- Why Did Convention Center Cancel College Fair?
- How Could a Rewrite of NCLB Scrap Teacher Evaluations?
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Why Did Convention Center Cancel College Fair?
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
October 19, 2011
Tuesday evening’s session of the D.C. National College Fair at the Convention Center could have been a game-changing event in the lives of some of the estimated 2,000 students and their families who were expected to attend. Under one roof, more than 300 representatives of colleges and universities from the U.S., Canada and Great Britain were going to be available for one-on-one meetings. Students could visit a counseling center to discuss their choice of majors and get information about financial aid.
But Events DC, which operates the convention center, pulled the plug on the 6 p.m. session after a fight broke out among a small group of the estimated 7,000 students who came to the morning session. The morning event, scheduled to end at 1 p.m., was suspended at about 11:45 a.m. and the students were evacuated with assistance from the police.
There were no injuries or arrests, according to the D.C. police. A Twitter reference to a stabbing that circulated Tuesday was false. But in a statement Tuesday, Events DC said “disruptive activity” posed unspecified safety considerations for the evening segment, scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. — six hours later.
“Public safety remains our utmost concern and priority for our attendees,” Events DC told The Post’s Martin Weil on Tuesday evening.
But Marc Caposino, communications director for OSSE, which co-sponsored the event with the National Association for College Admission Counseling, said he was told by other District officials that it was not security concerns but a complaint about noise that led to the scuttling of the evening program.
Caposino said he was told the complaint came from another group using the center that day. The calendar on the convention center site shows only one other event scheduled for Tuesday: LeadingAge (formerly known as the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging), an association of non-profits, was in the third day of a four-day annual meeting. According to the official conference schedule the Tuesday session ended at 5 pm, an hour before the College Fair evening session was set to begin.
So, what noise?
Convention center senior vice president and general manager Samuel Thomas did not respond to e-mail or phone messages left Wednesday morning. LeadingAge spokeswoman Lauren Shaham said she wasn’t aware of any noise-related issue raised by her organization. She said she would look into it but never called back.
Caposino said he’s not aware of plans any plans to reschedule the college expo. He finds the whole episode regrettable.
“To be honest, the sad thing was the reaction by the convention center was such an overreaction,” he said. “It was an enormous disservice to the kids and parents who were planning to go that night.”
How Could a Rewrite of NCLB Scrap Teacher Evaluations?
The Washington Post
By Editorial
October 19, 2011
Politics makes for strange bedfellows, but Senate Republicans doing the bidding of teachers’ unions is particularly unexpected. That, though, is what happened when an important provision on teacher evaluations was knocked out of a proposed rewrite of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Given that the legislation had already abandoned meaningful student achievement targets, the latest change renders the bill a non-starter.
The Senate’s education committee is set to begin work Wednesday on a proposed reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, known in its latest incarnation as No Child Left Behind. Sen. Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who chairs the committee, released last week an 865-page bill that in its latest iteration is supported by Sens. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) No Child Left Behind needs an overhaul, and this attempt has commendable aspects, including a requirement that states set college- and career-readiness standards, the retention of reform initiatives such as Race to the Top and Promise Neighborhoods, and a federal focus on worst-performing schools.
But those positive components can’t compensate for the proposal’s retreat from accountability provisions, a retreat that rightly came under fire from civil rights and education-reform advocates. It’s a foregone conclusion that NCLB’s strict yardstick of Adequate Yearly Progress to measure student achievement will be scrapped, but the bill’s allowing states merely to show “continuous improvement” in student outcomes is a far cry from what is needed to ensure accountability for poor and minority students. One critic likened it to paying a kitchen contractor who never finishes the renovation as long as he promises incremental progress. Mr. Harkin said he wanted achievement targets in the bill but backed off in order to get support from Republicans, who are wary of any federal role in school policy.
The same impulse led to Mr. Harkin’s agreement over the weekend to drop a requirement that states develop teacher and principal evaluation systems. States and districts would have had great leeway in devising the details of the systems, but not enough to satisfy many Republicans. The National Education Association, meanwhile, doesn’t like using student achievement to measure teacher effectiveness, which is a bit like measuring race car drivers by everything except how fast they go. So the NEA and GOP forged their alliance, and the provision was dropped. Mr. Alexander told us that states would be more successful in setting up teacher-evaluation systems without a lot of mandates from the federal government and that the bill contains incentives for states to undertake evaluation reform. “I am no friend of the NEA and they are no friend of mine,” Mr. Alexander told us.
The Obama administration is right to resist proposals that, under the mantle of bipartisanship, retreat from reform. Schools should be held accountable for improving student academic results, and teachers should be evaluated based on how well they teach. It’s sad that either one of those propositions remains controversial.
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