As school leaders struggle to find enough highly qualified educators to staff the nation’s classrooms, a growing number of districts have been turning to the web in hopes of corralling new employees. Now, one North Carolina school system is among the first in the country to adopt a practice that already is catching on in the corporate world: using online exams to screen and assess potential candidates.

Beginning June 1, the Wake County Public School System–the second largest school district in North Carolina, serving more than 104,000 students–will require anyone who applies for a job as a teacher or school principal to take a multiple-choice test online. The exam asks a series of questions intended to highlight certain personality traits and assess how candidates might respond in different situations.

Back in February, Wake County tapped Pennsylvania-based Kenexa, a provider of human-resources services and web-based hiring solutions to Fortune 500 companies, to lend a touch of corporate efficiency to the school system’s slow-moving hiring process.

The district, which has 127 schools and employs more than 7,500 teachers, approached Kenexa with two goals in mind: (a) implementing an automated system that would help hiring managers sift through the tremendous influx of paper-based and electronic resumes received from potential job applicants and (b) creating a selection process that would enable administrators to identify the brightest, best-prepared, and most talented prospects in the application pool.

“With the ongoing shortage of teachers, it has become difficult to both hire and retain the right teachers,” said Toni Patterson, assistant superintendent for the district.

The challenge isn’t unique to Wake County. Nationwide, school systems are reeling from a worsening teacher crunch. Owing to a current crop of aging educators and a continually shrinking pool of college graduates interested in entering the teaching ranks, experts have estimated a need for more than 2 million additional teachers to staff the nation’s classrooms over the next 10 years–a problem that has recently been compounded by stricter high-quality teacher provisions ushered in under the No Child Left Behind Act.

The law requires all states to retain certified teachers in every core subject area, from math and science to language arts, by the end of the 2005-06 school year.

But it isn’t just about recruiting good teachers. The real challenge these days lies in matching the right applicant with the right job, Patterson said. The more comfortable an employee is in his or her position, the more likely he or she is to stick around.

To improve system-wide retention, Wake County will administer two customized online assessments–one for prospective teachers and another for administrators–which should take job-seekers about 20 minutes to complete through a service hosted for the district on Kenexa’s web site.

In formulating the assessments, Kenexa human-resource consultants interviewed top district administrators to get a sense for what skills and personalities have elicited the most success among district employees.

“By matching the right applicant to the right job, we’ll increase the probability of [employee] success and increase retention in the school district,” Patterson said.

The list of questions used as examples during the test period included asking applicants how they would react if they suspected a student of being intoxicated at a school function, or what they would do if a school board member asked them to discuss the educational progress of someone else’s child. Applicants also were asked to describe what they enjoyed about working with children and to give their opinions on equal education.

In peak season, Wake County receives as many as 150 applications a day from job-seekers looking to join what has become one of the nation’s fastest-growing school systems.

“We spend a lot of time just wading through papers,” Patterson said. “The volume of work is significant.”

By bringing the system online, she hopes the district will have a better shot at acting quickly to nab top talent.

“This will allow us to recognize [highly qualified teachers] and follow up with them immediately,” she said.

That’s not to say the automated process eventually will replace the need for in-person interviews.

“Putting [the application] on the web is really the easy part,” said Ame Creglow, director of assessment operations at Kenexa. The hard part, she added, lies in developing a unique “success portfolio” that can assess whether a given applicant is likely to thrive in the existing environment.

Although some applicants often look good on paper–boasting diplomas and accreditations from top-flight schools–not all of them exhibit the kinds of behaviors and attitudes likely to gel with existing staff and students, Creglow said.

To help hiring mangers get a better sense for how well each applicant is likely to fit in, Kenexa worked with district officials to develop a set of questions administrators could ask potential employees during face-to-face interviews. Candidates for in-person interviews are selected based on their overall qualifications and their individual performance ratings on Kenexa’s online assessments.

Creglow said she hopes the new system will enable the district to improve its hiring processes by expanding the overall pool of applicants to job seekers across the internet and by allowing school officials to contact immediately those candidates who demonstrate the skills and qualities necessary to achieve long-lasting success within the school system.

“You really get some in-depth information about [candidates] … before they ever start working in the building,” Creglow said of process. “Retention comes from finding out about the applicant–that personal information that allows you to know and support [him or her].”

In the private sector, Creglow said, the Kenexa system averages 14 days from the point of application to hire. Although Wake County is the only school district in the nation to have used the model, she said, the average hire in the public sector so far is closer to 30 days. She attributed the increase in time to additional hurdles related to state certification discrepancies, background checks, and other administrative roadblocks not commonly encountered in the business world.

Depending on the size of the district and its needs, Creglow said, school districts can expect to pay between $20,000 and $70,000 for the service.

Elsewhere in the nation, school districts have resorted to a number of other tactics to help fill vacant teaching and administrative posts. Last year, administrators at Calumet High School in Gary, Ind., used an online service provided by international personnel firm USA Employment Inc. to interview teaching applicants from India via the web.

Michigan-based staffing giant Kelly Services Inc. offers Kelly Educational Staffing, a substitute-teacher staffing program designed to relieve schools of the administrative burden associated with finding, training, scheduling, and managing the substitute teacher workforce, according to the company’s web site. The service looks to ease certain administrative headaches by conducting the hiring process, completing candidate background checks, providing automated scheduling and reporting tools for better substitute management, and offering retention programs such as vacation pay, weekly wages, holiday-bonus pay, and medical benefits for temporary and temp-to-hire teachers.

Additionally, the Kelly Educational Staffing model includes fulfillment of non-teaching positions. The program also staffs administrative assistants, office clerks, food service staff, and custodians. All positions can be filled using Kelly’s Automated Scheduling System (KASS), an internet- and phone-based scheduling tool that allows teachers to post their absences online, where eligible substitutes can log on or call in to monitor upcoming vacancies and accept assignments based on availability, the company said. To date, Kelly staffs more than 9,000 substitute teachers across 42 states.

Also on the internet, a new product called FacultyFinder.com, from Decade Consulting, LLC, of Montgomery, Ala., lets instructors seeking online teaching positions post resumes and professional profiles, which subscribing institutions can then search to staff growing distance-education programs. Since going live earlier this month, more than 1,200 prospective faculty members have posted profiles to the site, the company said.

Links:

Wake County Public School System
http://www.wcpss.net

Kenexa
http://www.kenexa.com

USA Employment Inc.
http://www.usaemployment.org

Kelly Educational Staffing
http://www.kellyeducationalstaffing.com/eprise/main/internet/kes/home.html

FacultyFinder.com
http://facultyfinder.com

For hundreds of thousands of students across the United States, virtual schooling–instruction that takes place entirely online–has opened educational doors previously inaccessible. But for students who are blind, visually impaired, or who have certain other disabilities, cyber-education programs might actually create more barriers than they remove.

Bringing down those barriers was the objective addressed by a select group of special-education experts and industry executives who convened earlier this month at the National Summit on Disability and Distance Education in Washington, D.C. Their goal was to form an agenda that would help make the promise of virtual instruction a reality for the nation’s special-needs learners.

“Technology is a huge barrier for students with disabilities,” said conference leader Sarah Rule, director of the National Center on Disability and Access to Education. “Are we providing captioning for our deaf students who participate in live-video instruction? In a real-time virtual classroom, how do students with little or no use of their hands activate a microphone to participate in multi-site conversations? With increases in the use of online education, do people stop to think about how a blind student could take an online quiz or read class notes?”

In most schools across the country, the answer to these questions is a resounding “no.” Although 95 percent of postsecondary institutions use the web to offer distance-education programs, only 18 percent of institutions make the content accessible to students with disabilities, according to a recent study by the National Center for Education Statistics.

At the K-12 level, this situation slowly is changing. Thanks in part to the No Child Left Behind Act, K-12 school systems now are charged with ensuring that mentally and physically disabled students reach the same achievement benchmarks as their peers.

The law’s effects could be felt at the college level, too, because it has provided new motivation for technology vendors (including makers of commercially available software for online instruction). Universally accessible solutions are available to more students, which broadens the potential customer base while simultaneously protecting lucrative school contracts from regulatory or policy sanctions.

Throughout the two-day conference in Washington, held May 11 and 12, stakeholders from industry and education discussed how online course materials–and the assistive technologies that often are required to access them–could be improved to accommodate all students, regardless of disability.

Experts suggested a three-pronged approach to the problem, including (a) broad shifts in public policy; (b) stronger, more ambitious professional development for distance educators and course designers; and (c) design changes to educational technology that would permit all students–including those with disabilities–to benefit from its use.

Accessibility vs. usability

To make distance-education programs fully accessible to all students, schools and their corporate partners first must address what speakers called a fundamental rift between accessibility and usability. Just because a solution adheres to a set of predetermined accessibility standards doesn’t necessarily mean the technology will make learning any easier on the student, participants said.

“The difference between accessible and usable–or easy and comfortable to use–is sometimes worlds apart,” said Norm Coombs, professor emeritus from the Rochester Institute of Technology and chief executive officer of EASI (Equal Access to Software and Information), a provider of online technology training for persons with disabilities that has reached more than 4,000 people in three dozen countries since its inception in 1993.

Coombs, who is blind, said schools need to provide “direct” accessibility of hardware, software, and course materials, so that when students with disabilities log onto distance-education programs and other online learning resources, they are not required to jump through additional hoops before proceeding.

For example, frames and other elements of online course design can trip up a user’s screen-reading software. If visually impaired students must change or adjust the settings on their software each time they try to access various course materials, they’re already at a disadvantage when compared with their peers.

The answer, summit participants said, lies in the creation of distance-education solutions according to the principles of “universal design,” so materials are universally accessible to–and easily usable by–all students, regardless of their disability.

But that’s easier said than done. Distance-education providers and advocates for disabled learners are faced with several questions: Which set of standards should institutions follow when designing courseware that is universally accessible? How can schools be encouraged to adopt this practice? How can companies be encouraged to develop universally accessible ed-tech products?

Coombs was part of a working group that proposed solutions to these and other questions. Here are the group’s key recommendations:

• Collect all existing accessibility standards in a single location for companies and schools to draw from. This collection of standards should include those spelled out in Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1998.

• Design a curriculum for schools to implement that teaches how to make web sites and online courses fully accessible. (Cyndi Rowland, project director for WebAIM, a project of Utah State University’s Center for Persons with Disabilities, reported that her organization is already working on a version of this.)

• Create a model reporting tool that students can use to inform schools of their non-compliance.

• Persuade the accrediting institutions to consider whether a distance-education program is fully accessible before granting accreditation.

• Create an awards or recognition program for universities that adopt best practices in accessibility, and share these best practices among schools nationwide.

Policy and funding

Funding is also a challenge, participants noted. Many argue that the time and money it takes to develop universally accessible distance-education solutions have precluded smaller vendors from entering the market. Without competition, these advocates contend, there is little or no motivation for larger providers to invest in improving their solutions. That often translates into bad news for disabled students, many of whom are forced to use tools that only loosely address their specific needs.

To raise public awareness of the issue–and influence those who hold the purse strings–summit participants called on stakeholders to take the conversation to lawmakers on Capitol Hill and elsewhere.

“Disability access is often left out of public-policy discussions,” according to Hilary Goldmann of the Higher Education Information Technology Alliance, a group dedicated to pursuing the collective interests of libraries and colleges in matters of federal information technology policy.

Goldmann said the idea behind generating more interest in this policy strand is to connect the different revenue streams that can be used to feed disability and distance education.

That might be happening already on the federal level.

The summit took place just one day before the U.S. Senate passed a bill that aims to fully fund the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) for the first time in its history, advocates of the bill say.

If the bill becomes law, the federal government would contribute 40 percent of the cost of educating the nation’s special-needs students–the full amount specified by the act–within the next seven years.

Lawmakers say the revised law would reduce the paperwork burden on teachers and would unite parents and schools to better meet the needs of children with disabilities. The program currently contributes $11 billion in federal money to special-education projects.

Summit participants also said they would petition lawmakers to address the accessibility of distance-education courses when Congress reauthorizes the Higher Education Act in the coming months.

Links:

National Center on Disability and Access to Education
http://ncdae.org

EASI: Equal Access to Software and Information
http://www.rit.edu/~easi

WebAIM: Web Accessibility in Mind
http://www.webaim.org

Higher Education Information Technology Alliance
http://www.heitalliance.org

The easy availability over the internet of graphic video footage showing an American civilian being beheaded in Iraq has caused problems for some school administrators.

Teachers in at least six states–California, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Texas–have been disciplined or are under investigation for showing the video to students during class, according to Associated Press reports. In other reported cases, students were caught using school computers to access the video on their own.

The video of the beheading of American civilian contractor Nicholas Berg, 26, was posted on a web site linked to the Islamic extremist group al-Qaida earlier in May. American television networks broadcast preliminary scenes but deemed the beheading too grisly to show.

The filtering software used by most schools can be set up to block the site where the video originated, but the images have cropped up on a host of other sites around the globe. More important, educators agree, is the need for school leaders to establish and communicate clear policies for what kinds of video images are considered appropriate for students to view at school.

In Ontario, Ore., the local school board disciplined two high school social studies teachers on May 21 for showing students the gruesome video of Berg’s beheading.

Students had the option of not watching the beheading as it was shown in Ontario High School classrooms on May 13, according to school board director Evelyn Dame, but many did.

Dame declined to identify the teachers or specify how they had been disciplined.

Neither Dame nor Carol Kitamura, the district’s personnel director, could provide the number of students who chose to view the beheading.

The school board has no specific policy on graphic images, Dame said, but could discipline the teachers for violating a policy on presenting material not appropriate to the maturity level or competence of students.

Dame said the teachers agreed to penalties instituted by the board.

Kitamura said the teachers claimed they showed the video as part of social studies curriculum on current events. Kitamura said the teachers showed remorse and regret for their decision to show the video. The board sent letters to parents of the children saying they may have watched the beheading at school.

Dame added that parents should have been involved in the decision by the teachers to show the video.

With the board’s May 21 decision, the school district became the latest in the country to discipline teachers who showed the video in classrooms.

High school teachers in Texas and Ohio have been placed on administrative leave or are under investigation for showing the video. One teacher in Texas is under investigation for reportedly allowing students to watch the beheading during a classroom pizza party.

A high school teacher and track coach in Oklahoma also might face disciplinary action for letting students use her computer to connect to the internet and view video of the beheading.

Putnam City High School Principal Don Wentroth said the incident happened May 18 during a study hall for members of the girls’ track team.

“It was a mistake in judgment for this teacher to show that video clip to a small group of students,” Wentroth said. “She’s made a mistake, and she’s been making calls to parents and talking to students.”

The teacher’s name has not been released. Wentroth said he met with parents May 20 to address their concerns.

“The parents I’ve visited with are satisfied, I believe, in the way we’re handling things,” he said.

“This kind of video is definitely inappropriate to show at school. I don’t believe [students will] be scarred or harmed permanently from something like this, but we’ll be available if the students are having nightmares, trouble concentrating, or other problems and they need to talk about it.”

District spokesman Steve Lindley said such a video would be included in the district’s policy banning students or faculty from using school computers to view obscene material.

“I definitely think this would be considered obscene,” he said.

In South Dakota, a teacher at Dell Rapids High School will not be disciplined for showing students the video, the school board president said May 21. The board decided its policy on showing such graphic images was unclear.

President Robert Harms said the board will discuss what kinds of video are appropriate to show in classrooms. The board could make changes over the summer, he said.

The school’s current policy prohibits only pornography from being viewed on the internet, school officials said.

Dell Rapids students said the teacher was not in favor of the students watching the video, but they wanted to watch it as part of current events. No one objected in a class vote, they said.

Links:

Ontario High School
http://www.ontariosd.k12.or.us/ohs/

Dell Rapids Public School District 49-3
http://hs.dellrapids.k12.sd.us/

Innovative schools around the United States are using technology to enable distant parents–including troops in Iraq and other remote locations–to feel a little more togetherness, even if the get-togethers are only virtual.

Some Central Texas school districts plan to make this year’s high school graduation ceremonies accessible on the internet or by videoconference so soldiers deployed to Iraq from nearby Fort Hood can watch, officials said.

In addition to watching the ceremony, a deployed parent will be able to talk to his or her graduating student one-on-one via a private videoconference, said Bob Massey, a Killeen Independent School District spokesman.

So far, more than 250 soon-to-be graduates have signed up to participate in videoconferencing, he said.

Ceremonies for four Killeen high schools, plus one ceremony each for Salado, Temple, Copperas Cove, and Belton school districts, can be accessed on the Killeen Independent School District web site, Massey said.

The commencement ceremonies are May 25-30, he said.

Thousands of Fort Hood soldiers have deployed to Iraq since war broke out last year.

A webcast of the Sherman High School graduation ceremony in Seth, W.Va., to an Army parent in Iraq led the school to use its internet and video facilities to reunite a school employee with her son, who has been stationed overseas for more than a year.

Donna Massey hadn’t seen her son, Army Sgt. Robert Massey Jr., who is stationed in Germany, for 14 months.

But mother and son got the chance to see one another on May 20, via the internet, through a one-way, video-only connection.

Sherman High School, where Donna Massey has worked as a cook for 23 years, broadcast its evening graduation ceremony live over the web so another soldier, who is stationed in Iraq, could see his daughter get her diploma.

When Massey found out about the 6 p.m. webcast, she mentioned to school officials that it would be nice if she could get on camera to get a message to her son in Germany.

“They announced it here at school, and I said, ‘If I could be here early, then maybe I could say something to my son,”‘ she told the Associated Press. “They came back and said ‘Most definitely.”‘

The webcast did not include audio, so Massey and other family members made signs out of white poster board.

One sign was decorated with two American flags, another was adorned with yellow ribbons, all had messages such as “We miss you,” and “We’re so proud of you.”

And the messages were not just for Sgt. Massey, said his mother, but also for his wife, Heidi, and 3-year-old daughter, Kaleigh, who are with him in Germany.

The webcast project started with Sherry Flynn, who was determined that her husband, Army Staff Sgt. Joseph Flynn, get to see their middle daughter, Meagan, graduate with about 80 other seniors.

“It was absolutely wonderful,” Sherry Flynn said the evening of the graduation ceremony. “Meagan had a sign that said ‘I made it Dad.’ She has a lot of friends in the school and they were happy her daddy got to watch her graduate.”

Sherry Flynn set the project in motion when she came to the school May 19 to see what could be done so that her husband could see the ceremony. That’s when computer science teacher Randy Herron and his students set to work.

With the help of Sherman alumnus Brad Barker, who is now a student at West Virginia University Tech, a web cam was set up and linked to the school’s web site.

Sgt. Flynn called the school the morning of the graduation ceremony to make sure everything was set, and thanked school personnel for setting up the broadcast.

“I’m just glad that we have the technology at Sherman to be able to do that,” Principal Theresa Lonker said. “We have a lot of students and a lot of school personnel that have just stepped up to the plate.”

Herron and his students have undertaken similar projects in the past. The school was the first in the state to broadcast a football game over the internet a few years ago, Herron said.

“We could make it an annual event,” Herron said of the graduation webcast.

Links:

Killeen Independent School District
http://www.killeenisd.org

Sherman High School
http://www.shermanhigh.com/

Effective leadership within the education, government, and business communities is critical to the successful integration of technology in the nation’s schools, concluded panelists who spoke at Intel Corp.’s Third Annual Visionary Conference in Washington, D.C., May 11.

Among the attributes speakers used to define “effective leadership” were the recognition that ed tech is really about education, not technology; the ability to establish and communicate a clear and common vision for technology’s use in schools; and the ability to change and manage change.

Fulfilling its role as a corporate leader, the company said, Intel organized the conference to help its business partners better serve education.

“It’s really to bring education visionaries into a unique venue and talk about what a connected community [requires],” said Terry Smithson, Intel’s education marketing manager for North and South America.

From its Teach to the Future program, which has supplied hundreds of millions of dollars for teacher training to schools nationwide, to its Model Schools program, which helps selected schools become showcase sites for how technology can advance teaching and learning, “Intel has always had a leadership role in education,” Smithson said.

At the conference, top executives from companies and education groups alike–including the National School Boards Association, Scantron Corp., Pasco Scientific, SchoolNet, LearnStar, and others–gathered to hear invited “visionaries” discuss the technology challenges facing schools today.

The day’s conversation kept coming back to leadership.

“It always comes down to leadership,” said Kim Quinn, coordinator of education technology for the Maine Department of Education.

Before Maine could launch its groundbreaking one-to-one laptop initiative, her department had to earn support from the state’s leaders, Quinn explained. To gain buy-in from legislators, Quinn’s staff set up a wireless network in the legislature and gave each legislator a wireless device so lawmakers could see for themselves the impact laptops would have. Now, the state’s one-to-one laptop initiative is an exemplary technology project for the nation.

Rod Ziolkowski, science teacher and department chair at Whitney High School in California, one of Intel’s Model Schools, made a similar point, saying that only when industry and government leaders place value on technology for learning will it become truly ubiquitous in schools.

“In Iraq, the soldiers have the best technology because someone decided it was essential for survival,” Ziolkowski said. In education, leaders currently place more value on standards and test scores, and “it’s robbing the poorest of our students,” he said.

Panelists went on to say that effective leaders must establish and communicate a common vision for the use of technology in their schools.

Like successful corporations, schools should establish the same goals and same message for everyone, said Bridget Foster, director of the California Learning Resource Network. “We have to be consistent, or we aren’t going to get anywhere,” she said.

Diny Golder, executive director of JES & Co., expanded on this idea by saying that successful companies share three common characteristics that schools could replicate.

First, successful companies have a common vision they easily share with everyone. Second, professional development is tied to that vision and offered to everyone, including all support staff and stakeholders.

Third, successful companies have the ability to change and manage that change. For example, if a school district decides to hold virtual teacher-parent conferences, school officials would ask: What’s involved? How do we get that done? How do we manage the success of those two items?

Leaders’ focus also should change, panelists said.

“I think we have focused too much on technology in the past. We should focus on education,” Quinn said. “We need to think differently.”

She added, “Our whole problem is that we market ourselves as ed tech. We keep saying ‘ed tech, ed tech.’ It’s [about] education!”

Golder agreed, saying it’s time to move the conversation beyond the need for technology in schools and toward finding solutions. “It’s like coming together to talk about why electricity is important,” she said.

Getting teachers to make decisions based on data is also challenging for school leaders, panelists said.

“We can have all the data in the world, but unless you use [them] well, it doesn’t help,” said Scott Price, director of technology and grants development for California’s Fullerton Joint Union High School District.

Teachers can either get defensive about low scores compared with their colleagues or they can use the data well, he said.

Teachers are concerned about the “gotcha” effect, said John Porter, associate superintendent and chief information officer for the Montgomery County, Md., Public Schools. His district is trying to educate teachers that information is a tool that can help them be more successful.

Finally, school leaders need to focus on sustainable funding for technology, panelists said.

“I think we need to be concerned about funding for the future,” said David A. Spencer, president and CEO of the Michigan Virtual University.

“School districts can’t do this alone,” Porter added. Public and private partnerships are essential.

Links:

Intel Corp.
http://www.intel.com