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Show DAILY. Thursday, January 17, 2008 HERALD A3 Teacher positions filled with subs Nearly a third of public schools with vacancies used substitutes to cover during the 2003-0- 4 school year, while close to 1 in 1 0 public school principals identify teacher absenteeism as a big problem. Percentage using substitutes for vacancies V t Fewer E-rra- 20 i 10 ' HTS0. ROB One factor behind the increase was an overall rise in the number of e schools reporting they had Continued from A 1 vacancies. That points to teacher even when substitutes fill in. And test shortages in some communities. scores have gained heightened imporAlso, schools are being more thortance, because the 2002 education law ough in reporting on vacancies and on school staffing generally due to penalizes schools if too few students meet testing benchmarks. The goal is requirements of the No Child Left Beto get all kids reading and doing math hind law, Miller said. at their grade levels by 2014. Standards for substitutes vary widely but are typically far below those Raegen Miller, a postdoctoral fele low at the University of Washington, for regular teachers. Some is examining the impact of teacher states and local districts don't require absences on fourth-grad- e test scores background checks, and many don't in a large, urban school district that require substitutes to have attended he chooses not to identify. His findcollege, let alone graduated. And states with the fewest stanings show that 10 teacher absences within a year cause a significant loss dards for substitutes also rely most in math achievement. When the regu- on subs. Principals in Arkansas, lar teacher is gone for two weeks, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and it can set students back at least that Washington, D.C., are most likely to amount of time. identify teacher absenteeism as a big "Teachers often have to problem, according to Education Dematerial, restore order and rebuild re- partment survey data from 2003-04- , .the most recent available. lationships after absences," said Miller, who is conducting the research Among those places, only Washwith Harvard University education ington requires all substitutes to have some college. And even there, prinprofessors. The potential harm multiplies when cipals sometimes ignore that requirement when faced with teacher absubs are used in long-terroles in suba classroom. Though long-tersences, according to a district review. stitutes often have better credentials With math in particular, the higher than those chosen for daily the level taught by the absent teacher, they are no replacement for regular, the harder it is to find a substitute, e said Francis Fennell, president of teachers who have gone the National Council of Teachers of through the normal hiring process. Mathematics. "If the prime teacher Nationwide, the number of schools of calculus is going to miss some time reporting that they used substitutes to fill regular teaching vacancies man, are you in trouble," he said. doubled between 1994 and 2004, acAt Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, a high school with a math and scicording to Education Department data. The latest data showed more ence focus, a substitute might be in than a fifth of public schools use subs a math class one day and an art or 4 in this way. science class the next, said principal " tr? full-tim- full-tim- fill-in- full-tim- Fewer 5 D.C.: 32.9 SOURCE: Department of Education AP full-tim- ' "eyebrow-raisin- g study" should quickly spur more research, particularly in blacks, who have a higher incidence of prostate cancer; saidjDrj Howard Sandler, , a cancer specialist at the. University of Michigan and spokesman for the American Society of Clinical Oncology. The study was led by doctors at Wake Forest Univer- 5 sity in Winstoh-Salem- , N.C., . those letters, said Sandi Jacobs, vice 'president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and advocacy group. Lawmakers trying to update the federal law have not addressed that loophole, although they have put a provision in draft legislation that would increase training for substitutes and for administrators who manage them. Children's advocates say kids are being hurt. "We need to pay a lot more attention to the prevalence of substitute teachers, vacancies and along with long-terturnover rates, especially in schools students who with a lot of can least afford instability in their classlow-inco- rooms," said Ross Wiener, who oversees policy issues at Education Trust, a nonprofit that advocates for poor and minority childrea and involved Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Results were published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Al they turned out to have nothing to do withihe aggressiveness of a tumor, only, whethena man is lately to 3, 1 ; develop bnet Nor did they correlate with levels of PSA, a blood substance often used to gauge cancer risk. PSA is a notoriously imprecise measure, so a gene test that independently predicts risk would be very valuable, experts said. This More Lowest Neb.: low-inco- - 20 Highest Continued-fro- v- 3 15 National Cancer ; pounds. t Although British newspapers variously described it as a mouse or a rat, researchers say the animal, named monesi, actually was more closely related to a guinea pig or porcupine, a "These are totally different from the rats and mice wfe're accustomed to," said Bruce Patterson, the curator of mammals at the Field Museum in Chicago, adding that it was the biggest rodent he hadever heard of. An artist's rendering showed a creature that looked like a cross between a hippopotamus and guinea pig. The fossil was found in 1987 about 65 miles west of the capital of Montevideo, near the vast River Plate estuary a muddy waterway separating Uruguay from Argentina that empties into the South Atlantic. That s area is site of ancient and other deposits where fossils have been found, he said. An Argentine fossil collector identified as Sergio Viera donated the skull to Uruguay's National History and Anthropology Museum nearly two decades ago, said museum director Arturo Toscano. It spent years hidden away in a box at the museum and was rediscovered by curator Andres Rinderknecht, who enlisted the help of fellow researcher Ernesto Blanco to study it. Blanco told The Associated Press he was shocked when he first came face to face with the fossil, saying it looked even bigger than a cow skull. "It's a beautiful piece of nature," he said in an interview. "You feel the power of a very big animal behind this." Blanco said the skull's shape and the huge incisors left no doubt they were dealing with a rodent, but he cautioned that the estimate of the animal's bulk was imprecise. The extinct rodent clearly outclassed its nearest rival, the Phoberomys, found in Venezuela and estimated to weigh between 880 and 1.500 pounds.' Blanco said the rodent was far more enormous than any South American rodent alive today, surpassing even the present-dacapibara that can weigh up to 110 pounds. He said the animal's teeth 10 wealthiest ones. .c- Schools serving poor and minority students also have more trouble fille ing teaching positions, and they are more likely to fill those jobs with substitutes. The federal law requires that all students be taught by a highly qualified opment; In his research, Miller found big teacher. That generally means teachers are supposed to have at least a bachedifferences in teacher absence rates lor's degree in the subject Jhey teach or among schools in the same district. test. that they pass a subject-nwe- r He said the "professional culture" of Substitutes often don't meet those a school and the relationship between teachers and administrators affect standards, but the law doesn't include sanctions to keep unqualified absenteeism. substitutes from serving for long' Principals in schools serving and minority populations are periods. It merely requires that, after four weeks, parents be notified that more likely to say teacher absenteeism is a problem. That's consistent their children are being taught by a teacher without the "highly qualified" with Clotfelter's research, which label. Some schools rotate substishows the poorest North Carolina schools average almost one extra sick tutes through a classroom in under four weeks to avoid having to send daper teacher annually than the 1 I as a big problem Barney Wilson. "We're not expecting him to teach the material. We're expecting him just to follow the lesson plan that the teacher laid out," Wilson said. Teachers at Poly, as the school is affectionately called, take that responsibility seriously. Algebra teacher James Todaro was recently injured in a car accident and needed to stay home for several days. Each day, the bandaged and bruised Todaro came to school to leave an updated lesson plan for the substitute. That's not the case across the country, however, and substitutes themselves want improvements, said Geoffrey Smith, director of the Substitute Teaching Institute at Utah State University, which provides training to substitutes and schools. "They will be the first to say, 'I wish we had more competent lesson plans left. I wish we had better control of the students,' " Smith said. Nationwide, teachers are generally allowed 10 or more sick or personal days a year. They also can be out of the classroom for professional devel- Rodent Continued from Al V Percentage of principals reporting teacher absenteeism CARRAssociated Press Shakeara Jordan left Briana Jones center andJanay Kittrell work together on a math problem while substitute teacher Amon Carter far back teaches the class. Baltimore Polytechnic Institute students Absent More National average: 30.3 ' vV g 40 30 Idaho: west i..-g- r I Medicine. Prostate cancer is the most common caifceir in American ; men and arguably the most mysterious. Unlike breast cancer, where variants in single genes like BRCA are known to confer greater risk, few have been discovered for prostate cancer. In the past year, other researchers identified five, but none individually seemed to raise risk very much. Combinations of them did, ; the new worlriyealsj ' It involved 2,893 men with i prostate cancr ind 1 81 similar men wW did not have: the disease. Sweden was chosen because the population is so ethnically similar and well suited to gene studies. Researchers looked for ,' "hot spots" of differences in genes of the men with cancer compared to the others, then focused on the five most common variants, which were single letter changes in the gene's usual DNA alphabet. When our or five variants were present, men were more tfian four'times more likely to develop prostate cancer than those with none of the mark- ers. .When family history was added in, men with five of the six factors were more than nine times more likely to develop the disease. These six factors accounted for 46 percent of the prostate cancer cases in the study. f That i a lot," Manolio sa$d, but added, "you have to.take those estimates with a grain of'salt" because less than 2 percent of men had all of the variants. Still, some are very common one is estimated to occur in 60 percent of men. river-bank- y t LOOK WHAT'S NEW TODAY! Royal Society An artist's illustration shows variations on the head of Josephoartigasia monesi, a newly discovered extinct species. Call pointed to a diet of aquatic OertaiTlati plants. IcIUM search journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B. "From what we can tell, we Scientists uninvolved with the finding agreed that this know it was a herbivore that lived on the shores of rivers or was one really big rodent. "I think it's a very important alongside streams in woodland areas," Rinderknecht told the discovery it is certainly an AP. "Possibly it had a behavior immense animal," said Mary similar to other water-farin- g Dawson, a paleontologist at the rodents that exist today, such Carnegie Museum of Natural as beavers, which split their History in Pittsburgh. She said time between land and water." it and other rodents grew bigBut he said the rodent apger by filling the ecological niche taken elsewhere by rhipears to have had no tail, addnoceroses and hippopotamuses. ing that follow-u- p studies are "They got large taking the being planned to better determine its diet and other traits. role of some herbivores that The creature may have were not present at that time been a contemporary to the South America was still an island continent," she said. But cats and giant carnivorous birds that roamed when North and South Amerithe area millions of years ago, ca were linked about 3 million but Blanco said it was not clear years ago, the rodents were whether such predators had swamped by North American animals and eventually died the power necessary to bring out. down the huge beast. "This investigation began "It's too bad they're extinct, I'd love to see those things," about a year and a half ago she said but it's still not complete," Patterson said its discovery Rinderknecht said, adding that the next step may be a CT scan gave scientists more insight into the fauna of the prehistorof the skull "to better deteric South American continent, mine its interior dimensions." when it hosted creatures such The research by Rinderknecht and Blanco was as marsupial predators and hoofed animals known to scipublished Wednesday in this entists as archaic ungulates. week's issue of biological re saber-toothe- d Sunroc has two FT job openings In SF. 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