BY STATE EDUCATION COMMISSIONER RICHARD P. MILLS
April 1999
BY STATE EDUCATION COMMISSIONER
RICHARD P. MILLS
This week, our thoughts are with the people of Littleton, Colorado. And also with other communities marked by sudden, unexplainable violence over the last year. We remember children killed and wounded. Teachers killed and wounded in the act of protecting their children.
One by one we heard of those terrible events and always we asked the same question: what can we do here?
And we have done those things: warnings to schools, information on where to get help on prevention, and examples of communities with effective prevention programs. We have joined forces statewide and regionally with human services, law enforcement, parents, and others because this is not a school problem but a whole community problem. District Superintendents have organized regional responses to repeated bomb threats. We have had PBS programs for parents and students, and professional development for the educators. And now there is the Governor’s task force led by the Lt. Governor.
But there is no certainty. Most schools are far safer than the world outside. And yet the violent world outside sometimes comes inside. Some students are so separate from the norms of civilized behavior that they see no value even in their own lives. Violent language has become so commonplace that we sometimes fail to take seriously a student’s words. They almost always say something. More and more, we do listen.
In moments like these, it’s important to remember this. People who work in schools are part of a great civilizing enterprise. Without them, there is no free society. Their skill, compassion, and hard work enable children to become caring adults. They help young people see that there is a future. They show the connections to young people who just don’t know where they fit in. Most of the time, it works – even when they are left to do the job almost alone in the case of some children. And society knows that they do it. And that’s why violence in school is such a violation.
A side by side analysis of the Senate and Assembly budget resolutions reveals significant agreement on priorities, and the Regents proposed state aid figure is right between the numbers advanced by the two houses of the Legislature.
We have presented the numbers countless times, reminded individual legislators of parts of the budget to bear in mind when decision time does arrive, and listened to and responded to concerns about safety nets for students who will need help to meet the standards.
Budgets do get adopted eventually and can’t be hurried. But strangely absent is a sense of indignation that so basic a government decision as budget making is not accomplished. People across New York who are responsible for thousands of programs of every kind must plan under uncertainty. And that is a unnecessary obstacle for local leaders trying to improve performance.
Local superintendents and other school leaders told us that key dates for some education initiatives are converging in a way that makes local action difficult. We listened to them.
We examined the implementation schedule for policy implementation in teaching, school facilities, academic intervention, special education and other areas and we propose some adjustments. Here are some examples:
These schedule changes will go before the appropriate Regents committees for discussion. If adopted, these schedule adjustments do nothing to reduce the urgency of the work to educate all students to the standards. They would, however, give real help to the people at ground level doing the work.
As we raise standards we think about students who will have difficulty meeting those standards. That’s why we have a safety net in place -- not to prevent students from trying to reach the standards, but to catch them if they need a little more help.
Here is what the safety net includes:
The Competency Test should remain an option during the phase-in period (for students entering grade 9 in the year 2000 or before) for students with disabilities who have taken Regents courses and first attempted to pass the Regents Exam. The reason is straightforward. The original plan to replace the Competency Test after one year and use a modified pass score for students with disabilities is not feasible. To make it work, we would need more data, but students and their parents understandably need to know the pass score – and the alternative – now.
Additional safety net ideas actively under review:
And if results prove that we need more strands to that safety net, we will build them together. But beyond we have in place and under review now, let’s wait until we see the results. There will be lots of results to see in the coming months. First we will see the 4th grade scores in late May. Then come the January Regents exams. Then the 8th grade tests. Each view of the data will give us a sense of how close we are getting and what we need to do next – how to make changes where needed to ensure that students make it.
Schools are displaying an astonishing amount of creativity and effort to raise student achievement. The view that many students were never intended to pass the Regents is falling away before determined local leadership. Schools are proving that students can perform at this level given time and help. If we were to lower the expectation for some students, we would undercut that work, and diminish the opportunity that schools are creating for students.
Regulations before the Regents this month will enhance public protection and change how registered pharmacists provide services to patients. The big change is that prescribers will be able to transmit prescriptions to pharmacists electronically. We expect that within three years half of all prescriptions will be transmitted electronically. This should reduce medication errors caused by misreading handwritten prescriptions and reduce confusion that can occur when prescriptions are transmitted orally. An estimated 165 million prescriptions were filled in New York in 1998. That number may reach 220 million by 2005.
These regulations also allow a patient to refill a prescription at a pharmacy other than where it was initially filled either within or outside of New York State. That will give patients easier access to authorized refills while traveling, when a prescription is lost, or when the patient moves to a new neighborhood. With these regulations, pharmacists will be able to share detailed medication profile information when a prescription is transferred. This is an important safety feature because it will provide the pharmacist, who may be unfamiliar with a new patient, with a complete history of the medications taken by that patient. In addition, because the regulations allow pharmacists to delegate more routine tasks, they will have more time to spend counseling patients on their prescribed medications.
This entire regulation package was developed to increase public protection and provide pharmacy patients with safe and timely delivery of their prescriptions. The proposed regulations were developed after extensive benchmarking of other states and with the collaboration of the State Board of Pharmacy, professional associations, and the pharmacy community.
The Higher Education Summit on March 18 was a success. Three hundred representatives of higher education and secondary institutions, the legislature, the Board of Regents, the State Education Department, parents, and students met in Brooklyn to discuss issues facing higher education in New York State. The Office of Higher Education and the Advisory Council on Higher Education convened the meeting. Deputy Commissioner Patton opened the meeting, followed by remarks from Regent Cohen, State Comptroller Carl McCall, Syracuse University Chancellor Kenneth Shaw, and myself.
Four issues critical to higher education in New York State were the topics of presentations by Michael Nettles, University of Michigan; Michael Rosenthal, Maryland Higher Education Commission; Gary Miller, Pennsylvania State University; and D. Bruce Johnstone, State University of New York at Buffalo. The Advisory Council on Higher Education identified four critical issues: 1) insti-tutional effectiveness and accountability; 2) K-16 articulation and collaboration, 3) technology and distributed/distance learning, and 4) college costs, affordability and access.
The record of the conference will go to the Advisory Council, meeting participants, and to the Regents to inform their policy making.
This work is at the mid-point. In late March, VESID supported a second meeting of the Task Force to define recommendations that are surfacing from the five areas of focus: preparation and readiness, student success and employment, faculty education and instruction, funding streams, and assistive technology. We expect draft reports on each of these topics in May and a final report to support Regents policy making in August.
The reports on the Grade 4 English Language Arts test will be in the hands of school leaders by the end of May. As this is first year of the new test, I need to be sure that the information we report to schools is valid, complete and accurate and school personnel are prepared to use the information in ways that will benefit their students.
The Blue Ribbon Panel I appointed in January reviewed the test development and will shortly examine test data to detect evidence that any students had an unfair advantage as a result of exposure to certain classroom materials.
The Department is doing its own analyses to prepare for public presentation of the results from this first administration. While this work is going on, Department staff will provide guidance to help teachers and administrators use the information that will be included on score reports and to prepare them to discuss results with students and parents. Regents will see a sample report from this month.
The press coverage on the recent School Report Cards has been extensive and quite positive. Our communications team called every daily newspaper with a circulation of more than 10,000 and offered specific information, help on working through the data file, and the opportunity for an interview about schools in their region. Our parent night program on PBS focused on the Report Cards just days before the release to help the public understand the results.
WXXI’s "Digital Summit" on April 6, was the first of a series of discussions at public broadcasting stations across the state in April. The purpose is to learn from educational and community leaders how best to use the potential of digital public television to serve the educational community. Staff from WMHT in the Capital District and from WCNY in Syracuse were there to gain insights in preparation for their "Digital Summits on May 20, and 25, respectively.
Some suggestions included:
WNED in Buffalo will host seven meetings between April 12 and 28, each devoted to a different potential use. These are: early childhood, K-12 instruction, higher education, workforce development, community-based organizations, parent and family education and arts and cultural education. WLIW is doing three meetings during April with different groups. WNET will sponsor a "Digital Roadshow" on May 11 with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as well as a series of focus groups on educational use of digital TV.
On April 20, 1999, the Minority Access Consortium to the Licensed Professions in Central New York held their annual Opportunity Day at Onondaga Community College. This career fair attracted several hundred high school students from racial and ethnic groups historically underrepresented in the licensed professions. The Office of the Professions (OP) involved members of 20 professions. OP provided printed material that was distributed and discussed by members of the State Boards for the Professions, representatives from State professional societies and faculty from professional preparation programs. Linda Hall, from the Human Rights Commission in Syracuse who chairs the Consortium, reported that the professionals participating in this event were engaging, informative, and added a meaningful dimension to this event.
OP has pursued similar partnerships with existing programs in local communities across the state to bring to underrepresented students an awareness of and access to the services and career opportunities of the 38 licensed professions. Similar efforts currently are under way in Buffalo and Brooklyn.
Problems come in clusters. For example, 90 percent of the students farthest from the Regents standards live in the 173 high need school districts. These communities tend to have low employment, rapid turnover in employment, and low adult literacy. Many of these school districts are in communities where most current and former welfare recipients live. While parent’s educational level is the single factor most associated with student reading achievement, fewer than 40 percent of adult public assistance recipients have a diploma or a GED. Consider what it must be like for a single parent on welfare who wants to help a child learn to pass the new 4th grade test, but that parent cannot read.
A remarkable confluence of public policy offers an opportunity to confront these problems with greater force than in the past. In education, welfare reform, and workforce development, a series of catalytic events is driving change. In education, the standards, Regents exams, and School Report Cards are among the events. In welfare reform, the 5-year lifetime limit on federal assistance and limited exemptions from work requirements are driving welfare numbers down fast. And in workforce development, new federal law requires comprehensive state and local planning, greater coherence in job training, adult education, and vocational rehabilitation systems.
We co-hosted a national conference to explore this opportunity this month. Regent Tisch and I attended, as well as representatives from the Legislature, Division of the Budget, and the Department of Labor. We discussed the extensive cross-agency collaboration in New York on all of these issues, and learned from the examples of other states.
Joining these three reform efforts, in the context of strong alliances across agencies, offers potential solutions to our work on closing the gaps in student achievement in the high need school districts.
A Regents home page on the web provides current information about the Board – its meeting schedule and the issues before it. The home page now includes full color photographs of the Regents along with biographies. The address is www.nysed.gov/regents/home.html
In May the Regents will be in Buffalo. The theme -- "Closing the Gap: A Community Effort" -- reflects intense Regents interest in improving student achievement, in welfare reform, in workforce creation. We will visit schools in Buffalo and Niagara Falls, meet Family Support Center representatives and listen to a great many community, education, and business leaders and elected officials.
Regional meetings such as this have become a major element of the Regents policy-making leadership. For example, the January meeting in Queens which focused entirely on nonpublic schools set the stage for recent progress on how to resolve remaining issues concerning nonpublic schools and the academic standards. A framework for reaching that issue will come before the Regents this month. We are looking for the same boost in resolving the complex problem of how to close the gaps in achievement -- which is shorthand for a set of issues that are increasingly at the heart of the Regents and State Education Department’s work.
A monthly publication of the State Education Department
Back to Report Home Page | Return to SED Home Page