeded centrist Sandra Day O’Connor in 2006, leading to a more consequential ideological shift. The 2007 decision in the Louisville schools case was a jolt to the right. Justice John Paul Stevens, who had served since 1975 and retired this past summer, said he believed that no one on the court he joined would have voted the way the five conservatives did in the Louisville case.

Roberts wrote that the disputed integration plans from Louisville and Seattle recalled a pre-Brown era. In Brown, the Supreme Court said “separate but equal” schools were inherently unequal and violated the Constitution’s equality guarantee.

“Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin,” Roberts said, joined by the court’s most conservative justices. “The school districts in these cases have not (demonstrated) that we should allow this once again — even for very different reasons.” He added, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Dissenting justices observed that before the Brown ruling, only black children were told where they could go to school. Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by the court’s three other more liberal justices, said the majority’s decision undermined “Brown‘s promise of integrated primary and secondary education that local communities have sought.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is at the ideological middle of a divided court, was the crucial fifth vote for the conservative majority. He wrote a concurring statement that declared diversity in schools remained a “compelling” governmental interest but integration programs had to be “narrowly tailored.”

“This nation has a moral and ethical obligation to fulfill its historic commitment to creating an integrated society that ensures equal opportunity for all of its children,” Kennedy wrote, adding that districts could look at race only as part of a “nuanced, individual evaluation of school needs and student characteristics.”

Setting the bar higher

Louisville’s efforts to follow the high-court ruling have ushered in new challenges.

The new plan has turned out to be far more “disruptive” than the prior plan, says student-assignment specialist Barbara Dempsey, requiring more students to be bused between regions. In two years of the new plan, fewer than half of the kindergarten to second-grade classes have reached the district’s diversity goals, she says.

Pat Todd, executive director of student assignments, chalks that up to initial difficulties in balancing diversity with other factors, such as requests for siblings to stay together, and says she expects the elementary schools to meet the goals fully in four to five years.

“I do think we will have to make modifications,” Todd says. “But we will be continuing with a diversity plan, so the students will be better prepared for the future.”

There has been political fallout: Two Republican state legislators recently introduced a bill that would require the district to return to neighborhood schools. In this fall’s school board election, the integration plan is a major issue.

The plan prompted hundreds of school-transfer requests, one of which came from Schad who, with her husband, who has Crohn’s disease, wanted their son, Ethan, closer to home.

Schad says she was dismayed by Roosevelt-Perry’s academic scores and didn’t want to take a chance on the new magnet program: “It’s so new and so fresh that I don’t feel like you can put a whole lot of stock in it.” Her son is now at a school less than a mile from their home.

Still, the district has plenty of supportive parents, such as Shweta Krishnani, who chose Roosevelt-Perry after touring the school.

Krishnani says she was reluctant at first to send son Sahil, 5, there because of the neighborhood and the school’s low test scores. But Howell convinced her and her husband the grounds were safe and the new technology program was first-rate.

Those and other worries, including the two-bus ride her son must take every morning, have been eclipsed by his academic progress. Sahil began the school year in kindergarten but proved himself so advanced he was reassigned to first grade, where he can participate in a LEGO robotics lab and build robots with moving parts and sensors.

Krishnani is from Dubai and her husband grew up in India. She says she wants Sahil to mix with students of all races so he will be ready, as an adult, for anything in life or on the job.

Howell says she did not object to the old diversity plan but has since realized that with the poverty levels of students, white and black, the diversity “wasn’t pushing us to the top.” With the magnet program, she says, “we are now able to set the bar a lot higher for our students.”

Plans vary across the nation

In Louisville, a new turn in school integration

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.

9 states, D.C. receive ‘Race to the Top’ education funds

Ceara Sturgis’ dispute with the central Mississippi Copiah County School District started in 2009, well before a student in another Mississippi school district, Constance McMillen, found national attention in her fight to wear a tuxedo and take a same-sex date to prom.

On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit for Sturgis, claiming the Copiah County district discriminated against her on the basis of sex and gender stereotypes. Her photo and name were kept out of her senior yearbook.

The ACLU first contacted the district in October 2009 about the issue, but officials said they would adhere to a school policy. By the time Wesson Attendance Center yearbooks were released this spring, school officials had made clear Sturgis’ photo in a tuxedo wouldn’t be included. But Sturgis was surprised to see even her name was left out of the senior section.

“I guess in the back of my mind I knew that was going to happen, but I did have a little hope. I cried. I put my head down and put my hand over my face,” Sturgis said Tuesday.

The suit challenges the district’s policy allowing male students, but not female students, to wear a tux for senior portraits. The suit alleges a violation of Title IX, the federal law prohibiting discrimination based on gender.

Sturgis, who has worn masculine clothing since ninth grade and begins classes at Mississippi State University on Wednesday, said she felt as if she was being punished “just for being who I am.”

District Superintendent Rickey Clopton didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment.

Sturgis graduated with a 3.9 grade point average and participated in numerous extracurricular activities, including band and soccer, her attorneys said.

“Inclusion in the senior yearbook is a rite of passage for students, and it is shameful that Ceara was denied that chance,” Christine P. Sun, senior counsel with the ACLU Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Project said in a statement Tuesday.

“It’s unfair and unlawful to force students to conform to outdated notions about what boys and girls should look like without any regard to who they actually are as people.”

The ACLU attorney also represented McMillen, who drew inspiration from Sturgis in challenging Itawamba County school officials about McMillen’s plans for prom this year.

“I inspired her to do what she did and now we are friends,” Sturgis said.

But Sturgis didn’t face the same hostility as McMillen. Sturgis said her classmates and teachers were supportive, but she hopes hoping the suit will help other gay teenagers who feel they must conceal their gender identity.

“There are students who are hiding it their sexuality,” Sturgis said. “They have come up to me and told me they are. I had already decided what I was going to do, but it just took a little while.”

While she finished her senior year, Sturgis was living last fall with her grandparents in Wesson, a town of about 1,700.

The students took their yearbook portraits at a studio and Sturgis tried on one of the “drapes” that females students are required to wear.

“The thought of a portrait of her in the ‘feminine’ clothing as a representation of her senior year embarrassed her, and she began crying,” the lawsuit states.

Sturgis later put on the tuxedo and was photographed.

School officials informed Sturgis’ mother, Veronica Rodriguez, early in the school year that the tuxedo photograph wouldn’t be allowed, according to the suit. At the time, Clopton said federal court decisions supported the school’s policy.

The lawsuit names the school district, superintendent Clopton and school principal Ronald Greer. It seeks unspecified damages and attorneys’ fees.

The filing comes weeks after McMillen reached a settlement in her federal lawsuit against the Itawamba County School District.

The north Mississippi district had canceled its prom rather than allow McMillen attend with her girlfriend. The district agreed to pay $35,000 and follow a nondiscrimination policy as part of the settlement, though it argued such a policy was already in place.

Miss. lesbian student sues school over rejected tux photo

U.S. Attorney Zane David Memeger says investigators have found no evidence of criminal intent by Lower Merion School District employees who activated tracking software that took thousands of webcam and screenshot images on school-provided laptops.

A student and his family sued the district in February, claiming officials invaded his privacy by activating the software. That case continues.

The district has acknowledged capturing 56,000 screen shots and webcam images so it could locate missing laptops.

Memeger says he decided to make Tuesday’s announcement to close the matter before the start of the school year.

Feds: No charges in Philadelphia school laptop-spying case

He and thousands of other teachers around the country could get their jobs back now that the Senate has approved an emergency stimulus package designed to keep educators and other public employees out of the unemployment line.

“My biggest thing is I want to go back to the school I was at for the students,” said Ebersbach, 43, one of 14 math teachers in the Toledo school district to receive notice a few weeks ago that their jobs were cut. “We’re in a high-poverty school and one thing the students need more than anything else is consistency. And they’re not going to get that.”

The $26 billion measure passed Thursday is less than was initially proposed by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, but will provide $16 billion to help states balance their Medicaid budgets and $10 billion for grants to school districts to forestall layoffs.

Republicans strenuously opposed the measure, denouncing it as yet another federal bailout the government cannot afford and calling it a giveaway to public employee unions.

For educators across the country, it’s been a bewildering summer as money to save thousands of jobs stalled in Congress and unions and administrators sparred over ways to rehire laid-off teachers.

The result has been what is referred to in education circles as the “yo-yo effect.” School budgets, facing severe reductions in state funding, are cut. Layoffs are made. And some or even all of the teachers are hired back over the summer as officials scramble for money.

The money coming from Congress could help fill some of that void. But until districts actually have the money in hand, thousands of teachers must wait in limbo not knowing whether they’ll have jobs when school starts in a few weeks.

Data provided by the U.S. Department of Education on how many jobs the bill is expected to fund reads like the medical chart of a battered patient: 16,500 in California. In Texas, 14,500. More than 9,000 in Florida. Some 161,000 education jobs across the country in all.

“The Senate amendment will go a long way to protecting these jobs and ensuring that America’s educators are working to educate our way to a better economy,” Duncan said. “It’s the right thing to do for America’s students and America’s teachers.”

Throughout the summer, many districts had despaired that Congress would deliver any money, and scrambled to find other ways to bring back the teachers, offering early-retirement incentives and negotiating furlough days.

In Iowa, where 1,500 layoffs were announced earlier this year, the Des Moines district has called back all but 30 of the 173 teachers who were laid off. Twyla Woods, the district’s chief of staff, said they opened an early retirement option and hope to have enough attrition overall to bring back the remaining teachers.

In Santa Cruz, Calif., 82 teachers were laid-off this spring and rehired again this summer, also largely due to a negotiated retirement incentive that 41 workers opted into. Teachers also agreed to take furlough days. The entry level salary in the district is $40,000.

The efforts all saved jobs, but are not considered long-term solutions.

In other districts, no solution was reached at all, leaving hundreds unemployed and hoping for federal money.

Gretchen Marfisi in Florida was laid off in each of the last two summers, only to be rehired by the Broward County School District.

This year she canceled her family vacation and put her life on hold before being called back Thursday.

“Why are they firing all of us?” Marfisi said, her voice ringing with frustration. “Besides giving us all more gray hair and wrinkles, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of logic involved.”

Marfisi is now preparing to unpack all her boxes of teaching materials once again.

“It’s a relief to get a paycheck,” Marfisi said. “It’s just very weird and bizarre emotionally. It just in the process makes you feel like garbage.”

Mike Langyel, president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, worries about the long-term effects these series of layoffs will have on the teaching career.

“We don’t need to turn this into a Wal-Mart employment where you’re in for a while and you’re out,” Langyel said.

Teachers say the effect on morale has been overwhelming.

“Somebody said to me, ‘Teacher: I thought that was one field that was recession-proof,’” Ebersbach said. “I’m at a 50-50 shot.”

Turner reported from Atlanta. Armario reported from Miami.

Jobs bill offers teachers relief

The numbers, based on federal data, were released Tuesday by groups advocating for more federal aid for struggling families.

South Dakota saw its number rise from 1,038 in 2006-07 to 1,794 in 2008-09 — a 73% increase.

The 22,000-student school district in Sioux Falls has seen the number of homeless kids jump 44% over the past five years. Today, more than 1,000 pupils — about one child per classroom — don’t live in permanent homes.

“We have homeless students identified in every school in the district,” said Gail Swenson, supervisor of the district’s Office of Homeless Education. “Some would like to believe one part of town would not have a homeless child and another part would. It’s across the board.”

The report said there were nearly 680,000 homeless students, classified as those without permanent housing, in the 2006-07 school year. By 2008-09, that number had climbed to almost 957,000 due to increasing bankruptcies, home foreclosures and unemployment. Forty-three states saw their rolls increase, including five states with more than double the national growth rate: Texas (139%), Iowa (136%), New Mexico (91%), Kansas (88%), and New Jersey (84%).

Advocates are asking Congress to provide at least $140 million for homeless students next year, the same amount Congress allocated this year to help with medical care, school supplies and transportation. But about half of that was economic stimulus money that may not be available in 2011.

More funding could be a long shot with lawmakers increasingly looking for way to cut federal spending and corral the federal debt.

“Schools are uniquely positioned to provide safety, structure and services for homeless children,” said Bruce Lesley, president of First Focus, which released the report with the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth.

Swenson said it’s critical that homeless students not miss extended periods of school because of their transient situation.

“With every move that a child makes, they can lose from three to six months of academic gain,” she said. “A child who virtually misses third grade loses out on multiplication and cursive writing and that affects the rest of their life.”

Schools report surge in homeless students

Education Department officials provided The Associated Press with a list of the finalists ahead of a speech by Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

The states are: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and South Carolina.

Duncan was expected to officially announce the finalists at a speech at the National Press Club.

The competition rewards ambitious reforms aimed at improving struggling schools and closing the achievement gap. Applications were screened by a panel of peer reviewers, and finalists will travel to Washington in coming weeks to present their proposals.

In all, 35 states and the District of Columbia applied for the second round of the application. The 19 finalists have asked for $6.2 billion, though only $3.4 billion is available.

Dozens of states passed new education policies to make themselves more attractive to the judges.

New York, which was a finalist in the first round but did not win money, lifted its cap on the number of charter schools that can open annually from 200 to 460. Colorado passed laws that would pay teachers based on student performance and can strip tenure from low performing instructors.

Two states, Tennessee and Delaware, were awarded a total of $600 million in the first round.

Their applications were praised for merit pay policies that link teacher pay to student performance and for garnering the support of teachers’ unions. Tennessee and Delaware also have laws that are welcoming to charter schools.

In the first round of the race, some stakeholders were reluctant to support applications tying teacher evaluations to student test scores.

Armario reported from Miami. AP Writer Michael Gormley in Albany, N.Y., contributed to this report.

18 states, D.C. named Race to the Top education grant finalists

Instead of simply moving kids from one grade to the next as they get older, schools are grouping students by ability. Once they master a subject, they move up a level. This practice has been around for decades, but was generally used on a smaller scale, in individual grades, subjects or schools.

Now, in the latest effort to transform the bedraggled Kansas City, Mo. schools, the district is about to become what reform experts say is the largest one to try the approach. Starting this fall officials will begin switching 17,000 students to the new system to turnaround trailing schools and increase abysmal tests scores.

“The current system of public education in this country is not working” said Superintendent John Covington. “It’s an outdated, industrial, agrarian kind of model that lends itself to still allowing students to progress through school based on the amount of time they sit in a chair rather than whether or not they have truly mastered the competencies and skills.”

Here’s how the reform works:

Students — often of varying ages — work at their own pace, meeting with teachers to decide what part of the curriculum to tackle. Teachers still instruct students as a group if it’s needed, but often students are working individually or in small groups on projects that are tailored to their skill level.

For instance, in a classroom learning about currency, one group could draw pictures of pennies and nickels. A student who has mastered that skill might use pretend money to practice making change.

Students who progress quickly can finish high school material early and move forward with college coursework. Alternatively, in some districts, high-schoolers who need extra time can stick around for another year.

Advocates say the approach cuts down on discipline problems because advanced students aren’t bored and struggling students aren’t frustrated.

But backers acknowledge implementation is tricky, and the change is so drastic it can take time to explain to parents, teachers and students. If the community isn’t sold on the effort, it will bomb, said Richard DeLorenzo, co-founder of the Re-Inventing Schools Coalition, which coaches schools on implementing the reform.

Kansas City officials hope the new system will help the district that’s been beset with failure. A $2 billion desegregation case failed to boost test scores or stem the exodus of students to the suburbs and private and charter schools. The district has lost half its students and will close about 40% of its schools by the fall to avoid bankruptcy.

Covington wants to start the system in five elementary schools in hopes of spreading it through the upper grades once the bugs are worked out.

“This system precludes us from labeling children failures,” Covington said. “It’s not that you’ve failed, it’s just that at this point you haven’t mastered the competencies yet and when you do, you will move to the next level.”

As it plans for the change, Kansas City teachers and administrators have visited and sought advice from a Denver area school district that uses the reform.

Adams County School District 50 has about 10,000 students this past school year its elementary and middle students made the shift. The reform will be phased into the high schools starting in the fall.

Count 11-year-old Alex Rodriguez as a convert to the new approach. He used to get bored after plowing through his assignments. He had to bring books from home or the library if he wanted a challenge because the ones at his old school were one or two grade levels too easy.

“I liked school,” he said. “But it was hard sitting there and doing nothing.”

His parents transferred the high achiever and his three younger siblings to the Denver area district after learning it was trying something new. His father, Richard Rodriguez, has been thrilled with the turnaround.

“I wish school was like this when I was growing up,” he said.

There also is growing interest in Maine, where six districts, with a combined 11,248 students, are transitioning to the reform, starting with staff training and community meetings and gradually changing what happens in classrooms.

“It is incredible what is happening in the classrooms in Maine that are trying it,” said Diana Doiron, who is overseeing the effort for the state’s education department.

Education officials in Kansas City, Maine and elsewhere said part of the allure is the success other districts have after making the switch.

Marzano Research Laboratory, an educational research and professional development firm, evaluated 2009 state test data for over 3,500 students from 15 school districts in Alaska, Colorado, and Florida. Researchers found that students who learned through the different approach were 2.5 times more likely to score at a level that shows they have a good grasp of the material on exams for reading, writing, and mathematics.

Greg Johnson, director of curriculum and instruction for the Bering Strait School District in Alaska, recalled that before the switch there were students who had been on honor roll throughout high school then failed a test the state requires for graduation.

Now, he said if students are on pace to pass a class like Algebra I, the likelihood of them passing the state exam covering that material is more than 90%. He’s proud of that accomplishment and said teachers love it.

“The most die-hard advocates for our system are our teachers because, especially the ones who were back with us before the change, they saw where things were then,” he said. “They see where things are now and they don’t want to go back.”

Some schools grouping students by skill, not grade level