The club of private college and university presidents earning seven figures is getting less exclusive. Thirty presidents received more than $1 million in pay and benefits in 2008, according to an analysis of federal tax forms by The Chronicle of Higher Education . More than 1 in 5 chief executives at the 448 institutions surveyed topped $600,000. Most of the pay packages were negotiated before the full force of the recession. But even if the numbers dip slightly in next year’s survey, executive pay is expected to keep climbing over the long term as colleges compete for top talent. And schools are rewarding executives while raising tuition, exposing themselves to criticism. At large research universities, the median pay was $760,774; it was $387,923 at liberal arts colleges and $352,257 at undergraduate and graduate colleges and universities. The highest paid executive in the Chronicle survey was Bernard Lander, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi and sociologist who founded Touro College in New York in 1970. He died in February at 94. Lander received a compensation package of nearly $4.8 million. In a statement, the college said $4.2 million of that was retroactive pay and benefits awarded after an outside consultant determined Lander had been “severely underpaid.” Several deals reported the Chronicle survey, which covers the most recent available data, included deferred compensation or other unusual circumstances. Comparisons to past years aren’t possible because of changes in how data is reported to the Internal Revenue Service . Colleges were asked to report salaries by calendar year instead of fiscal year as in the past, so most dollar amounts overlap with what was reported the previous year. Another change: Perks including first-class air travel, country club dues and housing are now included in reported pay. In 2007-2008, 23 presidents received more than $1 million. As recently as 2004, no college president had broken the seven-figure threshold. While some presidents on the latest list lead ultra-selective schools such as Columbia, Yale and Penn, executives from schools such as the University of Tulsa and Chapman University in Orange, Calif., are on it, too. Not all the most elite schools are represented, either. The presidents of Harvard, Princeton and Johns Hopkins all were paid in the $800,000s. “Value is in the eyes of the beholder,” said Jeffrey Selingo, editor of the Chronicle . “Some boards think these presidents, even at small institutions, are worth it. On the flip side, the prestige of serving at other institutions is enough of a paycheck for some.” Still, numbers in the tax forms don’t always tell the whole story. Chapman University President James Doti’s $1.25 million compensation includes two “golden handcuff” deferred compensation deals worth almost $665,000, spokeswoman Mary Platt said. She said the board did not want to lose Doti, who since taking the job in 1991 has raised the school’s profile and overseen expansive building projects. He and other college presidents have donated a portion of the earnings back to the college. Doti gave a $1 million gift for an endowed chair in economics. David Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, said in a statement that salaries reflect supply and demand, and that presidents’ jobs have become more demanding. Presidential salaries make up a very small percentage of campus budgets and have virtually no impact on tuition increases, Warren said. Still, public confidence in higher education erodes when tuition and presidential pay are both rising, said Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. “People see higher education as another institution that takes care of the people at the top first,” he said. According to the College Board , average tuition and fees at private colleges and universities have risen almost 35% in the past decade, to $27,290. Many students, though, pay much less because of grants and tax benefits. The average net price at private schools was $11,320 this fall, less than what students paid on average a decade ago. Public college presidents generally earn less than their private counterparts. Only one public university president topped $1 million in 2008-09 — Ohio State University president Gordon Gee brought in $1.5 million. Then there are for-profit colleges, which are under fire for their heavy reliance on federal student aid money and high student loan default rates. Strayer Education Inc. paid chairman and CEO Robert Silberman $41.9 million last year, according to a Bloomberg report last week. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Stagnant scientific education imperils U.S. economic leadership, says a report by leading business and science figures. Released Thursday at a congressional briefing attended by senators and congressmen of both parties, the report updates a 2005 science education report that led to moves to double federal research funding. Nevertheless, the “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” review finds little improvement in U.S. elementary and secondary technical education since then. “Our nation’s outlook has worsened,” concludes the report panel headed by former Lockheed Martin chief Norman Augustine . The report “paints a daunting outlook for America if it were to continue on the perilous path it has been following”: •U.S. mathematics and science K-12 education ranks 48th worldwide. •49% of U.S. adults don’t know how long it takes for the Earth to circle the sun. •China has replaced the United States as the world’s top high-technology exporter. Although U.S. school achievement scores have stagnated, harming the economy as employers look elsewhere for competent workers, the report says that other nations have made gains. If U.S. students matched Finland ‘s, for example, analysis suggests the U.S. economy would grow 9%-16%. “The real point is that we have to have a well-educated workforce to create opportunities for young people,” says Charles Vest, head of the National Academy of Engineering , a report sponsor. “Otherwise, we don’t have a chance.” “The current economic crisis makes the link between education and employment very clear,” says Steven Newton of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland. In 2007, however, an analysis led by B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University found U.S. science education worries overstated. It saw three times more science and engineering college graduates than job openings each year. Other reports have found top science and engineering students migrating to better-paying jobs in finance, law and medicine, since the 1990s.

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

The number of college students who defaulted on their federal student loans climbed in the fiscal year that ended in September 2008, according to new government data released Monday. And once again, those who attend for-profit colleges and universities were the most likely to default. The grim numbers are no surprise, given that the timeframe roughly aligns with the start of the recession. But they come at a politically charged time, as for-profit colleges fight proposed regulations that would cut off federal aid to some programs if too many students default on loans or don’t earn enough after graduation to repay them. YOUR MONEY: Student loan program changes affect rates, repayment DEBT: Student loan debt exceeds credit card debt in USA Figures from the U.S. Department of Education show 7% of borrowers of federal student loans defaulted within two years of beginning repayment, up from 6.7% the previous year and 5.2% the year before that. Default rates crept up in all sectors of higher education — from 3.7 to 4% for private nonprofit schools, 5.9 to 6% for public nonprofit schools, and 11 to 11.6% for for-profit schools. The data covers borrowers whose first loan repayments came due between Oct. 1, 2007, and Sept. 30, 2008, and who defaulted before Sept. 30. 2009. “Even before the economy went down, student borrowing had doubled in this decade,” said Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education in San Jose, Calif. “More students borrowed and they borrowed more money, and they’re now they’re going out in a very tough economy.” The Education Department underscored the for-profit default rates. Education Secretary Arne Duncan , repeating what has become his mantra on the fastest growing segment of higher education, voiced concern about excessive debt and useless degrees while simultaneously highlighting the sector’s positive contributions. Students at for-profit schools represented 26% of federal loan borrowers and 43% of all defaulters in 2008-09, the department says. Citing those figures and the sector’s rapid growth, the department has proposed a complicated aid eligibility formula that would weigh both the debt-to-income ratio of recent graduates and whether all enrolled students repay their loans on time, regardless of whether they finish their studies. The department was flooded with more than 80,000 comments on the proposed regulations in a public feedback period that closed last week. For-profit colleges argue the government is soft-pedaling the potential harm and say the changes would disproportionately hurt minority students. Harris Miller , president and CEO of the Career College Association, which represents for-profit schools, said the major factor driving defaults is not an institution’s tax status but student demographics. For-profit colleges accept higher-risk and lower-income students, and Harvard would have higher default rates if it did the same, he said. Experts caution that the two-year rate does not provide a full picture and many more students default in subsequent years. The Education Department is moving to a three-year rate to determine schools’ eligibility to take part in taxpayer-supported student aid programs. Donald Heller, director of Penn State University ‘s Center for the Study of Higher Education, also cautioned against comparing for-profit college default rates with those at all public and private colleges. He said it’s more accurate to stack them against community colleges, which are closer to for-profits in programming and student makeup. By that measure, for-profits still have default rates that are worse, but it’s closer. The default rate for students at public two- to three-year programs — which covers the vast majority of community colleges — was 10.1% in fiscal year 2008, the new data shows. At for-profit schools, the rate was 12.6% in two- to three-year programs. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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.

WASHINGTON — Nearly 1 million homeless students attended public schools in 2008-09, a 41% increase over the previous two years and another sign of how broadly the economic recession has struck America. 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.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

WASHINGTON — More than 10 years have passed since she gave up her pursuit of a degree in computer science, but Yajahira Deaza still has regrets. “I feel incomplete,” says the 33-year-old, a customer service representative for a major New York bank. Her experience reflects the findings of an Associated Press-Univision poll that examined the attitudes of Latino adults toward higher education. LATINOS: Students face barriers Despite strong belief in the value of a college diploma, Hispanics more often than not fall short of that goal. The poll’s findings have broad implications not only for educators and parents, but also for the U.S. economy. In the next decade, U.S. companies will have to fill millions of jobs to replace well-trained baby boomers going into retirement. As the nation’s largest minority group, Latinos account for a growing share of the pool of workers, yet their skills may not be up to par. Aware of the challenge, some California State University campuses are reaching out to Hispanic children as early as the fourth grade. “Aspirations for higher education are very strong among Hispanics, but there is a yawning discrepancy between aspirations and actual attainment,” said Richard Fry, an education researcher at the Pew Hispanic Center. Indeed, the poll, also sponsored by The Nielsen Company and Stanford University , found that Hispanics value higher education more than do Americans as a whole. Eighty-seven percent said a college education is extremely or very important, compared with 78% of the overall U.S. population. Ninety-four percent of Latinos say they expect their own children to go to college, a desire that’s slightly stronger for girls. Seventy-four percent said the most important goal for a girl right after high school is to attend a four-year college, compared with 71% for boys. Enthusiasm about higher education hasn’t been matched by results. Census figures show that only 13% of Hispanics have a college degree or higher, compared with 30% among Americans overall. The poll revealed some of the roadblocks: Latinos do not have enough money, yet many are reluctant to borrow. Family obligations intervene. Parents and teachers provide only lukewarm support. Fifty-four percent said their own parents either did not expect them to go to college, or did not care either way. After graduating high school, Angel Vasquez of Port Arthur, Texas, wanted to go to a technical school to become a diesel mechanic. First he wanted a six-month break. No, said the grandfather who raised him: Go to school immediately or get a job immediately. Now 23, Vasquez works as a technician for a company that repairs buildings damaged by water and mold. “My grandparents raised me pretty good, and I understand where they were coming from,” he said. But “I seriously wish I would have gone to school because I could be making double the money.” In the poll, just 29% cited poor grades in high school as an extremely or very important reason for not going to college. “A main takeaway here for policymakers is that there are a lot of things that are inhibiting Hispanics, other than their academic performance,” said Michael Kirst, a Stanford University education professor. “They have really major barriers that are more intense for this population.” Affordability was the top reason for not completing a college degree, cited by 54% as “extremely” or “very” important. Financial pressure is magnified by a reluctance to borrow that appears to be cultural. The second most common reason for not finishing college was family responsibilities, cited as extremely or very important by 52%. Deaza, the New York bank employee, said that is why she had to leave her computer studies back in the late 1990s. A single mom-to-be, she was expecting her first child, a daughter who’s now 11. Deaza is married with three children now, and says she has a lot to be thankful for. Still, she feels bad not having her degree. “I feel it the worst when I’m trying to find a job,” she said. The AP-Univision Poll was conducted from March 11 to June 3 by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago , using a sample of Hispanic households provided by The Nielsen Company. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

BOISE — In her small timber town in northern Idaho , Christina Williams enrolled her son in the closest public school because she had few other choices near her home. But as she watched him struggle for years — many mornings prying him out of bed and forcing him to go to school — Williams sought an alternative to the traditional classroom. The single mother now drives about 140 miles roundtrip each day to her 12-year-old son’s charter school in Sandpoint . “It’s killing my poor little car, but it is so worth the drive to me,” Williams said in a telephone interview. “He was not getting the education he needed.” Williams would like a closer alternative, but Idaho allows just six new charter schools a year. Several other states also put strict limits on the number of new charter schools. Another 11 states don’t allow charters at all, even though the federal government has created a $4.35 billion competition to encourage charters and other educational innovations. Most states adopted only modest measures to improve charter schools as a result of the “Race to the Top” competition and no new substantive charter school laws were passed, said Jeanne Allen, president and founder of the Center for Education Reform, a school choice advocate based in Washington, D.C. “I can’t tell you how much I wish Race to the Top would have created a firestorm,” Allen said. “The reality is, it didn’t.” Charter schools get taxpayer money but have more freedom than traditional public schools do to map out how they’ll meet federal education benchmarks. They are arguably more popular than ever, with a record 5,000 operating in 39 states and the District of Columbia, serving more than 1.5 million children. About 300,000 children are on waiting lists. Charter schools draw fire from teachers’ unions and other education groups, who say taxpayer money should be spent to fix traditional public education system rather than creating schools that have less oversight from state and local officials. Alabama’s politically powerful teachers’ union helped kill a bill — introduced by Gov. Bob Riley in response to Race to the Top earlier this year — that would have allowed charter schools. “The dollars we do have need to go into the classrooms of schools we’re operating,” said Paul Hubbert, executive director of the Alabama Education Association. States qualify for Race to the Top money based on a scoring system that gives states with charter schools a significant advantage. Of the 500 points a state can receive, 40 are related to charter schools. At the start of the competition, Education Secretary Arne Duncan went so far as to warn states that ban or restrict charter schools were jeopardizing their chances to win a slice of the money. But he backed off that threat, and many states, like Idaho, took that as a signal that they didn’t need to change their charter school laws. A bill to allow more charter schools for certain groups of students — such as minorities or those with disabilities — to open each year was scuttled as the Idaho Legislature focused mostly on regular public schools, which face the worst budget year for public education in the state’s history. The first Race to the Top grants were awarded in March to Tennessee, which received $500 million, and Delaware, which received $100 million. Both were lauded for their charter school laws among other attempts to improve education. Tennessee expanded charter-school eligibility only in 2009. Louisiana, Illinois, Michigan and Massachusetts also eased or eliminated limits on charter schools in the past year. North Carolina and New York are among states that, like Idaho, are holding tight to their caps on the specialized schools. One state — Mississippi — let its charter school law expire last year. Mississippi lawmakers passed new legislation in late March that would allow low-performing schools to be restructured to become either charter schools or “new start” schools, both of which are designed to revamp management and increase parental involvement. Applications for the second round of Race to the Top awards are due in June. Kentucky’s legislature is considering allowing charter schools, and Hawaii officials are considering easing charter restrictions as they vie for the federal funds. “When you put money on the line and it’s the most difficult budget faced in years, people start listening for a variety of reasons,” said Todd Ziebarth with the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

These aren’t your old-school fundraisers. Bake sales to pay for field trips are giving way to online giving, fairs and businesses donating percentages of their sales as parents raise money to pay teacher salaries and save sports and art programs from budget cuts. “We see an ever-increasing need for parents to go above and beyond the call of duty,” says Chuck Saylors, 50, president of the National PTA (Parent Teacher Association). “School districts can’t keep the cuts out of the classrooms.” “Really, we shouldn’t have to be put in this position,” says Melissa Neumann, 39, who has two children in Cupertino , Calif., schools. “We shouldn’t have to fundraise basically for the core curriculum: reading, writing and math.” Still, she and others say they’ll do what they can: • In Cupertino in the Silicon Valley , parents have collected $1.6 million, close to the $2 million they hope to raise by Saturday, to save the jobs of 110 teachers. The district of 18,000 children needs to close a $7.3 million budget shortfall next year. The parents have asked every household in the community to donate $375. They got businesses to donate a portion of their sales on given days. • In Mokena, Ill., outside Chicago, parents want to raise $250,000 by December to keep 48 sports and other activities, including band and after-school tutoring. The district of 2,100 students needs to cut $2 million from its budget next year. The parents have raised $27,000 with movie nights, concerts, car washes and fairs. • In Portage, Mich., parents have $10,000 of the $1.3 million they need by June 2011 to offset state cuts that forced the district of 8,700 to end school a week early and offer teachers early retirement. Educators applaud the efforts, but they say fundraising to operate schools is not sustainable. “You have the funding for one year and then what?” says Dan Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators . He warns fundraising will widen the opportunity gap between affluent and low-income children. The National PTA discourages parents from raising money for school operations, Saylors says. He says parents need to hold officials accountable. Goals can be hard to reach. Parents in Woodcliff Lake, N.J., tried to raise $186,000 to save three teachers. They got $30,000, not enough for one job, says Elizabeth Neve Calderone, 42, a mother of two. “It’s disappointing,” Calderone says. “We don’t want to be dipping into our pockets any more than we have to, but if it means saving a teacher or two, we’ll do it.”