United Way "Agenda for Change" Proposal / Update!

Agencies seize opportunity to pitch new plans

For the first time in 10 years, United Way is opening up the funding process and encouraging area agencies to consider ways to better partner with the organization to make a stronger long-term impact on lives across the tri-county area.

The newly established process for 2008-2011 agency applications will allow unaffiliated organizations the opportunity to become United Way partners. This is part of United Way's overall effort to direct community resources in areas of the greatest need.

The new multi-year funding process will focus on programs, services, strategies and collaborations that will address short and long-term goals in three specific areas - educational preparedness, financial stability and basic needs, as outlined in the organization's Agenda for Change.

Current member agencies and those looking to form United Way partnerships based on programs that align with one or more of the priority areas were invited to complete a letter of intent in September. The review of those LOIs will conclude Oct. 5. Applicants will be notified during the week of Oct. 8 if their submissions made it to the next phase, during which they are asked to respond to a request for proposal.

Those current partners not selected for the RFP phase will be directed to the transitional funding process.

While United Way will continue to significantly invest in a wide array of agency programs and services, funding will primarily be focused on achieving Agenda outcomes. The funding system further supports the Agenda for Change, which serves as the United Way blueprint for creating sustained community change that measurably improves people's lives.

"The decision to realign our funding process was driven by our region's growing socioeconomic and human service needs," said Michael J. Brennan, President and CEO of United Way for Southeastern Michigan. "We know that today's issues are far too complex for any individual, group, or institution to tackle alone. We must work together and bring new groups into the fold. It is only through community building and regional collaboration that we will effect lasting change."

For more information about the LOI/Agenda for Change process (including guidelines, technical assistance sessions, and application deadlines), visit www.uwsem.org/partnertools.

Alignment to OUR NSF GRANT Purpose!

Ford likes the look of proposed contract


Chairman says automaker interested in health care fund


October 4, 2007

BY SARAH A. WEBSTER

FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER

Ford Motor Co. Executive Chairman Bill Ford indicated on Wednesday that leaders at the company founded by his great-grandfather are generally satisfied with the tentative contract rival General Motors Corp. reached with the UAW.

It is expected to serve as a pattern for the Ford deal.

"The broad framework is certainly something we can work with," Ford told journalists during an appearance in Chicago. He was there for a ceremony to start a national network of community-based high schools, which is being supported by the automaker.

Ford spokesman Mark Truby confirmed the comments, which were first reported by Dow Jones, although he emphasized that the company still is studying the deal.

Ford and crosstown rival Chrysler LLC agreed to an indefinite extension of the current contract after GM was named a strike target Sept. 13.

GM and the UAW reached a deal Sept. 26 after a two-day strike, and the union's 73,000 members at GM continue voting on the proposed contract.

The UAW is expected to resume talks with Ford and Chrysler when the GM-UAW tentative contract is ratified.

Bill Ford, who learned labor relations early in his career from former Vice Chairman Peter Pestillo, seems to have good relations with UAW President Ron Gettelfinger, who started his career at a Ford factory in Louisville, Ky., and was head of the UAW's Ford division prior to leading the entire union.

During his Chicago trip, Ford said the company is "very prepared to get going" in talks.

He also said that the automaker is interested in talking to the union about a voluntary employee beneficiary association, or VEBA. That form of union-supervised trust to manage health care for UAW retirees is set to save GM about $20 billion from its $50 billion in related liabilities.

J.P. Morgan Chase estimates Ford's UAW retiree health care liability at $22 billion, indicating possible savings for Ford of $9 billion from a GM-style VEBA.

Bill Ford's comments were notable in that they contrasted with industry experts' recent comments that Ford may need more -- or significantly different -- concessions than those GM won from the UAW.

For Ford, the specifics of the GM agreement could force it to provide greater clarity about its turnaround plan, which aims to make the North American division profitable by 2009, Arthur Wheaton, a labor expert from Cornell University, said last week. Ford lost $12.6 billion last year and is undergoing a restructuring.

David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, said he expects that Ford, when it reaches a deal with the UAW, will disclose the six remaining of 16 plants it plans to close as part of its restructuring. Another large benefit of the proposed contract for GM is the savings related to replacing current workers in noncore jobs with lower-paid union members.

But Ford is ahead of GM in outsourcing noncore jobs, said John Casesa, a veteran auto analyst and managing partner of Casesa Shapiro Group LLC.

Over the past two years, the UAW approved what are known as competitive operating agreements at Ford plants that allowed noncore jobs to be subcontracted out at lower pay. UAW Vice President Bob King said that saved $750 million.

Casesa said the UAW will have to give a different deal to Ford and to Chrysler LLC if it wants to help the companies survive.

"Ford's financial situation remains fragile," Casesa said last week. "Because the main feature of the agreement is relief on health care for retirees and GM has the highest active-to-retiree ratio, it's disproportionately better for GM," he said.

GM provides health benefits to more than four retirees and surviving spouses for every active worker it employs. Ford's ratio is two retirees for each active worker, and Chrysler's ratio is about one-to-one.

Contact SARAH A. WEBSTER at swebster@freepress.com.

MEAP Easy? But MEAP Scores indicate otherwise!

NEW! MEAP tests are too easy, national report finds



DETROIT -- A national report says Michigan's proficiency tests might be too easy to truly prepare students for college.

The report released Wednesday and called "The Proficiency Illusion" says the state's reading and math tests are less difficult than most of the 26 states studied.

It shows the scores required to pass Michigan's tests decreased from 2003-05. The news comes just days before the state administers the Michigan Educational Assessment Program tests in grades 3-8.

State officials said that the study is inconsistent with other reports that rank Michigan higher.

The report was conducted for two education research nonprofit organizations.

"THE DIGITAL COMMONS"

COMMONS Project Explores Alternative for Underserved Communities

Oct 1, 2007, By Sascha D. Meinrath

The United States faces a worsening broadband crisis.

Over the past half-decade, the United States has fallen behind a growing list of industrialized nations in broadband penetration rates, delivery speeds and price per megabit.

Rural and poor communities are doubly discriminated against, often receiving little or no broadband access and paying higher service rates when they do have access. In addition to other benefits, the Cooperative Measurement and Modeling of Open Networked Systems (COMMONS) project offers one approach to alleviate the problem.

Initiative History

In December 2006, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) held the North American Strategy Workshop to discuss and launch innovative collaboration among researchers and interested broadband networks from across the continent.

This initiative was developed to solve three acute and growing problems facing the Internet: a self-reported financial crisis in the Internet service provision industry that poses a severe threat to broadband growth and American competitiveness; a data acquisition crisis that has stunted the field of network science; and a critical dilemma within emerging community, municipal, regional and state networks, who need affordable broadband connectivity but face severely limited service level, usage and provider options.

The COMMONS project is partnering with national backbone providers to interconnect participating community, municipal, regional and state networks to one another, and to the global Internet. COMMONS peering - the voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the users of each network - is available to city, county, state and federal government entities; academic institutions; community Internet initiatives (e.g., community wireless networks); and commercial entities based on three conditions.

These three conditions are, first, that networks will make select operational data available to COMMONS researchers under appropriate legal data-sharing and privacy safeguards. Second, the attached networks must agree to develop and abide by COMMONS policies, which will be based on the research results of empirical data analyses of network usage. Third, participating networks must abide by the acceptable use policies (AUP) set by the COMMONS Project Coordination Committee.

The COMMONS project merges representatives from industry, community and municipal networks; regional and state networks; and Internet researchers, community organizers and developers building next-generation data communications technologies.

The initial Strategy Workshop participants also included heads of research, infrastructure, media and policy organizations, and telecommunications lawyers. The diversity of workshop participants helped ensure that major project stakeholders were represented in the proceedings and could provide insights into the potential pitfalls and opportunities the COMMONS Project might face in coming years.

The COMMONS Strategy Workshop report is available at the Web site.

Laying the Groundwork

Charter members of the COMMONS project forged a consensus mission statement for the initiative. This statement of purpose laid the groundwork for future organizing efforts and provides a glimpse of how COMMONS differs from other initiatives to bring affordable broadband to underserved communities.

COMMONS is a community of interest comprising local networks, broadly defined, that seek to utilize an AUP-neutral communications infrastructure; mitigate geographic disparities in the cost of Internet access and wide-area network connectivity; enable competitive environment in the connectivity market; benefit from economies of scale; and realize a vision for ownership in an open, universal and scalable backbone infrastructure.

COMMONS is also a community of network operators who recognize that the future usefulness and security of the Internet depend on the availability of empirical network data; support the availability of that empirical data to the academic research community; and insist that the data collected and utilized be handled in a manner respectful of personal privacy.

In addition, the project is a community of people who seek to exchange ideas on, and devote resources to, a wide variety of common interests to further the objectives stated above, including approaches to social problems that make the most of innovative technology and business strategies; political, legal and regulatory strategies; and community networking.

While the benefits to participating communities are fairly obvious, the active collaboration of the network research community is an innovative element of the project. The motivation behind scientists' involvement in broadband service provision is worth looking into because it provides valuable insights into often-ignored shortcomings in our understanding of the Internet itself.

Analyzing in the Dark

When the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) backbone was privatized in 1995, the network science community lost access to the only set of publicly available statistics on a national Internet backbone network. This transition, perhaps inadvertently, eliminated an opportunity to conduct analyses on a widely used national backbone.

Today, far from having an analytic handle on the Internet, network researchers often lack the ability to measure traffic at the granularity necessary to make increasingly critical infrastructure improvements. Legislators operate under an enforced ignorance of potential security problems when the scientific community can't identify potential congestion points on the Internet, and labor under an empirical cluelessness about how the Internet can be improved.

Access to the network traffic data that the COMMONS project would collect would let researchers begin solving problems of cyber-security, spam overload, privacy invasion and identity theft, digital rights management and piracy, network congestion, pricing discrimination, illegal pornography, and many other issues. Without this data, network scientists, regulators and decision-makers are left fumbling in the dark as they attempt to address these seemingly intractable and growing problems.

Over the past decade, while the Internet's core continued to expand, scientific measurement and modeling of its systemic characteristics has largely stalled. The proliferation of multimedia content, and new services and applications, makes the acquisition of data far more difficult and costly than in previous years. Much like a scanning electron microscope is a critical tool for modern physics laboratories, high-powered (and concomitantly expensive) measurement tools are needed by Internet researchers to keep pace with the Internet's increasing complexity.

A growing number of policy analysts believe we can't build a national broadband policy that brings America into the digital future without a solid understanding of what's happening on our current networks. Throughout the decades that the U.S. government was a steward of the Internet, the only statistics collected regularly were those required by government contract. Since the Internet's privatization, we've embraced a policy that has sacrificed this data access. It's clear to network scientists, however, that this privatization created disastrous outcomes for network science and basic research.

Why COMMONS Works

Due to regulatory, political and market constraints of incumbent local exchange carriers and other broadband providers, Internet researchers have been unable to study mission-critical aspects of the Internet, or the state of its current robustness, capacity, usage and problem areas.

This means that potential solutions to these issues remain more conjecture than empirically backed analysis. Meanwhile, telecommunications regulators and policymakers have increasingly called for methodologically sound study of Internet usage, analysis of potential failure points and improvements to this vital infrastructure.

By offloading the responsibility for supporting Internet service delivery to so-called "unprofitable areas" from commercial providers, the COMMONS initiative will alleviate economic pressures on providers and provide much-needed competition. COMMONS also offers an unprecedented opportunity to establish standards of scientific integrity in the field of Internet research by providing rigorous empirical data against which theories, models and simulations can be validated.

Also, because the COMMONS test bed supports analysis of actual Internet traffic, it informs debates on increasingly important technical, economic, policy, privacy and social issues related to the Internet. The COMMONS project not only allows struggling community networks to cost-share a financially daunting component of their connectivity, but it also provides a forum for the cooperating networks and research community to share lessons learned with one another.

We're also at a unique inflection point in Internet history - a time when the idea that wireless infrastructure is "too inexpensive not to deploy" is starting to gain traction in public debates. In the last several years, the growth of wireless access has been astounding.

According to the MuniWireless.com 2006 State of the Market Report, the municipal wireless market alone has grown from $47.5 million in 2004 to $235.5 million in 2006. The market is predicted to well exceed $1 billion before the end of the decade, with the number of networks almost doubling each year.

When mapping these networks geographically, one can see that the COMMONS project is tapping into a national (and global) phenomenon with critical mass to support an incredible research endeavor.

Though wireless broadband numbers may look promising, the United States is falling dangerously behind in Internet infrastructure penetration, although even the extent to which we are falling behind has been obscured by faulty and opaque measurement and analysis methodologies.

In his seminal analysis and report on the state of U.S. broadband - Broadband Reality Check II - Free Press Research Director Derek Turner states that policymakers must require the FCC to improve its data collection on broadband markets. "Policymakers cannot adequately assess the problems in the broadband market, nor identify the most appropriate solutions, if the FCC provides poor information," Turner wrote. "The starting point should be a more precise measure of which geographic areas have service (using a smaller unit than the ZIP code). Beyond that, carriers should be required to report the percentages of households where broadband service is available in every service area, the percentage of households that subscribe, and the average cost per megabit of throughput. This evidentiary record will allow an accurate analysis of the problems we face and foster solutions that will achieve results."

COMMONS begins to address seven key areas identified by workshop participants as critical to the initiative: infrastructure issues, regulatory harmonization and reform, outreach and education, research and technological development, business model innovation, expansion of broadband services, and vision for the future.

For participating networks, the incentive to join COMMONS is similar to that of participants of Internet2, NLR, Quilt and the 33-plus state networks trying to execute similar agendas on a smaller scale: collective buying power, ongoing access to extensive research data, affordable fiber infrastructure, and transparent and accountable collaboration.

Broader Impacts

Cisco, CAIDA and (inter)national backbone providers have joined together with community, local, municipal, regional and state networks to support a large-scale incentive-based experiment in end-to-end network workload, performance, economic and behavioral measurement on an unprecedented national, intersegmented, interprovider scale.

Attached networks would agree to collaborate with network researchers by, for example, allowing researchers access to historical and current operational data, where necessary in an appropriate form made anonymous to protect users; agreeing to permit and/or participate in occasional openly reviewed experiments required to test new technologies; making customized end-user polling tools available to community network users who participate in project-related behavioral research; and adhering to responsible general administrative guidelines as set by the policy board to ensure project-funded resources are used securely and appropriately - for example, ingress �????�???�??�?¯�????�???�??�?¬?ltering to prevent spoofing, sufficient logging to support DOS traceback, 24/7 accessible networking support contact, network neutrality requirements.

When the companies who own the infrastructure under study are declaring bankruptcy, measurements are scarce. And when the companies who own the infrastructure are competing against each other, existing measurements are often considered extremely sensitive or completely proprietary. And yet, changing technologies, commercial strategies and regulatory policies have brought dramatic restructuring of Internet service delivery at the local, regional, national and global levels. Accompanying these changes are a variety of strong but conflicting (and generally unverified) assertions concerning the relative feasibility, necessity and superiority of different possible outcomes of this restructuring.

These assertions pose a problem for both researchers and policymakers. Given the increasingly critical role of information and communications technologies for national productivity, economic competitiveness, and even security, the costs of error could be grievous. Yet decision-makers are often forced to operate in an information vacuum - having access only to the information that the companies who would be affected by policy and regulatory changes are willing to share.

Both U.S. telecommunications companies and user advocates are unhappy with current communications policy. Prices for services are higher than many other industrialized nations, and broadband penetration is lower. Telecommunications companies have increasing trouble attracting investment and claim their broadband services need exemption from common carrier regulation in order to thrive.

Solutions tend to focus on industry-centric approaches to policy reform - for example, how much price-control leverage the government should have over telecommunications carriers, how much freedom should telecommunications carriers have to price-discriminate, how much subsidization of telecommunications companies is necessary, which entities should be forced to pay for universal service for rural areas, among many other questions.

The problem is that the dearth of Internet research makes it impossible to come up with reliable empirical answers to many of the questions regulators and politicians need answers to. Thus, national telecommunications policy is forced to advance blindly at a time where the United States is losing its competitive (broadband) edge. The COMMONS project provides a collaborative environment for policymakers to help shape the research questions under study and offers a vital resource for regulators seeking to make decisions based on empirical scientific research.

The COMMONS project offers an innovative experimental test bed that also provides affordable broadband to participating networks. Through collaborative peering and rigorous data collection and analysis, the COMMONS project facilitates both basic research and innovative improvements to the Internet. COMMONS presents an unprecedented opportunity for establishing standards for scientific integrity for in vivo Internet research using rigorous empirical data to validate theories, models and simulations.

The potential outcome of this project promises researchers a clearer picture of the nature and characteristics of the current Internet than ever before possible while informing discussions of future architectures and related design issues. The COMMONS project also provides an opportunity for opening up the "economics, ownership and trust layers" of inter-networking in much the same way the transport, network and application layers of the Internet are open to innovation.

At this critical juncture in telecommunications history, COMMONS provides a much-needed resource to help us chart the future of communications.

Sascha Meinrath is a regular contributor to Government Technology's Digital Communities and a co-editor of MuniWireless.com. Sascha serves as vice president of CTCnet, a U.S.-based network of more than 1,000 organizations united in their commitment to improve the educational, economic, cultural and political life of their communities through technology, and also founded The Ethos Group, a telecommunications consulting firm focusing on maximizing the community benefits of broadband technologies. Sascha blogs regularly at SaschaMeinrath.com.

INDEED! (THE BIGGER PICTURE!)

Our Schools Must Do Better

By BOB HERBERT

Published: October 2, 2007

Boston

Share Your Comments About This Column

I asked a high school kid walking along Commonwealth Avenue if he knew who the vice president of the United States was.

He thought for a moment and then said, “No.”

I told him to take a guess.

He thought for another moment, looked at me skeptically, and finally gave up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know.”

The latest federal test results showed some improvement in public school math and reading scores, but there is no reason to celebrate these minuscule gains. We need so much more. A four-year college degree is now all but mandatory for building and sustaining a middle-class standard of living in the U.S.

Over the next 20 or 30 years, when today’s children are raising children of their own in an ever more technologically advanced and globalized society, the educational requirements will only grow more rigorous and unforgiving.

A one- or two-point gain in fourth grade test scores here or there is not meaningful in the face of that overarching 21st-century challenge.

What’s needed is a wholesale transformation of the public school system from the broken-down postwar model of the past 50 or 60 years. The U.S. has not yet faced up to the fact that it needs a school system capable of fulfilling the educational needs of children growing up in an era that will be at least as different from the 20th century as the 20th was from the 19th.

“We’re not good at thinking about magnitudes,” said Thomas Kane, a professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “We’ve got a bunch of little things that we think are moving in the right direction, but we haven’t stepped back and thought, ‘O.K., how big an improvement are we really talking about?’ ” Professor Kane and I were discussing what he believes are the two areas that have the greatest potential for radically improving the way children are taught in the U.S. Both are being neglected by the education establishment.

The first is teacher quality, a topic that gets talked about incessantly. It has been known for decades that some teachers have huge positive effects on student achievement, and that others do poorly. The positive effect of the highest performing teachers on underachieving students is startling.

What is counterintuitive, but well documented, is that paper qualifications, such as teacher certification, have very little to do with whatever it is that makes good teachers effective.

“Regrettably,” said Professor Kane, who has studied this issue extensively, “we’ve never taken that research fact seriously in our teacher policy. We’ve done just the opposite.”

Concerned about raising the quality of teachers, states and local school districts have consistently focused on the credentials, rather than the demonstrated effectiveness — or ineffectiveness — of teachers in the classroom.

New forms of identifying good teachers and weeding out poor ones — by carefully assessing their on-the-job performance — have to be established before any transformation of American schools can occur.

This can be done without turning the traditional system of teacher tenure on its head. Studies have clearly shown that the good teachers and the not-so-good ones can usually be identified, if they are carefully observed in their first two or three years on the job — in other words, before tenure is granted.

Developing such a system would be difficult. But it’s both doable and essential. Getting serious about teacher quality as opposed to harping on tiny variations in test scores would be like moving from a jalopy to a jet.

The second area to be mined for potentially transformative effects is the wide and varied field of alternative school models. We should be rigorously studying those schools that appear to be having the biggest positive effects on student achievement. Are the effects real? If so, what accounts for them?

The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), to cite one example, is a charter school network that has consistently gotten extraordinary academic results from low-income students. It has worked in cities big and small, and in rural areas. Like other successful models, it has adopted a longer school day and places great demands on its teachers and students.

Said Professor Kane: “These alternative models that involve the longer school day and a much more dramatic intervention for kids are promising. If that’s what it takes, then we need to know that, and sooner rather than later.”

If American kids — all American kids, not just the children of the elite — are to have a fair chance at a rewarding life over the next several decades, we’ve got to give them a school system adequate to the times. They need something better than a post-World War II system in a post-9/11 world.

VIOLA!

Cog

Electric Light Orchestra - Hold on Tight

Get Ready, Get Set, GO!

INSIGHTFUL and INTENTIONAL!

The Unsung Heroes Who Move Products Forward

Illustration by James Yang

By G. PASCAL ZACHARY

Published: September 30, 2007

AT first blush, the iPhone from Apple, the new microprocessor family from Intel and the ubiquitous Google search engine have nothing in common. One is a gadget, one is an electronic part and one is a service.

Yet all of these products — much acclaimed for their creativity — depend on obscure process innovations that, while highly complex and lacking glamour, are an essential part of establishing a winning edge in commercial electronics. Indeed, the success of Apple, Intel, Google and scores of other technology companies has as much or more to do with their process innovations as the products that inspire loyalty among fans and admiration from foes.

First, a definitional detour. Processes are the stuff in the proverbial “black box,” the alchemy unseen by consumers or the inelegantly termed “end users” who buy computers, cellphones, cameras and all manner of digital devices and services.

Snazzy products are the stuff of legends, romanticized by “early adopters” and skewered by neo-Luddites. Yet while these products bring glory to companies, novel processes are often more important in keeping the cash registers ringing.

The proof of this proposition is that while companies often spend millions to advertise and market new product designs and innovations, they guard intensely the details of their process innovations.

Consider the question of Google’s greatest business secret. Is it the algorithms behind its search tools? Or is it the way it organizes vast clusters of computers around the globe to answer queries so quickly? Perhaps predictably, Google won’t disclose the number of computers deployed in its vast information network (though outsiders speculate that the network has at least 450,000 computers).

I believe that the physical network is Google’s “secret sauce,” its premier competitive advantage. While a brilliant lone wolf can conceive of a dazzling algorithm, only a superwealthy and well-managed organization can run what is arguably the most valuable computer network on the planet. Without the computer network, Google is nothing.

Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, appears to agree. Last year he declared, “We believe we get tremendous competitive advantage by essentially building our own infrastructures.”

Process innovations like Google’s computer network are often invisible to the public, and impossible to duplicate by rivals. Yet successful companies realize that maintaining competitive advantage depends heavily on sustaining process innovations. Great process innovators often support basic research in relevant fields, maintain complete control over the creation of every aspect of a product and refuse to rely on outside suppliers for important components. Certainly, there are exceptions to these patterns, but even companies like Apple that buy essential processes on the open market nevertheless invest in gaining a working knowledge of the technologies and an understanding of their future arc.

Intel treats its process innovations as a competitive weapon, striving to create a “new generation” every two years. That enables the company’s chips, even if there were no changes in their design, to perform better and cost less to make.

Consumers are usually blind to the importance of novel processes. Even when they learn about these innovations, they tend to think only of the product itself.

“The average consumer doesn’t care what processes are used,” says Mark T. Bohr, an Intel physicist who oversaw what is arguably the most important advance in decades in the technology for making microprocessors, the brains inside computers and other digital devices.

Faced with ever-faster chips that threatened to explode into flames, Intel searched desperately for new processes to make microprocessors. Enter hafnium, a rare metal. Designers led by Mr. Bohr in Hillsboro, Ore., chose hafnium to replace silicon oxide, the venerable insulator in chips and a material used in making glass. Mr. Bohr also helped to identify new materials, whose identity Intel is keeping secret, for the crucial transistor “gates” that sit atop a chip’s insulators.

On Nov. 12, Intel will begin shipping its first chips using the new processes. Gordon E. Moore, Intel’s co-founder, recently declared that the hafnium-and-gate process innovations should allow his so-called Moore’s Law, whereby chips grow ever faster and less expensive, to hold true for some time.

Despite the enormity of the achievement, Mr. Bohr is relatively anonymous, even within Intel. “The work of process development comes second to creating new designs for chips,” he says. Not surprisingly, when Intel starts shipping the new chips, neither the hafnium nor the gates innovations will be trumpeted as selling points. Rather, Intel will emphasize how customers can benefit from using the chips.

If process innovations are unheralded, consumers may misunderstand the nature of technological change.

“Process innovation tends to receive less attention from the informed public for the same reason that incremental innovation tends to receive too little attention: it is more difficult to encapsulate in a press release or photo opportunity,” says David C. Mowery, a business professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a scholar of technological change.

“Process innovation, even more than most product innovations, also tends to realize its economic potential through a lengthy process of incremental improvement based on learning by doing and other types of learning,” he added. “So ‘breakthroughs’ in process engineering are, if anything, even rarer than in product innovation.”

As a result, process gurus are resigned to playing in the shadows, leaving fame, if not fortune, to others. John Feland, human interface architect at Synaptics Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif., knows this enduring truth of invention. He helps design arrays of sensors that drive the touch screens in the newest cellphones like the Prada from LG. Such touch screens are earning raves from consumers, yet Mr. Feland is essentially an invisible man.

“My job is to make our customers look like heroes,” he says philosophically. Then he sums up the special role played by fellow members of the process tribe: “We are like Q to James Bond.”

G. Pascal Zachary teaches journalism at Stanford and writes about technology and economic development. E-mail: gzach@nytimes.com.

NOW That's MUSIC to MY Ears! (Coming on Home to YOU?)

Sweet Home Alabama

Alabama Students Have Open Access to a New World of Learning

By Mark Gura

Head south to Ozark City, Ala. -- population 15,119. This "City for All Seasons" boasts a Wal-Mart Supercenter, two Dairy Queens and a Goodrich Tire dealer. Mayor Bob Bunting calls Ozark "the best kept secret in the South, for that matter, the best small city in the United States."

Hometown hyperbole? Not when it comes to education. True, Ozark only has one high school, one middle school, two elementary schools and an early childhood education center. But it does offer its students world-class opportunities to learn. This is something its residents couldn't have dreamed of a few years back. Now, however, as part of Alabama's Connecting Classrooms, Educators and Students Statewide (ACCESS) program, Ozark's Carroll High School distinguishes itself as more than the home of the Eagles football team. Students at this school experience material and challenges that some of the best schools in our nation's largest cities would be hard-pressed to set before their students.

Up there on the Ozark school system's sparse Web site, sitting proudly above links to the school calendar, bus routes and code of conduct is its mission statement. It's a statement that is echoed on Web sites across the nation. "Ozark City Schools is committed to providing a positive learning environment that encourages all students to grow intellectually, emotionally, physically, morally and socially." A lofty sentiment, but how does a small, rural town like this actually go about providing that?

The answer is ACCESS, Alabama's exemplary distance learning initiative. Unlike virtual school initiatives that attempt to replace or supplant brick and mortar schools, ACCESS builds on the state's existing real world education system, enhancing, enriching and taking it to places never previously imagined.

"The driving philosophy behind ACCESS is to provide all Alabama high school students with the same opportunities to excel," says Alabama Gov. Bob Riley. "Using technology to provide those opportunities not only increases the rigor of instruction, but it also acclimates students to the use of technology and prepares them for a 21st century workforce."

The Alabama Supercomputer Authority (ASA) is the networking technology partner for the ACCESS project. ASA is working to upgrade the Internet connectivity to participating schools and school systems through the Alabama Research and Education Network (AREN). "ASA works very closely with the schools to assure that every school system has an equitable level of network connectivity that will allow them to deliver and receive courses at a very high level of consistency and quality," says Alabama Supercomputer Authority CEO Randy Fulmer. "This is especially important to our most rural school districts and in meeting the goal of ACCESS to allow students equitable access to courses."

ACCESS has placed high-end interactive video conferencing equipment in participating schools, enabling students to connect with some of the best teachers around the state through synchronous sessions. It also offers asynchronous Web courses. ACCESS has placed tablet PCs in the hands of students and invites them to download a variety of specialized learning software, including collaborative note-taking, student response tools, content replay, an interactive lab simulation program and an equation plotter with calculus features.

The result is a powerful new set of learning experiences available to students. These new courses vastly increase student contact with inspired, adept teachers, advanced and specialized content and to one another ? a vital dimension to 21st century learning. This emphasis on collaboration, teaming and social skills mirrors the environment students will enter after graduation. Dr. Joseph B. Morton, Alabama's superintendent of education says, "By leveraging existing resources and expanding ACCESS distance learning, we will deliver a broad range of courses to students statewide, including our hardest-to-serve areas. It will help bring 21st century classrooms into all high schools in Alabama."

Denise Oliver, education and outreach director for the Alabama Supercomputer Authority, agrees. She says, "It has been gratifying to me as an educator on the 'network side' to watch the connectivity piece of ACCESS develop." She adds, "Working at a very rapid pace, the Alabama Supercomputer Authority (ASA) is collaborating closely with the Alabama State Department of Education and the governor's office and is upgrading connectivity to the schools so they can deliver interactive video conferencing and online courses to students. This connectivity upgrade will enable teachers to incorporate a media enriched curriculum into interactive video conferencing and online classes and enable students to receive the best possible distance learning experience."


Access Granted

Carroll High students can now choose from a body of courses that rival the offerings of any school, anywhere. While Spanish is the only foreign language taught in-house, through ACCESS students can now study Chinese, French, German and Latin as well. Offerings like advanced placement (AP) calculus, AP English literature and composition, AP macroeconomics, and marine science are courses now available that the school could only dream about staffing or equipping on its own. With ACCESS, students can learn these subjects from some of the best teachers and in the company of a cohort of bright and diverse peers from throughout the state.

Not only does ACCESS support high achieving, academically-oriented, college-bound students, it offers remedial courses in reading comprehension, math, science and social studies, as well as electives in career and technical studies.

Advance to College

Alabama, like many states, is focused on providing more advanced placement courses to more students. Many educators see AP courses as vital indicators of the quality of education that students receive. Not only do they give college-bound students a leg-up on their higher education experience, allowing them to earn college credits for a nominal fee, they are considered great preparation for success in college. Furthermore, the presence of an AP program in a school is seen by many as enriching the general learning environment, something that benefits the school far beyond the limits of the courses themselves.

Advanced placement programs can be expensive to develop and maintain for a number of reasons that include staffing and professional development. The Alabama State Department of Education's e-newsletter, Alabama Education News, stated in May 2007: "Although the number of students taking AP courses in Alabama is increasing, a disproportion exists between the volume of students who take AP courses in more affluent school systems and those in rural and inner-city systems." In fact, while statewide Alabama has 168 high schools in 94 school systems that offer AP courses, more than 200 Alabama high schools do not offer any AP courses at all. The state understands that of the many ways it might plan to address this issue, one that's likely to produce far-reaching results in a short amount of time is its ACCESS program.

Just Getting Started

As inspiring as the new reality for students established by participation in ACCESS is, it is likely that we are merely seeing the prow of a vessel that Alabama Gov. Bob Riley and the Alabama State Department of Education are building. Even as the first few cohorts of students ride ACCESS to 21st century competence, the bulk of its promise remains to be realized. "I first saw the potential of distance learning when I visited Troy University in Alabama," says Gov. Riley. "Troy teaches students across the globe through distance learning, and it made sense that we could apply the same technology in our high schools. We brought together representatives from all aspects of education and asked them to design a program that would provide students across Alabama the opportunity to take a full college-prep curriculum, advanced placement courses, foreign languages and electives. We launched our 24 pilot sites in January 2006, and the expansion continues at a rapid pace."

ACCESS was officially launched in 2004 with funding starting in the fall of 2005, and with the success of the pilot programs the plan is to establish 21st century classrooms in every Alabama high school. "Our goal is to put an ACCESS Distance Learning lab in every high school by 2010," says Gov. Riley. "We are well on our way, and with the passage of this year's budget, we will be in nearly half of all Alabama high schools in just three years." Plenty of students are taking advantage of the opportunities ACCESS has to offer. "During the current fiscal year, 10,000 students will take courses through ACCESS," adds Gov. Riley. "Next year, nearly 20,000 will have that opportunity, and we will add 100 new high schools. We are extremely proud of our progress."

In addition to the expanded body of class offerings and professional development tools, the plan includes the development of a learning objects repository ? a collection of text, HTML files, digital videos and more ? and an overall commitment to strengthening the state's high schools through distance learning. In other words, ACCESS is not seen as an add-on or a technology initiative, but a mission-critical strategy to develop and improve the state's core education program.

One exceptional aim of the program is its stated intention to "Expand the number of students served to reach the goal of giving every high school student (with priority given to schools and students with the greatest need) the opportunity to take at least one distance learning course during high school." This objective is quite visionary as it reflects an understanding that when it comes to using technology in the delivery of educational experiences, the students' interaction with the technology is as much part of the learning experience as is the traditional accredited curriculum being covered.

Learning Happens on Both Ends

An area of concern that all states face is the challenge of attracting and retaining highly qualified teachers, particularly in rural districts. The introduction of online courses taught electronically by teachers, or e-teachers, is a way to combat the shortage. Hiring and training e-teachers as well as providing support for facilitators and schools are essential components that Alabama has addressed by establishing three support centers, said Melinda Maddox, director of technology initiatives for the Alabama Department of Education. These support centers are essential to the success of the ACCESS program.

Another outcome from the ACCESS program has been the changes seen in the teachers on-site. The technology coordinators at the ACCESS schools have noticed that after teachers were trained to instruct students remotely through technology, they became more apt to use technology in their day-to-day lessons in the classroom, according to Maddox.

Follow 'Bama

In a world where virtual high schools are becoming common, success stories with this much impact and significance are rare. The Alabama example is not just one of a promise made, but of a promise kept. The disparity of access to high quality education is a defining issue that has persisted and frustrated countless individuals and kept our society from developing its greatest asset, human capital. Alabama has done the hard work of developing a relevant, appropriate program to address this need, and has built the infrastructure and done the outreach needed to make it work. "Without a statewide network, implementation would have been much more complicated and some students would still be waiting to take distance learning classes," says Oliver. "Strong infrastructure means strong delivery and a guarantee to the student that they will get the best quality of service possible. This guarantee has a direct impact and long-term benefit to the school district, but most importantly, to the student. Reaching down into Alabama's most rural and economically challenged areas and providing the same opportunities for the students there, in terms of connectivity and access, truly does enable ASA to play a significant role in closing the digital divide."

Seeing the great potential of distance learning, Alabama has taken aim and hit the bull's eye with ACCESS. "This is an exciting time to be in education and the field of educational technology," says Maddox. "In just two short years, I have watched the Alabama's ACCESS Distance Learning program grow from Gov. Riley's vision [of providing] every high school student in Alabama with the opportunity to take a wide range of courses to a detailed implementation plan. We're now beginning to see the results in high schools throughout the state. The most rewarding aspect is receiving messages from students, parents, teachers, principals and superintendents about how exposure to knowledge and ideas through the available technology is changing their futures."

ACCESS does more than level the playing field for students in Alabama. It establishes a valuable model on which school systems everywhere can do the same. A tremendous number of stakeholders were involved in creating such a program. Thus, representatives from all these groups needed to be included in the planning phases, and a consensus had to be reached about very difficult issues to ensure successful buy-in. The strong, continued partnerships between the governor's office, the State Department of Education, the Alabama Supercomputer Authority, Alabama Public Television, higher education institutions and school districts who continue to oversee, plan and improve the program is key to the success of the initiative. "ACCESS is revolutionizing the way we teach our students," explains Gov. Riley. "We are especially excited about the blended model of both video conferencing and Web-based courses that the program employs. We can tailor the program to the individual needs of the students. That is what sets Alabama apart."

ACCESS can show the world that metropolitan areas are not the only places that embrace technology. Students coming from all locales need to have adequate technology training and the ability to learn at their maximum potential. Maybe now the rest of the nation can spread the word about the not-so-secret success in the south.

Reality Check: The URGENCY of the DIGITAL EMERGENCY!

Dismantling Detroit

By PAUL CLEMENS
Published: September 28, 2007

Detroit

TO get to the auto plant that I’ve been drawn to for much of the last year, I drove, on my lunch hour last Monday, past an auto plant that members of the press had been drawn to for a full 45 minutes. As I drove east from midtown Detroit along I-94, the Ford Freeway, I could see a helicopter ahead, circling the General Motors Detroit/Hamtramck assembly plant — “Poletown,” in these parts.

TV news crews were parked outside it, to cover the strike that had begun at 11. I exited the freeway to see a dozen or so strikers, a handful of Detroit police officers and a couple of people holding tape recorders interviewing a couple of others holding picket signs. The United Auto Workers had called a national strike against G.M., and Poletown, for the press, was the place to be.

Back on the Ford Freeway I continued east, past the abandoned Packard plant, empty for half a century now, on my way to a more recently shuttered factory just up the road. I was pretty sure there’d be no TV crews at the Budd Detroit plant. Built in 1919 by the Liberty Motor Company and bought by the Budd Company in 1925, it had been a parts supplier, producing brake drums, wheels (old-timers still call it “Budd Wheel”) and auto body stampings for the major car companies. For eight decades, it supplied jobs to the city and the industry that drove the expansion and symbolized the strength of the American middle class — a class, the striking U.A.W. workers rightly asserted, that they were proud to belong to and didn’t want to see disappear.

The Budd plant — latterly, the ThyssenKrupp Budd plant — helped shape the contours of Detroit’s 20th century. Literally: in the 1950s, Budd Detroit built and assembled the body of the iconic, two-seat Ford Thunderbird. Last December it closed, and this past summer I spent much of my free time at the plant, observing workers from General Rigging disassemble it.

I wasn’t “press,” not here. In the Budd plant, “press” means stamping presses, and many of them still stand, a couple of stories high, in numbered lines of half a dozen presses each. A Spanish auto supplier, Gestamp, has bought 16 Line for one of its Mexican plants. A couple of Mexican engineers from Gestamp, along with German engineers from Müller Weingarten, the press maker that Gestamp contracted to oversee the 16 Line’s installation in Mexico, have been observing the disassembly. “Their role is to stand there, in awe, and hope they can put it back together when they get it to Mexico,” said Duane Krukowski, General Rigging’s electrical foreman.

If the picketers I’d passed a few miles back, with their demands for job security, were trying to counter the effects of globalization, Francis Blake Sr., the owner of General Rigging, embraced it. In addition to Mexico, press lines had gone or were going to India and Brazil. “None of it’s staying here,” Fran said, “here” being not just Detroit, but America.

Fran’s foreman on the Budd Detroit dismantling is Matt Sanders, an affable fellow in a Stars-and-Stripes hard hat. General Rigging had just completed a smaller job at a plant in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, owned by Tower Automotive, the bankrupt auto parts supplier, and had moved on to another Tower plant in Kendallville, Ind.

This process has been likened to the clear-cutting of a forest. The forest, in this case, spreads through parts of Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York State, and goes by the name of the American Rust Belt. Whether anything will grow back is unclear. What is clear is that dismantling America’s industrial infrastructure has become a growth industry.

“I get no pleasure from taking these places apart,” Matt said to me more than once this summer, exhaling cigarette smoke. Tower Automotive’s new owner, Cerberus Capital Management, also owned the Chrysler assembly and engine plants that bookend the Budd plant. Despite himself, Matt couldn’t help but speculate on which stamping plants Cerberus might decide to close.

While the Big Three seek to shed workers, Matt is always looking for bodies. “When can you start?” he asked when we first met. Some of the older guys on the crew are former U.A.W. members, and the younger guys, in an earlier era, might well have been Big Three workers. Yet even they seemed to realize that by working the Budd job they were part of something historic. Still scattered about the plant were Frisbees and buttons bearing the logo for U.A.W. Local 306, and this message: “I Believe in Budd Detroit.”

“See you Saturday?” I said to Matt on my way out. “I’ll be here,” Matt said.

On my way back downtown, I saw that the picketers in front of Poletown remained, but the news crews had departed. A day and a half later, the strike would be over, and among the reported U.A.W. concessions was the acceptance of a two-tier wage structure, one that could pay new workers as little as $12 to $15 an hour. That means that a young worker starting out could conceivably make as much taking an auto plant apart as he could working in one. It’d be dirty work, occasionally dangerous and done without union backing, much like auto work had been before the U.A.W.

“I want to be here to take this apart,” Duane, General Rigging’s electrical foreman, said to me this summer. He considered the Budd plant holy. “I used to work at Ford’s,” he said, applying the possessive, as working-class Detroiters do, “and I got laid off from Ford’s. What they did was, they built a new assembly line. One day, we went over for a tour of the new line, and they showed me a machine that was doing my job. This was in 1979. They turned the lights out, and the machine was still doing the job. So I said to myself, ‘Now I need to learn how to build machines.’ Which is why I’m here taking them apart. Because I know how to put them together. Now I’m 50 years old, and I wouldn’t give up being here for nothing.”

Paul Clemens is the author of “Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir.”

NSF ITEST STEM GRANT meet NCLB on 21st Century Skills

http://www.eschoolnews.com
Contents Copyright 2007 eSchool News. All rights reserved.

Lawmakers step up NCLB renewal process

21st-century skills, data-driven instruction are areas of focus in new House draft proposal

From eSchool News staff and wire service reports
September 6, 2007

College and workforce preparedness, 21st-century skills, and the use of data to inform instruction are among the new points of emphasis in a draft version of a bill to reauthorize the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

Proposed by Rep. George Miller, Democratic chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, and the committee's senior Republican member, Buck McKeon, the draft bill is a response to "two dozen hearings in D.C., a review of written recommendations from more than 100 education groups, and conversations with constituents and colleagues in Congress," the two lawmakers say.

The proposal calls for extensive revisions to the nation's education law. It would focus more on low-performing high schools in an effort to boost graduation rates, and it would offer greater flexibility in assessing and measuring school and student progress--especially for special-needs students and those just learning English. In addition, it would distinguish between schools that narrowly fail to meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and those that significantly miss AYP goals.

"This draft is a work in progress, subject to change in the coming weeks as the committee moves a bill through the legislative process," Miller and McKeon write. "However, we believe it represents a starting point from which to receive input."

The draft legislation would create a Graduation Promise Fund, which would establish new resources for high schools with the lowest graduation rates. These resources would support data-driven instruction, staff collaboration and professional development, and individualized student support--including counseling services for students at risk of dropping out.

The House draft also would provide incentives for states to develop standards aligned with the skills needed for success in the 21st century, such as problem solving, critical thinking, and collaborative skills.

In addition, it would allow states to use more than a single test for accountability purposes. States could use multiple, state-developed tests taken at different points in time to measure AYP, and they could consider more than just reading and math test results. Under this scenario, for example, schools could get credit for student performance on history, civics, or science exams, as well as for improvement in graduation or college enrollment rates.

The draft bill also would let states include students' academic growth over time in their definition of AYP. To use such a "growth model," states would need to have in place a longitudinal data system that can compare the progress of the same students from year to year.

In addition, the proposal would treat schools that fail to meet AYP in only one or two subgroups differently from those that fail to meet AYP in several subgroups.

The draft creates two separate categories for schools in need of improvement: "Priority Schools" and "High Priority Schools." And it offers a range of intervention options for these schools, including formative assessments and data-driven instruction.

The House proposal also allow states to measure how well students first learning English are doing at acquiring language skills, instead of judging these students on standard reading tests. The substitute test would only be allowed, however, for two years after the law is enacted.

During that time, states would be expected to develop alternative tests for limited-English speakers--such as tests using simplified English.

The draft proposal would encourage states to develop foreign-language reading and math tests, and it would allow students to be tested in their native language for five years instead of three.

School officials nationwide have complained it makes no sense to give subject-area tests in English to students who don't know how to read English well.

However, not everyone likes this proposed change: It would take the pressure off schools to get kids up to speed quickly in English, says Amy Wilkens, vice president of the Education Trust, a nonprofit organization that advocates for poor and minority kids.

"It's too long," Wilkens said, referring to the newly proposed grace period. "That seems to me a terrible disservice to those kids and these families."

Reaction from some other education groups to the draft proposal was more encouraging.

"Chairman Miller and ranking member McKeon, along with their colleagues and staff, should be applauded for creating an open process and dialogue on the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act," said Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia. "The staff discussion draft marks a true step forward for high school reform at the federal level."

Wise said his organization looks forward to working with Congress "to ensure that this reauthorization includes the best policy for our nation's high school students." But he added that, regardless of any proposed changes to NCLB, adequate funding is "critical to the success of school improvement efforts."

NSF ITEST STEM Grant Initiative

Published Online: September 25, 2007

Published in Print: September 26, 2007

Engineering a Blueprint for Success

Students in the Academy of Engineering at Wheaton High School test electrical resistance during their digital-electronics course, a class offered as part of the curriculum developed by the national pre-engineering initiative Project Lead the Way.
—Christopher Powers/Education Week

A rapidly growing program aimed at propelling more U.S. students toward engineering careers is attracting recruits beyond the usual pool of prospective high school talent.

By Scott J. Cech

Wheaton, Md.

Amid the clicking of computer mice and muted consultation, Wheaton High School teacher Marcus Lee’s class of 11th and 12th graders pored over the electronic blueprint for a four-story building they were designing on their desktops. The calculations for each floor needed to be set just right if the structure was to stand on its own.

“What we want to do is lay a foundation,” Mr. Lee explained. He was addressing the students in his civil-engineering and architecture class, but he could just as well have been talking about the goal of his school’s Academy of Engineering—and that of Project Lead the Way, the national curriculum it uses.

A Search for Answers in Science and Math
Lessons Drawn From Sputnik 50 Years Later Engineering a Blueprint for Success Grants Modeled on Reading First Aim to Bolster K-8 Math Teaching R&D Project on Algebra Software Seen to Show Promise Parents Less Worried Than Experts Over Math, Science

Often referred to by its acronym, PLTW is a rigorous four-year program of honors-level math and science, plus engineering, culminating in at least precalculus and advanced science classes, along with an intensive, hands-on collaborative engineering project. The curriculum is produced by Project Lead the Way Inc., a 10-year-old, Clifton Park, N.Y.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing the number of American college students who study and ultimately work in engineering fields.

The program has swiftly grown to include about 2,200 schools in 49 states. Last school year, 175,000 students were enrolled in PLTW classes nationwide.

Shane R. Stroup, the director of Wheaton High’s Academy of Engineering, gives the rigor of PLTW’s curriculum much of the credit for the success his students have had so far.

Members of the academy’s 26-student class of 2007—its first graduating class—went on to study in mechanical, electrical, nuclear, and other engineering fields at such selective universities as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell University, claiming more than $1.6 million in scholarships. Eighty-nine percent of Wheaton High’s 1,325 students are members of racial or ethnic minorities, and 41 percent receive free or reduced-price lunches.

“I think the reason was because of the Project Lead the Way curriculum,” said Mr. Stroup. “It prepared these students.”

---

It’s a familiar refrain that the United States is critically short of students prepared to perpetuate the nation’s decades-long pre-eminence in science, engineering, and the mathematics critical to both.

But when it comes to doing something about it, educators who have studied the alternatives say there’s no one else offering as much rigor in the so-called STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math education to as many students as Project Lead the Way.

“What we found was that PLTW offers the best curriculum out there,” said Bart Aslin, the director of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers Education Foundation in Dearborn, Mich. “It’s a pipeline vision to let as many students as possible see the excitement of science, technology, math.”

The Technical Track

Students at the Project Lead the Way program at Wheaton High School in Montgomery County, Md., can choose from among several sequences of courses designed to prepare them for the postsecondary study of engineering.
Click on graphic below to see the Grade 9 - 12 curriculum.

NOTE: The curriculum also calls for freshmen and sophomores to take physical education, and for seniors to take an engineering-related college course, elective, or internship.

SOURCE: Montgomery County (Md.) Public Schools

PLTW was singled out by the congressionally chartered National Academy of Sciences in its oft-cited 2005 report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” which recommended that the program serve as the national model for expansion of science and engineering education.

Still, the program is neither cost-free nor easy. Because of the hands-on nature of many PLTW classes, implementing the curriculum can cost up to $95,000 per school depending on what computer equipment and facilities a school already has. Robotic equipment and automated manufacturing machinery required for PLTW elective courses, such as Computer Integrated Manufacturing, can cost tens of thousands of dollars more.

Schools or districts must also pay for the specialized two-week summer training for teachers at one of PLTW’s 30-plus partner colleges and universities. The per-teacher cost of the required course varies, but can exceed $2,000.

To the teachers who attend—70 percent of whom have previously taught career and technical education, and may not have any formal engineering training—the cost may feel like the least of it. Mr. Stroup, the Wheaton High engineering-academy director, called the training “boot camp.”

“These classes are very hard-hitting,” concurred Renny Whittenbarger, an engineering teacher at Cleveland High School in Cleveland, Tenn. “PLTW will fail you. … You have to pass their exam before they let you [teach].”

---

At Wheaton High School, a clutch of adults filtered into Mr. Lee’s darkened class early one recent Monday morning, watching as the students compared notes on their building project. The students were showcasing the kind of collaborative effort that PLTW emphasizes, in lieu of the “eyes on your own paper” style of learning that prevails in many classrooms.

“What’s really impressive to me is to see the kids helping each other out—you never see that at the university level,” whispered James W. Sturges. “That’s how we work in engineering.”

Mr. Sturges was visiting in part because he’s the president of the Montgomery County school district’s advisory board on careers in engineering, scientific research, and manufacturing technologies, but also because he is the director of mission assurance at the Bethesda, Md.-based aerospace giant Lockheed Martin Corp.

“We’re the biggest employer of engineers in the United States,” said Mr. Sturges, who is himself an engineer. “If we can’t get [enough of] those, it’s going to affect our business.”

Student Sephar Simon uses a measuring device known as a digital multimeter to gauge resistance during the class.

—Christopher Powers/Education Week

Those same concerns gave rise to the project that would become PLTW.

In the 1980s, Richard Blaise, now a vice president of PLTW, was the director of occupational education for the Shenendehowa Central School District in Clifton Park, N.Y. To help expand his district’s technology education offerings, he reached out to local industry leaders, including Richard C. Liebich, now PLTW’s chief executive officer and the chairman of its board of directors, to form a technology advisory board.

Mr. Liebich, a former president of Houston-based Sysco Foods, was then running Transport National Development, an industrial cutting-tool manufacturer in Orchard Park, N.Y.—one of several similar companies he would eventually head as CEO and chairman.

Mr. Liebich was having trouble hiring engineers, “and it became apparent then that, yes, we need to do something,” said PLTW spokeswoman Crickett Thomas-O’Dell.

Funding the nascent idea through Mr. Liebich’s Clifton Park-based Charitable Venture Foundation, Mr. Blaise and his staff were able to field-test what would become PLTW at upstate New York middle schools in the late 1980s and early 1990s. By the 1997-98 school year, when PLTW was spun off to become a separate nonprofit group, high schools piloted the program, and by 2000-01, over 300 schools in more than 25 states offered the curriculum.

Project Lead the Way is now self-sufficient, running on revenues from the licensing of PLTW software and the sale of teaching tools to schools, Ms. Thomas-O’Dell said.

---

David Waugh, a dean emeritus of the University of South Carolina’s college of engineering who has observed PLTW with interest but is not involved with the program, attributes much of its rapid expansion to the fact that while many precollegiate educators recognize the importance of engineering, few teach the subject.

“So many people in high school have very little idea about what engineering really is,” said Mr. Waugh, a past president of the Alexandria, Va.-based National Society of Professional Engineers. “They have science classes, and they’ll encounter things like chemistry and even physics, but with engineering, they don’t encounter anything. That’s sort of where it ends.”

By contrast, PLTW puts engineering firmly in the foreground, and it mixes lots of projects into the curriculum.

Ninth grader William Mendoza works on a class project as part of a pre-engineering program at his Wheaton, Md., high school that follows a curriculum from a national initiative called Project Lead the Way.

—Christopher Powers/Education Week

“We make it fast-paced and hands-on,” said Steve Clariday, the career education director at Cleveland High in Tennessee.

As part of a Cleveland High PLTW engineering class, students work in teams to build cardboard boats that they’ll race in the school’s swimming pool. But first they have to calculate how many cubic feet the boat should be, how fast it will sink, and other factors on their own; the only equation they’re given is that one cubic foot of cardboard will sustain 60 pounds.

“They get frustrated,” Mr. Clariday said, “but they get to know the math.”

Cleveland High students also have designed tools to help people in their community, including a can opener with an extra mechanical advantage to help a woman with arthritis, and a rake that a one-armed man can use comfortably.

---

Along with other nations’ more-aggressive prioritization of technical education, raw population trends do not favor future American pre-eminence in engineering.

According to projections by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s directorate for education, India will produce more than twice the number of American and European college graduates combined by 2015. China will have even more.

The United States “cannot build a workforce of just white males in engineering,” said Laurie Maxson, the director of Science Technology & Engineering Preview Summer Camp Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo.—a transition between PLTW’s middle-school-level Gateway to Technology program and its high school curriculum.

“They’re focusing on all groups—all groups in this country are underrepresented when it comes to engineering,” the University of South Carolina’s Mr. Waugh said of PTLW.

According to data gathered on behalf of PLTW in 2005-06 by the evaluation firm TrueOutcomes Inc. of York, Pa., the program has had some success in recruiting students of color.

White students still account for more than 70 percent of PLTW students. But they’re only slightly overrepresented in PLTW classes compared with the enrollment of the schools in which they operate. Hispanics also are slightly overrepresented in PLTW classes, relative to the populations of their schools.

African-Americans are underrepresented by about 20 percentage points in PLTW classes, compared with their share of their schools’ overall enrollment—“not where we want to be,” said Carolyn Helm, PLTW’S pre-engineering curriculum project director.

“But we’re doing a heck of a lot better than colleges,” in whose engineering programs African-Amerian students are even more underrepresented, she said.

The program has had trouble attracting girls, who make up only 17 percent of PLTW classes. “We really have a hard time getting females involved,” Ms. Maxson said.

---

Yet Project Lead the Way has made strong inroads among two other groups that are not always well represented in STEM fields: the less-well-off and the academically unspectacular.

Senior Jessica Steinmann, bottom at right, and junior Marcos Rego work on computer-generated building designs during their civil-engineering and architecture course.

—Christopher Powers/Education Week

According to the TrueOutcomes data, the program is available at schools across the economic spectrum, but is represented especially well at schools that serve free or reduced-price lunches to more than 70 percent of their students.

“We don’t have money for college,” said Jessica Steinmann, a 16-year-old senior in Wheaton High’s engineering academy. “This is a way out.”

A Haitian immigrant, Ms. Steinmann now plans to study aeronautical engineering in college.

Andrew Kim, a 17-year-old Korean-American senior in the Academy of Engineering, came into the program in 9th grade as a special education student with poor grades. Now he is breezing through honors-level classes and hopes to study mechanical engineering at either MIT or the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

“My dad actually didn’t want me to go to Wheaton High School,” said Mr. Kim, recalling his father’s fears about “thugs in the hallways.” The school is the poorest in mostly affluent Montgomery County, Principal Kevin E. Lowndes said.

Senior Andrew Kim, second from right, works with Richard Sutton during their class in engineering design and development at Wheaton High’s engineering academy. Mr. Kim, who started out with poor grades, plans to study mechanical engineering in college next year.

—Christopher Powers/Education Week

But Mr. Kim said the academy’s rigor has won his father over, and now his younger brother, a 9th grader, has joined the program.

If PLTW hewed to the usual strategy of putting high-rigor academic programs only in well-to-do areas, said Mr. Sturges, the Lockheed engineer and advisory-board president, “you wouldn’t put this [engineering academy] in a high-FARMS [free and reduced-price meal system] area, you’d put it in a no-FARMS area.”

Mr. Lowndes, the Wheaton High principal, said “the most impressive thing” about the engineering program is what it does for average students. “It’s teaching them through a cohort how to be successful in school and why it’s important to take the rigorous courses,” he said.

As Lynne M. Gilli, the program manager of the Maryland Department of Education’s career and technical education instructional branch, put it: “We are not trying to recruit the best and brightest” for PLTW pre-engineering programs. “We’re trying to recruit the top 80 percent.”

Coverage of mathematics, science, and technology education is supported by a grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, at www.kauffman.org.

AIM reaches the STARS! CONGRATULATONS!

Detroit HS tech stars get backers

Principal Patricia Pickett, Superintendant Connie Calloway, Rev. Jesse Jackson. PHOTO BY JACKIE BARBER

By Eric T. Campbell

The Michigan Citizen

DETROIT - Leaders from the education, faith-based and labor communities came together in front of the Northwestern High School student body Thurs., Sept. 14, to announce the creation of the Northwestern High School Success Project.

The assembly, held in Northwestern�s auditorium was part of the Rainbow/PUSH Third Annual Community Symposium.

Rev. Jesse Jackson, Deputy Mayor Anthony Adams, Detroit Schools Superintendent Connie Calloway and U.S. Representative John Conyers addressed the students.

The "Success Project" was initiated by a partnership of Northwestern Alumni with the Michigan Labor Constituency Council, the UAW, International Union, New Detroit Incorporated and the Rainbow/PUSH coalition.

Honorary Chairs and committee members include a long list of Detroit community leaders and activists. The five-year pilot program seeks to identify specific educational and structural needs at Northwestern and to raise a $500,000 fiduciary fund for the school to "augment their academic program over a five-year period", according to the symposium guide booklet.

The program also stresses the need for "community wide mobilization" to support student's scholastic needs and improve Detroit high school graduation rates.

"They've raised over $90,000 for us to augment our programs, organizations and clubs, to have a holistic approach, a community approach to transforming," Northwestern Principal Patricia Pickett told the Michigan Citizen. "We're going to try and develop a clean, safe learning environment with rigorous instruction. We're all stakeholders, continuously learning."

Northwestern High School was chosen to pilot the program in part because of its potential to incorporate an extended academic structure. The curriculum at Northwestern already includes nine advanced placement classes, four computer laboratories, two libraries and one of the only Planetariums located in a Michigan public school.

Dr. Shedrick Ward is the facilitator of the AIM program at Northwestern, which identifies and nurtures students from the ninth grade on and offers scholastic options based in technological fields.

"To bring the teachers together across areas to perform a unified approach" that's the American transformation of the high schools so that the kids are connected to places like Ford Motor Company, Chrysler, General Motors, who have their challenges in this global network," Dr. Ward told the Michigan Citizen in his office. "But young people still have some responsibility in understanding what that challenge is going to be when they leave high school."

In addition to the morning assembly, the Community Day Symposium also included a luncheon and town hall meeting, at which participants discussed and reviewed elements of the "Success Program".

The day ended with a black tie gala and fundraising dinner at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Keynote speaker Judge Greg Mathis has strong ties to the "Success Program" through his National Youth and Education Crusade, which focuses on issues of crime and education.

But the day was best exemplified by the gathering of the student body in the high school auditorium on Grand Boulevard, during which wisdom was passed from generation to generation in the spirit of community uplift and educational advancement.

"We are now the conscience of this country," congressman and Northwestern High graduate, John Conyers told the listeners. "We are now holding hands with the 6.6 billion people in the world and we can all make a difference."

Keynote speaker Rev. Jesse Jackson paid tribute to Northwestern High and its role, even beyond the neighborhood.

"You have such a sterling history and heritage of impacting our world by lessons taught and learned from this school," Jackson began.

He focused directly on the students in the building and their responsibility to uphold the advancements made by those in the Black community.

"We're going another way, against the odds, we at Northwestern, are going to higher ground," the audience repeated with Jackson. "We shall lift ourselves, and our community, our city, our state, by the power of our minds. We change our minds, and the whole world changes. We must first change our minds to change the world."