NEW YORK (AP) — Mayor Michael Bloomberg named a top publishing executive with no background in education to head the nation’s largest school system after announcing Tuesday that New York City ‘s longtime chancellor was stepping down. Hearst Magazines chairwoman Cathie Black will become the first female chancellor of the city’s 1.1 million-student school system, replacing Joel I. Klein , who has served as chancellor since 2002. Klein is leaving to become an executive vice president at News Corp . Bloomberg praised Black, a Chicago native who spent eight years at USA Today as president, publisher, board member and Gannett Co. executive vice president, as a “world-class manager.” The billionaire mayor, who often eschews traditional resumes for government posts, said Black’s business skills make her an ideal leader of educators and students. “She understands that we have to make sure that our kids have the skill sets to partake in the great American dream,” Bloomberg said. “In the end, I picked somebody who I have confidence is the right person for this job at this time.” The appointment will require a waiver from the state Department of Education because Black is not a certified teacher. The mayor said Klein will stay on until the end of the year. Black attended parochial schools in Chicago and sent her own children to private boarding schools in Connecticut. She has been on Fortune magazine’s “50 Most Powerful Women in Business” list and is the author of a book called “Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life).” She will be the first woman to lead the New York City school system. At Hearst, she oversees titles including Esquire; Good Housekeeping; O, the Oprah magazine and Popular Mechanics. Black’s appointment reflects Bloomberg’s view that success in business translates to similar achievements in public service. “There is no one who knows more about the skills our children will need to succeed in the 21st century economy,” Bloomberg said at a City Hall news conference with Klein and Black. Before Klein joined the Bloomberg administration, he was with media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG . Previously, he was an assistant attorney general in the Clinton administration. He headed the U.S. Justice Department ‘s antitrust division for nearly four years, where his work included launching the case to break up Microsoft Corp. Unlike Black, Klein grew up in New York City and attended public schools. As chancellor, he often clashed with unions and with parent groups that complained of being denied a role in running the schools. “Many parents will be glad to see Joel Klein leave as chancellor, who had no respect for their views or priorities,” said Leonie Haimson, who leads a parent advocacy group called Class Size Matters. Ernest Logan, the president of the union that represents New York City principals, said Klein “had a rocky road” as chancellor but learned on the job. Logan said he knows little about Black. “I’m now going to read her book,” he said. Teachers union head Michael Mulgrew said: “I look forward to working with Ms. Black. As a teacher, I will help in any way I can to improve the education for the children of New York.” Black told reporters she has had “limited exposure to unions” in her previous jobs. Klein was appointed chancellor after Bloomberg won control of the school system and disbanded the Board of Education. Bloomberg and Klein have touted the progress that students have made under their watch, but the state Education Department said last summer that rising scores on standardized tests had been overstated because the tests had become too easy. Black will likely serve no longer than the three years remaining in Bloomberg’s term. “She’s had a career, so maybe she can have the ability to devote the next three years to public service,” Bloomberg said. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Those of you who are lousy at math may someday be able to boost your skills with the use of a painless method of electrical brain stimulation, British research suggests. In a study published in the Nov. 4 online issue of Current Biology , neuroscientists at Oxford University report that adults with normal math abilities were able to improve their performance on a series of numerical tests with the help of a noninvasive technique known as transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS). TDCS involves stimulating specific regions of the brain with low-level electrical currents to enhance or reduce the activity of neurons. Over the last decade, the procedure has shown promise at improving brain functioning in stroke victims as well as in people with Parkinson’s disease . But this is the first study to show that TDCS can help healthy individuals do better on math tests. “We were able to enhance math abilities, in a specific fashion, and with remarkable longevity,” said lead author Roi Cohen Kadosh, a cognitive neuroscientist at Oxford’s department of experimental psychology. For the study, Cohen Kadosh and his colleagues studied 15 student volunteers between the ages of 20 and 21. The students were asked to learn a series of artificial numbers (symbols that they had never seen before that they were told represented numbers) while they received either a placebo stimulation or TDCS applied to the parietal lobe, a region situated at the back of the brain that is key to numerical understanding. “As our aim is eventually to help children when they are experiencing learning difficulties with numbers, we wanted the adult subjects to learn new material (the artificial numbers) rather than test them with material that they already know,” Cohen Kadosh explained. His team tested the participants’ ability to automatically process the relationship of the artificial numbers to one another and to map them correctly in space using standard testing methods for numerical competence. The results of the tests showed that the brain stimulation improved the participants’ ability to learn the new numbers, and those that improvements lasted for six months. Control tests showed that the effect was specific to the learned symbols and did not affect other cognitive functions. One American researcher said the findings were encouraging, but a lot more study is needed. “Like many good studies, it opens a raft of fertile questions, including ‘Will this work in children?’ and ‘Is it safe to use in children?’” said Dr. Edwin M. Robertson, associate director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “It is certainly possible that undergoing this procedure will affect brain function in children and so cause either neurological or psychiatric problems in the future, and so good follow-up studies are required to examine this issue,” said Robertson, who is also an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard University Medical School. “The concern is greater for children whose brains are still developing, as opposed to the adult population of volunteers who took part in the current study.” Cohen Kadosh said the next step is to test the technique on people who are among the 20% of the population with moderate to severe numerical disabilities, as well as on those who lose their skill with numbers as a result of stroke or degenerative disease. “Our aim is to try to find a way to enhance cognitive treatment by coupling it with noninvasive and painless brain stimulation,” he said. He acknowledged, however, that the technique may also end up being sought after by zealous parents eager to have their kids improve their math scores. “It’s just like other innovations in the past that have been misused,” said Cohen Kadosh. “The experiments that we are doing have been designed to improve disabilities, but of course it can be used by others to enhance average math performance, and we don’t have any control over that.”

BOSTON (AP) — Federal officials and the Boston Public Schools have reached an agreement over allegations that the school district violated federal law by not providing English instruction to students with a limited grasp of the language, the U.S. Justice Department announced Friday. Under the agreement, Boston Public Schools agreed to assess the English proficiency of an estimated 7,000 students who were not previously tested in how well they understand, speak, read and write English. The district also agreed to provide the students with extra English language help during other classes including math, social studies and science. In addition, the Boston Public Schools must monitor the academic performance of current and former English language learners and provide English language learner services at all schools. The Boston Globe , citing documents obtained under a public records request, reported in July that the federal scrutiny began after Boston schools revealed during a routine state review that 42% of the district’s nearly 11,000 English language learners were not receiving the legally required help. In a statement Friday, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and the federal Department of Education ‘s Office for Civil Rights said that since 2003, Boston Public Schools had failed to properly identify and adequately serve thousands of English language learners under federal law. Officials said the settlement came after federal authorities examined the district’s policies and visited schools. “All students who are not proficient in English are entitled to language acquisition services to overcome language barriers that impede their equal and meaningful participation in educational programs,” said Thomas Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. For months now, Boston schools have made changes in anticipation of settlement agreement. “This agreement outlines the work that is already underway in Boston for students learning English,” Boston Public Schools Superintendent Carol Johnson said in a statement Friday. “Within the last two years we have made significant investments for ELL students and their families that will ensure they are receiving a quality education in any school they choose in Boston.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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

CHICAGO — From continuing education and enrichment classes to graduate school, many of America’s retirees are pursuing their interests at the college level. It’s a trend that is likely to grow as seniors’ ranks swell with baby boomers, who by 2015 will represent some 35% of the U.S. population, looking to either acquire new job skills or simply enjoy new learning experiences. (Baby boomers are people born between 1946 and 1964) Nearly six decades after graduating from college, Pete Shannon still can’t get enough of lectures and homework assignments. The 78-year-old Dallas retiree has taken dozens of classes at his local community college since he stopped working as a certified public accountant in 2004. This summer he studied music composition, and in the fall he plans to tackle philosophy and whatever else piques his interest. Exams can be challenging, but one thing he doesn’t sweat is tuition bills. In one of many such arrangements across the U.S., Dallas County residents age 65 and over get up to six hours’ tuition free at Richland College every semester. “It’s a marvelous opportunity,” Shannon says, calling the college his “candy store.” “It’s a wonderful place to go. The catalog is rich with all kinds of classes.” The prospect of having to pay for even moderately priced college classes might sound daunting to a retiree living on fixed income. But numerous discounts, tuition waivers and other deals make it possible. “There are more opportunities than in the past for senior citizens to take college classes and get help paying for them,” says financial aid expert Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org and Fastweb.com. Many community colleges and some four-year colleges allow seniors to audit classes for free and significantly reduce tuition for those who take them for credit. The financial arrangements vary widely by school and so do the age requirements — generally 60, 62, or 65 and over. Twenty-one states and Washington, D.C., offer free tuition for senior citizens at some or all of their public colleges, according to FinAid.org. The student still must buy textbooks and may have to pay fees. Two relatively new opportunities offer even more help. The Senior Scholarships program, created last year as part of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, provides $1,000 education awards for people 55 or older who volunteer 350 or more hours a year. The money may be used for the volunteer’s own education or transferred to a child, foster child or grandchild. And the American Opportunity tax credit can lower taxes for students of any age dollar-for-dollar for the first $2,000 spent on tuition, fees and course materials. The credit also applies to 25% of the second $2,000. Unless extended, the temporary credit expires at year’s end. More seniors might head back to school if they knew about the deep discounts and freebies — or lived near colleges. As it is, education remains an untapped resource for most. According to data released in June by the Bureau of Labor Statistics , Americans from age 65 to 74 say they spend 6.77 hours on leisure and sports on a typical weekday, watch 3.58 hours of TV, spend 0.71 hour reading, 0.59 hour socializing and 0.03 hour on education. That’s less than two minutes, compared to 0.46 hour or about 28 minutes for the population as a whole. Shannon, who got his undergraduate degree in business economics from Rice University in 1953, is happy to stay in school for life. He says he takes college classes to get out of the house, at his wife’s urging, and exercise his brain. The rest of him gets a workout, too, as he often bikes the 4 1/2 miles (6.4 kilometers) to campus. A perfect 4.0 grade-point average through 114 credit hours shows he’s not taking any mental shortcuts. “I like writing the papers and doing the work,” he says. “It’s more complete than Googling a subject. And by the time you finish the semester, you’ve learned something.” Thanks to the tuition deals, he reckons he has spent no more than $1,000 on education expenses since he retired. But he’d dig a little deeper into his retirement savings if he had to. “Frankly, I’d go to college even if I had to pay up to $1,000 a year for it,” he says. “I’d consider it part of my personal entertainment budget.” If retirement-age students decide to borrow to pay for college, loans don’t have to be as burdensome as they might expect. Federal student loans are discharged on the borrower’s death. That means the retiree student’s heirs won’t get shortchanged because of those late-in-life classes in history and Chinese. The senior can also choose the repayment plan with the longest payback period, thus the lowest monthly payment. When finances aren’t an issue, most any educational experience is still possible in retirement. Anne Carter Harrison-Clark of Williamsburg, Virginia, is thriving as a 71-year-old student at the William & Mary Law School. Learning more about the law is something she long aspired to do during a career as a lobbyist and public policy lecturer at Georgetown University , among other roles. Now she has both the time and money to do it, thanks to she and her husband Bob selling property near the top of the market six years ago. Immersed in her third year of law classes, she is thrilled to be studying at the college where her great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Harrison V, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was educated. She doesn’t at all mind being the only white-haired student or getting constantly asked why she’s there. The short answer to that is she wants to keep the brain cells going with new information and new contacts. And she doesn’t know where this educational “journey” will take her, although she does intend to get her law degree at some point, on her own schedule. “This whole (college) experience has been like dessert, like double fudge icing on a cake. Just a wonderful experience,” says Harrison-Clark, who already has a Ph.D. in politics. “I highly encourage it.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

The American Bar Association is moving ahead with changes in its accreditation system that faculty members fear could erode tenure protections for many professors and further weaken job security for clinical faculty members, many of whom don’t have tenure to start with. A special committee of the ABA last week released the latest version of proposed guidelines on academic freedom — just days before an ABA committee met Saturday to discuss (but not alter) the draft language. In the weeks before the draft was released, many faculty leaders had urged the ABA panel not to do the two key things its draft does: • Remove language from the ABA standards that has been interpreted by faculty members as requiring law schools to have a tenure system. (The ABA panel that wrote the revisions now says that tenure was never a requirement and that it is removing references to tenure for reasons of clarity — although that interpretation of current policy is being met with skepticism.) • Remove specific language requiring law schools with clinical professors and legal writing professors to offer them specific forms of job security short of tenure. The ABA panel recommending the changes has stressed that the accreditation requirements still insist that law schools protect academic freedom, and that many law schools would not necessarily change their tenure or other job protection procedures. The report accompanying the most recent draft characterizes the protections for clinical faculty members that would be eliminated as “intrusive mandates” that “are not the proper providence of an accreditation agency and provide approved law schools with latitude and flexibility to articulate and implement policies to attract a qualified faculty and protect faculty academic freedom.” OSU: Leader of USA’s biggest campus takes on tenure 2010: The year of the education documentary? ON THE WEB: Tenure as a tarnished brass ring Many law professors think otherwise. They are angry not only over the recommendations, but the fact that the new draft came out immediately after so many groups had issued lengthy statements in favor of preserving existing protections. “They are trying to ramrod through an ill-advised proposal,” said Michael A. Olivas, a professor of law at the University of Houston. The proposal is “the worst of all worlds, disguised as administrative tinkering.” Olivas is president-elect of the Association of American Law Schools, although he said he was speaking for himself, not the association. Many of the association’s leaders, however, share his concerns. In recent weeks — just before the ABA committee came out with its new draft — a series of impassioned letters were sent to the panel. Robert A. Gorman, an emeritus law professor at the University of Pennsylvania , wrote to the committee that tenure was particularly needed for law schools. “The research, scholarship and teaching of the law professoriate commonly deal with matters of public moment and controversy, more so than is the case in most other parts of the university; and the style of teaching is typically more challenging, argumentative and indeed on occasion confrontational,” Gorman wrote. “Reliance on tenure as a buttress for academic freedom is thus particularly justified for law faculty.” After Gorman’s letter circulated, another was sent endorsing it — by 11 other former AALS presidents, among them two former deans of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley and a former law dean at New York University ( John Sexton , currently the university’s president). The American Association of University Professors came out against changing the tenure protections. And the Clinical Legal Education Association has come out against the changes and the timing of the latest proposal. (Links to many of the letters opposing the changes can be found on the ABA site .) With all these legal luminaries opposed to change, why is it going forward? The push started several years ago, and was led by David Van Zandt, the dean of Northwestern University ‘s law school. Van Zandt said at the time that characterizing the changes as an assault on tenure was unfair. He said that it was wrong for the ABA as an accrediting group to require a tenure policy — and that institutions should decide such matters. “Sometimes some people portray this as an attack on tenure,” he said in 2007. “The real issue is whether or not you’re required to have tenure by an outside body such as the ABA. Not that we don’t want to have that institution.” After a period of some momentum, the move to change the standards stalled — but now is proceeding with the new draft. The current policies say that for a law school to be accredited it must have “an established and announced policy with respect to academic freedom and tenure….” That language would be replaced — under the new draft — with this: “A law school shall have an established and announced policy with respect to the protection of academic freedom of its faculty members and shall provide procedures to ensure that its policy is followed….” While the initial push to change the standards came from those saying that tenure was an inappropriate requirement, the new draft says that tenure was never really a requirement at all, so removing the reference to it doesn’t change things in a material way. “[T]he current standards do not require approved law schools to have systems for tenuring of any or all of their faculty members and this draft retains this feature,” the report says, adding that some have seen a tenure requirement as “implied” by the current language, but that this isn’t really the case. “Interests of greater clarity and transparency require that the revised standards explicitly state whether or not schools must provide tenure rights and for whom on the law faculty. So, this draft retains, explicitly, the current policy that tenure rights are not required as a matter of accreditation policy,” the report states. It notes that there are numerous references to the importance of academic freedom and its key role in legal education. While publicly the ABA leaders pushing for change say that they are not against tenure or law professors, supporters of tenure have noted a steady stream of criticism of law professors that emerges whenever the issue heats up. The National Jurist , a publication for law students, recently ran an article called ” When Law Profs Slack, the Students Suffer .” And that prompted coverage in a The Wall Street Journal blog: ” Are Law Professors Just Plain Lazy? ” Olivas said that he believes that a small group within the ABA leadership “just doesn’t believe in tenure” and wants to change the system. This is more than a little ironic, Olivas said, noting that ABA’s leaders include judges and law firm partners — two categories of people who themselves enjoy a kind of tenure, the latter “tenure with real money.” He said that the declarations of support for academic freedom are empty. “Academic freedom doesn’t anchor tenure. Tenure anchors academic freedom,” he said. So the panel is recommending that academic freedom be preserved while “undercutting” the very system that has protected it. Rights of clinical faculty Another key issue in the changes concerns the rights of faculty who may not be on the tenure track — in law schools, clinical and legal writing faculty members are most commonly in this category. Clinical law professors run programs in which students are supervised as they take on legal cases — frequently on controversial issues — and law schools are regularly attacked over the choice of such cases. Some lawmakers in Louisiana and Maryland pushed legislation this year to crack down on these legal clinics. In Maryland, a clinic at the University of Maryland offended the poultry industry by representing environmental groups. In Louisiana, the target was a law clinic at Tulane University that has done environmental work that angered business interests there. The language that the ABA panel wants to remove from the requirements says that law schools “shall afford to full time clinical faculty members a form of security of position reasonably similar to tenure, and non-compensatory perquisites reasonably similar to those provided other full time faculty members.” Gorman, the Penn professor, said in his letter that removing protections for clinical law professors was a move in the wrong direction. “Nor should it be necessary to explain that of all faculty categories, it has been the clinicians whose teaching — most especially, in the form of live-client litigation clinics — has placed them in the position that is most vulnerable to criticism and pressure (often of the most coarse and intolerable nature) from persons, corporations and legislators who are discomforted by the work of the clinic,” he wrote. “It is precisely the clinical faculty member for whom academic freedom is a vital concern and not merely an abstract slogan, and for whom tenure provides a crucial guarantee that instruction can be carried out in the best interests of our students, and of the public.” Olivas said he was bothered by the way the current standards let law schools place clinical and writing faculty in a separate class, with some protections but not the same as tenured faculty members. He criticized the ABA for moving to end the limited protections these non-tenure faculty members have, rather than moving them to an appropriate equal status with other professors. “There should be no bright line distinction between the two” kinds of faculty members, he said. “If clinical education and legal writing are appropriate parts of legal education, they should have the same protections, the same resources and the same faculty governance and all the academic freedom that is provided, including tenure. They need it more.” A spokeswoman for the ABA said that it would take at least 18 months, should various association panels endorse the changes, for them to take effect.

DES MOINES, Wash. (AP) — U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is urging Congress to act soon to increase education funding because cash-strapped states can’t wait until the fall to determine if they must lay off thousands of teachers. Duncan made his remarks Friday at a forum on innovation in education at Aviation High School in Des Moines, a small college prep school that focuses on science, technology and mathematics. At the forum, U.S. Sen. Patty Murray said she hopes fellow lawmakers spent their Fourth of July break hearing from parents and teachers, like she did. Murray said if they got the message about how urgent the school budget crisis is, they will return to Washington, D.C ., with the drive to find more money for schools. OUTRAGE: Is 2010 the year of the education documentary? A proposal to send billions more to the states has hit a number of roadblocks. The U.S. House has proposed cutting money from Race to the Top and other Duncan initiatives in order to send $10 billion to the states to keep 140,000 teachers in the classroom, and about $5 billion to shore up the Pell Grant program, which helps low-income students pay for college. Murray and Duncan both said many different proposals to pay for the emergency dollars are on the table. “He and I have to go back to Washington and make this work,” the senator said. Several dozen teachers and others held signs and chanted outside the school to protest Race to the Top and demand changes in the upcoming overhaul of the No Child Left Behind act. Some people inside the auditorium also expressed skepticism about education reform. “I’m very concerned. We have a lot of kids who don’t know how to engage with schools like this,” said Don Rivers, a Seattle man who works for an organization that monitors school improvement. Rivers is also a candidate for Congress in Washington’s 7th district. Students packed the non-air conditioned auditorium on a steamy summer afternoon for a chance to meet Duncan and show off their school, which is one of the state’s most unique. They spoke of the way their teachers taught them to not be afraid of trying new things and skills they picked up while believing they were just building rockets or doing chemistry experiments. “The only way to learn is by failing,” said Navid Shafa, whose remark inspired adults on the stage and in the audience to talk about education innovation and the need for experimentation and potential failure. Duncan said he was impressed by students and teachers at Aviation High School and would like to see a hundred more schools like it across the country. “This is a model for the country, absolutely,” he said, adding that the administration is interested in both charter schools and other innovative approaches. State education officials see the school as an example of what they hope to accomplish if the state wins a grant from the competitive Race to the Top program. Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire said that if Duncan sees how innovative some of Washington’s public schools are, he’ll recognize that creativity can live outside of charter schools. Washington state voters have voted repeatedly against charter schools. Gregoire was at the National Governors Association meeting on Friday so U.S. Sen. Patty Murray brought Duncan to the south Seattle high school. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.