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Community Development Partner Succeeds!

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Once-failing Detroit school makes the grade

It also will have to improve next year to avoid sanctions

BY CHASTITY PRATT and LORI HIGGINS
FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITERS

August 25, 2006

For years, Barbour Magnet Middle School on Detroit's east side was the catch-all building that took in busloads of students from overcrowded schools or those whose schools were closed for good.

It did not meet the federal guidelines for annual yearly progress and was considered failing by the government for six years.

Until June, the building was on schedule to be restructured under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The staff and students were preparing to be split up and sent to other schools, having been branded a bad school.

"I know that I put forth all the effort I could. I wanted for these children what I wanted for my own," said Randal Moody, the principal at Barbour for nearly 20 years.

But the staff learned something in June that became official Thursday -- for the first time in years, it had met its Annual Yearly Progress standards and no longer faces restructuring.

Moody said the secret to meeting the standards was in the planning.

He mandated that his teachers meet twice a week to go over state curriculum standards and expectations alongside the district's guidelines to make sure every class is on target. Students were signed up for after-school tutoring and enrolled in a two-week summer MEAP academy.

"Our focus was almost laser-like," Moody said.

Barbour is one of 92 schools in various phases of federal sanctions that made AYP for the first year. If these schools make AYP again next year, they will be removed from the sanctions list.

Some schools improved their status simply by getting more students to take the MEAP test, since federal law requires that schools test 95% of their students to meet the standards.

But in some cases, schools improved because they worked hard, said Sharif Shakrani, codirector of the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University.

Many of these schools didn't meet the academic goals because too few of their subpopulations of students -- including minorities, low-income students, special education students and those with limited English speaking skills -- scored well enough on the MEAP.

"What they most likely have done is attempted to emphasize instruction to these populations, especially in the area of mathematics, which seems to be a problem for these schools," Shakrani said.

But these schools can't rest easy now that they've managed to meet standards this year.

Last year, none of the three high schools in Plymouth-Canton Community Schools met the standards because of low scores among special education students. This year, those three schools made it off the list. Most of the students took the MEAP, while some took an alternate exam designed for special education students.

"The students worked very, very hard throughout the year. Obviously, when it came to the testing, they tried their very best," said Mike Bender, director of secondary education.

"This is something we have to do," Moody said. "If we don't, based on No Child Left Behind, we're going to suffer the consequences."

Contact CHASTITY PRATT at 313-223-4537 or cpratt@freepress.com.

Copyright © 2006 Detroit Free Press Inc.

A.I.M. Here!

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August 13, 2006

Bill Gates’s Charity Races to Spend Buffett Billions

By STEPHANIE STROM

Although it has long been the largest grant-making foundation in the nation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is facing an unparalleled challenge: how to give away more money — and do it much faster — than it ever has before.

Largely lost in the June announcement of Warren E. Buffett’s gift of $31 billion to the foundation were its terms. Mr. Buffet will make the contribution in annual increments. For tax reasons, starting in 2009, the foundation must give away every nickel that he contributed in the previous year.

At the current price of the Berkshire Hathaway stock Mr. Buffett will be donating, the foundation will have to distribute $3 billion annually, or a little more than twice what it distributed last year.

“It’s like having a second child,” said Dr. Helene D. Gayle, who left the foundation this year to become president of CARE USA, the international relief group. “It’s not just twice the amount of work; rather, things change in vastly different ways.”

In the next two years, the foundation plans to double its staff to about 600 people to handle the additional money, said Cheryl Scott, the foundation’s new chief operating officer, and it is building a new headquarters complex in Seattle. “We’re very thankful for the two years he gave us to ramp up,” Ms. Scott said. “I think he understands that you don’t just turn this kind of thing on and off.”

“I’ve been a manager for close to 30 years, and this is a well-run organization,” Ms. Scott added, “but if you put that kind of a load on the current process we have, it’s not going to carry it through.”

The foundation has said it intends to continue to focus its philanthropy on education and global health while adding a new area, global development, to help the poor in third world countries. Before Mr. Buffett’s donation, the Gates Foundation had assets of almost $30 billion.

Dr. Gayle said the foundation’s way of doing business had evolved from its early days, when it believed in giving out a few large grants, rather than many small grants, to avoid building a huge staff and becoming a big institution. Now, she said, it has a more formal, structured process. Increasingly, it creates horse races among potential recipients through requests for proposals, more like a business, Dr. Gayle said.

“That takes time and is very hard to do piece by piece, project by project when you’re trying to get that much money out the door,” Dr. Gayle said. “In addition to the traditional approach of requests for proposals for specific projects, they may need to look at ways of giving out money over longer terms and turning to institutions that have the capacity to spend large resources.”

Externally, the immensity of the amount the foundation will have to give away each year is reviving debate about its size and influence.

“One out of every 10 foundation dollars spent is going to have the Gates name on it, and that gives it influence that is impossible to calculate,” said Rick Cohen, executive director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a research group.

“And as currently structured, just four people are deciding how to spend all that money,” Mr. Cohen said, referring to Mr. and Mrs. Gates; William Gates Sr., Mr. Gates’s father; and Patty Stonesifer, the foundation’s co-chairwoman and president.

Mr. Cohen and others said the large amount of money also allowed governments and other donors an excuse not to spend their money.

In its 2007 budget proposal, for example, the Bush administration eliminated a $93.5 million program to underwrite the development of smaller schools, specifically citing the increase in support for those schools from “nonfederal funds” from the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation.

Then there is the issue of accountability. Foundations by and large police themselves because of the paucity of federal and state resources devoted to oversight of the nonprofit sector.

The Gates Foundation goes further than most in revealing its warts. Its Web site acknowledges various missteps and challenges, be they unexpected complications in starting its AIDS-related program in Botswana or problems with its efforts to develop small schools. Its new headquarters will have a visitors’ center, a first for a major foundation.

“There is skepticism about whether a foundation can be a responsible and effective steward of this kind of money,” Ms. Scott said. “For us, it’s a question of teeing up the issue squarely, because it is a real one, and telling the story as fully and openly as we can. We do not want to be a black box.”

Others say the critics’ concerns are overblown because influence can be achieved with even small amounts of money.

“It doesn’t take billions of dollars to influence public policy,” said James Allen Smith, a philanthropic historian at Georgetown University. “It can be done with tens of millions or even a strategically placed few hundred thousand.”

Dr. Smith said that although the Gates Foundation grants were typically many times the amount of an average foundation’s, its donations paled in comparison with spending by government-financed organizations like the National Institutes of Health, which has an annual budget of $29 billion.

Foundation officials make the same point. “It’s still, in absolute terms, a small amount of money, given the problems we’re working on,” said Raj Shah, who oversees the foundation’s new financial services for the poor and efforts to improve agricultural productivity. Mr. Shah said the foundation’s primary focus was on some 550 million households in the world that survive on less than $2 a day.

Mr. Shah’s responsibilities include a new global development program. It is concerned with making financial and agricultural advances, and water and sanitation improvements for the poor. In Malawi, the foundation has underwritten the purchase of thumbprint readers used in establishing savings accounts for the rural poor.

The new endeavors, which grew out of a 16-month review aimed at determining how to expand the foundation’s operations in ways that complement its work on global health issues, give it new opportunities to spend its money.

Dr. Gayle said the foundation’s work had been evolving in the past year to include broader goals. In reproductive health, for example, it has been moving beyond grants supporting the delivery of services to broader goals like reducing maternal mortality, increasing access to contraception and providing education to girls.

The foundation had begun working toward an expansion more than a year before the Buffett gift was announced. The Gateses have long said they intend to give much of their fortune, pegged at $51 billion by Forbes magazine, to the foundation, and Mr. Gates is ceding day-to-day control of Microsoft to devote himself to foundation work.

Find the "Sweet-Spot" of Imagination and Innovation

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August 12, 2006

Critic’s Notebook

At the Exploratorium and the Tech Museum, 2 Views of Science

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

SAN FRANCISCO — It is a hot day at the Palace of Fine Arts, but no one is bending down to take a promised drink. The spout, gleaming with polished chrome, looks like those on many new water fountains. The problem is that it is mounted on the rim of an open toilet.

“A Sip of Conflict” reads the explanatory sign, for this is an exhibit at the Exploratorium, the astonishing science museum here. Judging from the grimaces and giggles of visitors, the point being made is clear. We may know something to be true — that the water is clean and cold — but sensory experience conflicts with reason. In this conflict, guess which wins?

Compare that exhibit with another, at the Tech Museum of Innovation in nearby San Jose. You sit at a computer monitor and select elements of a roller coaster ride — track length, loop shapes, cart speeds — constructing a rudimentary track. Then you walk over to a roller coaster cart, where your custom bit of track is simulated: a screen shows the cart’s motion over the track, while the cart rocks and thrusts as if it were really moving through your self-constructed ride.

Could the approaches be more different? The Exploratorium exhibit has almost nothing to do with technology; the Tech exhibit celebrates it. The Exploratorium exhibit is almost deliberately old-fashioned; the Tech exhibit aspires to state-of-the-art effects. The Exploratorium display is modest, and succeeds; the Tech’s is ambitious and seems less spectacular than its promise.

The exhibits even reflect two different archetypes for the modern science museum. While the Exploratorium focuses on experiment, the Tech focuses on sensation. The Exploratorium has the aura of a science fair, the Tech the aura of a sci-fi fair.

But both models are in transition and confronting challenges. The two museums also have new directors. The Tech, facing declining attendance and recovering from Silicon Valley’s crash, hired a new president, Peter Friess, a German master clockmaker whose doctoral thesis connected the history of art and the history of technology. He also directed and helped to create the Deutsches Museum in Bonn, which focuses on German technology and research since 1945.

The Exploratorium has brought in Dennis M. Bartels as executive director. Experienced in science education and policy (and a former director of the Exploratorium’s learning center), he plans to expand the museum’s programming and subject matter while overseeing its move to a new building during the next few years, doubling its size. The new site, according to current plans, is on two piers near the downtown area.

Admittedly this is not a comparison of equals. The Exploratorium, founded in 1969 by the physicist Frank Oppenheimer (J. Robert’s brother), created the participatory model for the modern science museum. The best of its 400-some displays strip away irrelevant detail and decorous flimflam and focus on simple, pungent principles. Displays about mechanics, sound, electricity and human perception inspire a combination of wonder and unsettled thought: something is palpably felt that had earlier been just an abstract idea.

The Exploratorium’s displays are meant to appear homemade, and they are: the workshop where they are constructed and the display areas share the museum’s floor space. It really is an educational institution, with substantial resources devoted to training teachers and scrutinizing the effects of its exhibits.

But the Exploratorium’s style has also become so familiar that its displays can seem a bit shopworn, like well-used equipment in an aging high school science lab. The contemporary scientific universe is also different from what it was in the 1970’s, the Exploratorium’s first heady decade.

What about the personal computer, advances in medicine, nanotechnology, string theory, the Internet? None get satisfactory treatment here. Mr. Bartels, in an interview, pointed out that contemporary science had moved to extremes of scale: the very big and very small, the very fast and very slow. How, he asks, are they to be demonstrated with Exploratorium-style apparatus? And what about contemporary audiences’ taste for spectacle?

One response to these issues has been made by the Tech Museum, which was meant to embody the energy and inventiveness of Silicon Valley. It contains its own IMAX theater and, with its glossier aesthetic, celebrates newer technologies.

The museum, which opened in 1998 courtesy of the local government and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and companies, is housed in a $113 million building. Its 132,000 square feet now contain exhibits about the Internet, undersea exploration, earthquakes, genetic research and chip design, along with interactive displays and simulations.

Yet even with this kind of backing and ambition, the Tech pales in comparison with the Exploratorium. The tech crash couldn’t have helped. During the Tech’s first full year, 1999, the museum had 800,000 visitors. Last year there were fewer than 400,000, of which a third came only to see an IMAX film. (Some 500,000 visited the Exploratorium last year.)

But the Tech’s decline in attendance is not just a function of the local economy. During a recent weekend the largest crowds were waiting to see “Superman Returns” at the IMAX. Some exhibits were in disrepair. And displays that were meant to tap into Silicon Valley’s technological strengths seemed less sophisticated than commercial products and computer programs in daily use.

One participatory exhibit had all of the stolidity of the Exploratorium toilet but none of the wit: the visitor is invited to “experience an M.R.I.,” which involves lying down on a tabletop with your head in a plastic module as a tape recording plays the medical equipment’s grating, pulsing noise.

Mr. Friess, in an interview, said the museum would have to define itself more clearly by celebrating the spirit of innovation, and connecting itself more closely with the stories and ideas of Silicon Valley. But it is apparent that a reimagining will also be needed.

Is it possible that each of these museums could get hints of what it needs from what the other features? One thing missing from the Exploratorium, for example, is the very notion of innovation that Mr. Friess emphasizes. The Exploratorium presents ideas and principles but not scientists or methods. It is ahistorical. One wanders from one display or discipline to another, from earth sciences to mechanics, to optics, to psychology; each exhibit is effectively an experiment.

But many of these experiments have historical analogs: they were designed to answer particular questions. Visitors get no sense of this. They race objects of different shapes down ramps or change the lengths of swinging pendulums, for example, without recognizing that they are conducting variations of classic experiments Newton used to discern the laws of motion.

A historical context would also raise other questions: Which experiments failed and why? How were certain scientific questions answered or ignored?

Such an approach might expand the Exploratorium’s breadth and suggest different kinds of exhibits. It might even make it easier to explore the newer branches of science or examine ethical issues that Mr. Bartels said he wished to address more intensively.

As for what the Tech might gain from looking more closely at the Exploratorium, the benefits would be legion. The Tech’s displays put glitter ahead of substance. One offers protruding bronze molds of explorers’ hands and asks visitors to “touch hands that touched discovery,” including the hand of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard of “Star Trek,’’ treating him as if he were as real as an adjacent oceanographer. It’s a silly exhibit with an even sillier execution.

Another simulates an earthquake, though its shaking floor and sharp jerks seem more like an amusement park ride that can’t get off the ground.

In most exhibits little is learned about either science or innovation. But consider what happens at the Exploratorium, where simpler technologies are involved, and abstract ideas are made palpable.

Cold air is heavier than warm air? Sure, but wait until you’ve blown soap bubbles that hover without sinking, buoyed on the chilled air created by a slab of dry ice. Faster moving air creates the “lift” for airplanes? Sure, but make a flat disk float without falling as a jet of air blows down on it, and the principle begins to amaze.

At the Exploratorium square wheels roll smoothly over a properly shaped surface; the blood vessels in your own eyes can be seen; ice crystals branch out over a glass surface; the corpses of an iguana and mouse are devoured by natural scavengers.

In each display that works (not all of them do) something simple is indelibly portrayed. We may think we know the world’s scientific principles, but perhaps we haven’t yet come to feel those truths or to fully believe them. The best exhibit, like an experiment, has enough power to prove its point and reshape experience.

The Exploratorium even provides another water fountain for those who blanch at the toilet’s testimony to the inadequacy of reason. Press the fountain’s copper-plated switch, lean over, and the moment your lips touch the liquid, music is heard: water completes the electrical circuit.

The sip offers not conflict but wonder. We thought we knew the world, but here, drinking deeply, we find we are only beginning to understand it.