School Information System

Bad Rap on the Schools

Jay Matthews:

Oh, look. There’s a new film that portrays American teenagers as distracted slackers who don’t stand a chance against the zealous young strivers in China and India. It must be an election year, when American politicians, egged on by corporate leaders, suddenly become indignant about the state of America’s public schools. If we don’t do something, they thunder, our children will wind up working as bellhops in resorts owned by those Asian go- getters.

The one-hour documentary, conceived and financed by Robert A. Compton, a high-tech entrepreneur, follows two teenagers in Carmel, Indiana, as they sporadically apply themselves to their studies in their spare time between after school jobs and sports. The film, called Two Million Minutes, cuts to similar pairs of high schoolers in India and China who do little but attend classes, labor over homework, and work with their tutors. Two Million Minutes has become a key part of the ED in ’08 campaign, a $60 million effort by Bill Gates and other wealthy worriers to convince the presidential candidates to get serious about fixing our schools.

Most of the time, I cheer such well-intentioned and powerful promoters of academic achievement. I have been writing about the lack of challenge in American high schools for 25 years. It astonishes me that we treat many high schoolers as if they were intellectual infants, actively discouraging them from taking the college-level Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses that would prepare them for higher education and add some challenge to their bland high school curricula. I share what I imagine is Bill Gates’s distress at seeing Carmel High’s Brittany Brechbuhl watching Grey’s Anatomy on television with her friends while they make half hearted stabs at their math homework.

Via Flypaper.

Stanford students try writing a graphic novel

Justin Berton:

Tom Kealey has taught a lot of writing classes at Stanford University, but never one that asked students to consider the dramatic pause provided by the "page flip."

Or how wide to draw "the gutter."

Kealey and co-instructor Adam Johnson taught a winter course titled The Graphic Novel, and assigned their students to write, edit and illustrate a collaborative final project. The result is a 224-page graphic novel titled "Shake Girl," based on the true story of a Cambodian karaoke performer named Tat Marina who was the target of an "acid attack" after she had an affair with a married man.

"In a normal writing class, you'd write a poem or finish a chapter and you'd own it," Kealey said. "In this class, we had to collaborate every step of the way, every idea, and make compromises. It was the most difficult and rewarding class I ever taught."

While the study of comics and graphic novels has steadily become an acceptable part of college curricula - "Maus" creator Art Spiegelman taught a course at Columbia University last year - the project-based graphic novel class offered at Stanford appears to be the first of its kind.

Schools of Hope teachers recognized for narrowing racial achievement gap among Madison students

Sandy Cullen:

Madison teachers who participate in the Schools of Hope tutoring program were recognized Tuesday for their role in narrowing the racial achievement gap among students over the last 10 years.

"That's what school districts around the country are trying to do, and Madison is accomplishing it," First Lady Jessica Doyle told more than 50 elementary school teachers treated to the first outdoor reception of the season at the governor's residence overlooking Lake Mendota on National Teacher Appreciation Day.

"Because of you and that extra energy you put in," Doyle said, "more students can succeed and this whole community can be living with hope."

National Science Bowl for High School Students

US Department of Energy:

The National Science Bowl® is a highly visible educational event and academic competition among teams of high school students who attend science seminars and compete in a verbal forum to solve technical problems and answer questions in all branches of science and math. The regional and national events encourage student involvement in math and science activities, improve awareness of career options in science and technology, and provide an avenue of enrichment and reward for academic science achievement.

Six Books a Week: Harlem parents are voting for charter schools with their feet

The Economist:

THOSE who had won whooped with joy and punched their fists. The disappointed shed tears. Some 5,000 people attended April 17th's Harlem Success Academy Charter School lottery, the largest ever held for charter schools in the history of New York state. About 3,600 applied for 600 available places, and 900 applied for the 11 open slots in the second grade.

The desperation of these parents is hardly surprising. In one Harlem school district, not one public elementary school has more than 55% of its pupils reading at the level expected for their grade. And 75% of 14-year-olds are unable to read at their grade level. So Harlem parents are beginning to leave the public school system in crowds.

The Future of Reading

Ezra Klein:

The title of a 2004 report by the National Endowment for the Arts was “Reading at Risk.” The follow-up, released in November 2007, upped the ante. “To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence,” placed the consumption of Moby Dick up there with questions of poverty and health care. Weighty stuff. Around the same time, Newsweek published a cover story entitled “The Future of Reading”—I assumed the gist was along the lines of, “Nobody will be doing any, and the Russians will win.” I was wrong. In an almost uniquely American take on the subject, Newsweek decided to peer past the decline in reading and instead enthuse about the creation of new, expensive technologies that would help us read—namely, Amazon’s Kindle. The newsmag’s decision made a sort of perverse sense. After all, books may be in sharp decline, but compared to, say, 1992, reading on computer screens is way, way up. If you could put books on a computer screen, and maybe connect that to the Internet, you might really have something.

Bucky's Little Helper

Todd Finkelmeyer:

With final exams coming up, Renee figures she could fetch about $20 per capsule for Adderall, a prescription amphetamine widely known across campus as a "study drug." But she sells her surplus only to close friends, generally charging $5 per pill, which helps her cover her monthly refill costs of $25.

The UW-Madison senior first tried Adderall, which is used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), during finals week of her freshman spring semester three years ago.

"I hadn't slept in about two days and I had back-to-back finals coming up and, you know, you procrastinate a little and all of a sudden you're like, 'How am I going to get through this?'" says Renee, one of three Adderall users interviewed for this story who asked that her last name not be used due to fear of prosecution. "And a friend was like, 'Here, take this, it's just Adderall.'"

Priya Venkatesan Interview

Dartlog:

Review correspondent Tyler Brace conducted the following two interviews with Prof. Priya Venkatesan after news broke here on Saturday afternoon that she was threatening to sue seven students from her Writing 5 classes. Prof. Venkatesan—now of Northwestern University—is currently still planning to sue the College. —A.S.

...............

DR: Thanks for that. Why do you think a pretty significant amount of your students did complain about you? Why do you think that is?

PV: I think that sometimes when you have some students and some instructors they mix like oil and water. That could just be the explanation. It happens all the time, Tyler. Sometimes when a person goes into a corporation, they mix like oil and water. Sometimes when a person goes into a fellowship at a research institution like the one that I’m at now, the supervisor and the fellow mix like oil and water. It just happens a lot.

Joseph Rago:

Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their "anti-intellectualism" violated her civil rights.

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of "French narrative theory" that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will "name names."

The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.

Writer of the Week: I Would Go Out of my Way to Step on That Crunchy-Looking Leaf

"Featured Writer of Week:

Yael's defining quality as a writer is her rich imaginary aesthetic. She received a 2008 gold regional key from the Scholastic's Art & Writing Awards for her latest piece. Please celebrate Yael's accomplishment by reading:

Yael Weisenfeld:

When I first heard the question I thought it was rather ridiculous. “Would you go out of your way to step on a crunchy-looking leaf?” It seemed so… strange. Really, who but a child would? Of course I replied in the negative and received a look from the man in return that was somewhere midway between pity and disappointment. I don’t see what made me deserve that response; how does he know that I’m just not a leaf-crunching kind of person? Maybe the sound of leaf-crunching is my pet peeve. It isn’t, but that’s not the point. Apparently I can’t possibly enjoy life without stepping on crunchy leaves. I suppose I wouldn’t know, but that man doesn’t seem too experienced in life-enjoyment either, as he always acts as though he’s got a stick up his a*#.

Tutor faces exam leak probe

Carol Chung & Jeffrey Tam:

The Independent Commission Against Corruption is investigating tutorial center Popular Modern Education and top tutor K Oten over alleged buying of Hong Kong Certificate of Education examination papers.
The Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority said yesterday the case has been "forwarded to the law enforcement agency."

The center and the tutor were accused of texting messages on the HKCEE English-language examination during a 45-minute break.

The messages allegedly contained an "immediate analysis" helpful to answering questions.

Oten, 32, yesterday denied cheating and bribing invigilators to acquire the papers, saying it is a "deliberate defamation."

The tutorial center also denied providing the service to students. It said it will look into the matter and that it has terminated Oten's services.

The matter came to light when some students claimed the tutor had unlawfully obtained the papers and used them for commercial gain.

Exploring KIPP

Roy Romer:

Part of the reason KIPP charters have seen success is because of their rigorous standards and extended learning day. These are both concepts that the campaign has been advocating since its beginning -- we believe that charter schools, when coupled with high standards, effective teachers, and time and support for learning, hold bold promise for academic excellence.

"Commencement Advice You're Unlikely to Hear Elsewhere"

PJ O'Rourke:

Well, here you are at your college graduation. And I know what you're thinking: "Gimme the sheepskin and get me outta here!" But not so fast. First you have to listen to a commencement speech.

Don't moan. I'm not going to "pass the wisdom of one generation down to the next." I'm a member of the 1960s generation. We didn't have any wisdom.

We were the moron generation. We were the generation that believed we could stop the Vietnam War by growing our hair long and dressing like circus clowns. We believed drugs would change everything -- which they did, for John Belushi. We believed in free love. Yes, the love was free, but we paid a high price for the sex.

My generation spoiled everything for you. It has always been the special prerogative of young people to look and act weird and shock grown-ups. But my generation exhausted the Earth's resources of the weird. Weird clothes -- we wore them. Weird beards -- we grew them. Weird words and phrases -- we said them. So, when it came your turn to be original and look and act weird, all you had left was to tattoo your faces and pierce your tongues. Ouch. That must have hurt. I apologize.

So now, it's my job to give you advice. But I'm thinking: You're finishing 16 years of education, and you've heard all the conventional good advice you can stand. So, let me offer some relief:

What Do Children Read? Harry Potter's Not No. 1

Jay Matthews:

Children have welcomed the Harry Potter books in recent years like free ice cream in the cafeteria, but the largest survey ever of youthful reading in the United States will reveal today that none of J.K. Rowling's phenomenally popular books has been able to dislodge the works of longtime favorites Dr. Seuss, E.B. White, Judy Blume, S.E. Hinton and Harper Lee as the most read.

Books by the five well-known U.S. authors, plus lesser-known Laura Numeroff, Katherine Paterson and Gary Paulsen, drew the most readers at every grade level in a study of 78.5 million books read by more than 3 million children who logged on to the Renaissance Learning Web site to take quizzes on books they read last year. Many works from Rowling's Potter series turned up in the top 20, but other authors also ranked high and are likely to get more attention as a result.

"I find it reassuring . . . that students are still reading the classics I read as a child," said Roy Truby, a senior vice president for Wisconsin-based Renaissance Learning. But Truby said he would have preferred to see more meaty and varied fare, such as "historical novels and biographical works so integral to understanding our past and contemporary books that help us understand our world."

Michelle F. Bayuk, marketing director for the New York-based Children's Book Council, agreed. "What's missing from the list are all the wonderful nonfiction, informational, humorous and novelty books as well as graphic novels that kids read and enjoy both inside and outside the classroom."

18 Area Students Receive Meriter Scholarships

The Capital Times:

The winners, eight of whom have a parent who works at Meriter, will be recognized at an awards luncheon on Friday.

They are Kylie Severson, Columbus; Kristen VanderMolen, DeForest; Amadou Fofana, Junfeng Hou and Dolma Namgyal, Madison East; Marissa Wacker and Sabena Khan, Madison Edgewood; Carolyn Sleeth, Madison Memorial; Jamie Klump and Jennifer Werner, Middleton; Mathew Becker, Aubrey Lauersdorf, Brittany Sellers and Chie Yang, Monona Grove; Leah Smith, Portage; Emily Welch, Verona; Laura Purdy, Waunakee; and Megan Wood, Madison West.

Empty Nest Cure: Texas Mother Finds Meaning as a Mentor

Sue Shellenbarger:

After children leave home, many parents with empty nests must search hard for new pursuits to give their lives meaning. After Pat Rosenberg's two daughters left for college, Ms. Rosenberg, 61, a longtime volunteer in the Houston public schools, found new purpose in mentoring a student -- a poor teenager who, by his own account, was drifting toward a life of crime in his tough inner-city neighborhood.

In his unusual relationship with Ms. Rosenberg and other adult mentors, Tristan Love, now 18, says he found the strength to turn his life around, becoming a sought-after public speaker committed to attending college and pursuing a career in law. Ms. Rosenberg tells the story:

The Challenge: "We moved to Houston in 1986 for my husband David's career, before our two daughters entered school. I got deeply involved in the schools right away and stayed involved as our daughters' grew up. I was a room mother and headed the Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) in both middle school and high school. When they were at school, I was often at school, too.

"After our second daughter left for college 2-1/2 years ago, our house became incredibly quiet. It was a real period of adjustment. All of a sudden, this person who has been sitting at your dinner table with you, and going out and coming home late, and keeping you worried all the time, is gone.

Milwaukee Lawyer Created School as a Pathway to College

Dani McClain:

At 27, Deanna Singh is determined to change the dismal statistic that only 5% of African-American adults in Milwaukee have a four-year college degree.

So determined that she has launched her own charter school, where her inaugural sixth-grade students already identify their class by the year they will graduate from college.

She aims to build a culture that refuses to accept what she witnessed years ago as a volunteer in Washington, D.C., schools - 11th- and 12th-graders who could barely read or write.

Both students and staff at her Milwaukee Renaissance Academy, 2212 N. 12th St., follow the succinct dictum of a mural in the school's stairwell: "No excuses!"

High expectations propelled Singh from her father's north side gas station - where she spent much of the first five years of her life - through Elmbrook Schools and on to the top-notch East Coast universities where she received her college and law degrees.

Making the Grade:
International testing that is used to predict the grim future of US science and technology is being vastly misinterpreted

Obviously, the US population 301,139,947 is much, much larger than the countries included on this graph. Japan: 127,433,494, United Kingdom: 60,776,238 and Germany: 82,400,996.
Via a kind reader's email: Hal Salzman & Lindsay Lowell:

The future educational path for the United States should come from looking within the country rather than lionizing faraway test-score champions. Our analysis3 of the data suggests two fundamental problems that require different approaches. First, pedagogies must address science literacy for the large numbers of low-performing students. Second, education policy for our highest-performing students needs to meet actual labour-market demand.

In the United States, a decade's worth of international test rankings based on slender measures of academic achievement in science and maths have been stretched far beyond their usefulness. Perhaps policy-makers feel it is better to motivate policy by pointing to high-scoring Czechs with fear, instead of noting our high-scoring Minnesotans as examples to emulate. But looking within the United States may be the best way to learn about effective education. As the PISA authors emphasize in their report, 90% of the variance in the scores is within countries rather than between countries. Therefore, most of what one can learn about high performance is due to the variation in factors within the nation's borders. It would seem far more effective to transfer best practices across city and state lines than over oceans.

PISA website.

Clusty search: Hal Salzman and Lindsay Lowell.

2008 Presidential Scholar Semi-Finalists

Presidential Scholars Program:

Wisconsin
WI - Appleton - Theresa S. Ryckman, Appleton West High School
WI - Germantown - Travis J. Serebin, Germantown High School
WI - Madison - Reuben F. Henriques, West High School
WI - Madison - Brian W. Ji, James Madison Memorial High School
WI - Madison - Laurel A. Ohm, West High School
WI - Menomonee Falls - Evan E. Mast, Menomonee Falls High School
WI - Menomonee Falls - Angela M. Zeng, Hamilton High School
WI - Racine - Adam J. Barron, Jerome I. Case Sr High School
WI - River Falls - [ * ] Kacey R. Hauk, St. Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists
WI - River Hills - Lisa R. Koenig, University School of Milwaukee
WI - Saukville - Spencer D. Stroebel, Cedarburg Senior High School
WI - Waukesha - [ * ] Adam G. Blodgett, Interlochen Arts Academy

National list.

National list2008 Scholars.

Milwaukee Schools Examine Cincinnati's Graduation Rate

Dani McClain:

Seeking strategies to lower suspensions and raise the graduation rate, Milwaukee Public Schools officials will travel to Cincinnati this week to check out a district that's drawn national attention as a model of urban school reform.

Cincinnati Public Schools has reported that between 2000 and 2007, it raised its graduation rate from 51% to 79% and eliminated the gap in graduation rates between African-American and white students.

Along the way, the district in southwest Ohio, which has about half the students of MPS, changed the way schools handle student discipline problems, referring misbehaving students to in-school suspensions rather than sending them home.

This specific change caught MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos' eye.

"We suspend a lot of kids," Andrekopoulos said. "What we need to do now is to leverage more time on-task for children in the classroom."

Last school year, nearly half of MPS ninth-graders were suspended at least once, and a quarter of MPS students were suspended. African-American boys in special education faced the sanction at the highest rate.

Cincinnati Schools Graduation Rate: Clusty / Google / Yahoo

Waukesha West loses national title by hairbreadth

Scott Williams:

By the narrowest of margins, Waukesha West High School [Clusty Search] missed out Saturday on its second national championship in the United States Academic Decathlon.

The Waukesha school finished behind a California competitor by just 23 points, which amounted to one question out of hundreds asked during the academic competition.

"That's just the way it goes," said Randy Brown, a member of the Waukesha team.

Out of a possible 60,000 points, Waukesha West students scored 53,096, which is higher than the score that won the school its first championship in 2002.

But this time, Moorpark High School [Clusty Search] of Moorpark, Calif., was a little better, winning the title with a score of 53,119.

The razor-thin margin made the second-place finish all the more disheartening for Waukesha students.

Duane Stein, coach of the squad, said several competitors became emotional when they realized how narrowly they had missed the championship.

"My kids are kind of stunned right now," Stein said.

"I'm just so proud of these kids," he added. "They worked very, very hard."

From High School to the Future

Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab:

With loads of financial support from both CPS (Arnie Duncan) and the Gates Foundation (among others) CCSR and the school system built a tracking system that allows them to follow kids out of high school and into college & work, to see how they do-- and even more importantly, to figure out how to help them do better.

It's so unusual for a school district, especially one as large as Chicago's (130+ high schools!) to have the data capacity to do this. The vast majority of high schools in the U.S. rely on a student exit questionnaire administered in the spring of senior year, which asks kids "What are your plans for the fall" (choices include 4 yr college, 2yr college, work, etc) and their responses are used as a proxy for the real destination. In other words, the college-going rate for a high school or district is based on a student's self-report in May of senior year. This is a highly inaccurate measure, as several different data sources have proven-- plenty of kids who say they are going to college do not (or do not go to the kind of school they said they were going to, even if they were admitted and accepted) because they realize they cannot afford it, or get side-tracked during the summer, and many who say they aren't going, do decide to show up at a community college. Clearly districts need a much more reliable source of information if they are to learn about their high school graduates, and use that information to inform and change their educational practices.

Useful.

L.A.'s Cathedral Chapel is a power in the Catholic Academic Decathlon

Carla Rivera:

When the state Catholic Schools Junior High Academic Decathlon begins today in Chula Vista, a small mid-city school will be representing the Los Angeles Archdiocese for the third time, having beaten more than 100 other parochial schools to get there.

Cathedral Chapel School represented the archdiocese in the state competition in 2002 and 2005, winning the state title in 2002 and earning a reputation as the tough little school that nobody had heard of.

Though the Catholic competition may not have the name recognition of its public high school counterpart, the members of Cathedral's Academic Decathlon team are about the biggest guns on campus and the pride of the neighborhood.

At a pep rally this week, the elementary school's 285 students whooped and hollered for two hours in a frenzied buildup to the team's departure.

The Cathedral decathletes, mostly the sons and daughters of working-class immigrants, are more than just academic heroes. Scores of families are attracted to the school because they view the decathlon team's success as a reflection of the campus' overall academic excellence.

As other parochial schools face severe financial strains and even closure because of declining enrollment, Cathedral is financially stable and its enrollment has increased.

Latest Author Letter......

Mr. William Fitzhugh The Concord Review 730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24 Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776

Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,

I am happy to tell you that I was admitted early action to Yale and will be going there this fall. I also want to thank you again for including my [10,453-word] paper on the Philippine War in the Winter 2007 issue of The Concord Review. I was honored to have my work included among so many impressive pieces.

Writing my essay gave me a chance to learn something not only about a specific historical event, but also about the nature of scholarship. Throughout high school I have been an inquisitive and capable history student, but my papers did little more than synthesize the views of other historians. When I decided to submit a paper to you for consideration, I started from one I had written for my tenth-grade American history class. As I edited the essay, I became motivated to steep myself in primary materials—from soldiers’ accounts to congressional testimony to newspaper articles, many of them conflicting—in an attempt to piece together some sort of orderly narrative from these fragmented and contradictory stories. I then turned to secondary sources, considering the views of different historians, assessing their sources, and always trying to draw my own conclusions.

This process of revision was challenging and exciting. I enjoyed reading the stories and first-person narratives. But I also learned to think more critically, and to draw parallels between past events and the present. In the words of H.G. Wells, “History is a race between education and catastrophe.” Perhaps through careful study of the past, we can glean insight as to how to approach the future.

Even if the Review had not accepted my paper for publication, doing this research and writing would still remain one of the most intellectually rewarding experiences of my high school years. I am deeply honored that you chose to publish it and I thank you again.

Sincerely,

Benjamin Loffredo
Fieldston School
Bronx, New York

Art Without Craft

On the website www.michelangelo.com/buon/bio, I learn that:

"When Michelangelo turned 13-years-old he shocked and enraged his father when told that he had agreed to apprentice in the workshop of the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio. After about one year of learning the art of fresco, Michelangelo went on to study at the sculpture school in the Medici gardens and shortly thereafter was invited into the household of Lorenzo de' Medici, the Magnificent...During the years he spent in the Garden of San Marco, Michelangelo began to study human anatomy. In exchange for permission to study corpses (which was strictly forbidden by The Church), the prior of the church of Santo Spirito, Niccolò Bichiellini, received a wooden Crucifix from Michelangelo (detail of Christ's face). But his contact with the dead bodies caused problems with his health, obliging him to interrupt his activities periodically.

"Michelangelo produced at least two relief sculptures by the time he was 16 years old, the Battle of the Centaurs and the Madonna of the Stairs (both 1489-1492), which show that he had achieved a personal style at a precocious age..."...(and later) “Michelangelo also did the marble Pietà (1498-1500), still in its original place in Saint Peter's Basilica. One of the most famous works of art, the Pietà was probably finished before Michelangelo was 25 years old.”

My apologies for quoting at such length from a biography, but I have seen his Pietà in Rome on several occasions, and it seems clear to me that it took a gifted young man, with great acquired skill in the craft of shaping marble with hammer and chisel, perhaps two years to achieve this masterwork.

Fast forward to the modern period, when we learn from The Boston Globe, in an article in February 2002 by Dave Barry, that:

“...Another important British artist is Damien Hirst. He won the Turner Prize in 1995, for an entry that consisted of (I am not making any of this up) a cow and a calf cut in half and preserved in formaldehyde. Last October, a London gallery threw a party to launch an exhibition by Hirst. When it was over, there was a bunch of party trash—beer bottles, ashtrays, coffee cups, etc.—lying around. Hirst, artist that he is, arranged this trash into an ‘installation,’ which is an artistic term meaning ‘trash that the gallery can now price at 5,000 pounds (sterling) and try to sell to a wealthy moron.’ The next morning, in came the janitor, who, tragically, was not an art professional. When he saw the trash, he assumed it was trash and threw it away. ‘I didn’t think for a second that it was a work of art,’ he later told the press. When members of the gallery staff arrived, they went out and retrieved the artistic trash from the regular trash, then reassembled the original installation, guided by photographs taken the night before.”

A similar astounding contrast may be discovered between artists whose works depend on carefully developed skill and great diligence, such as Albrecht Dürer, Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, and Johannes Vermeer, among hundreds of others, and the newer artists whose work requires no craft at all, as, for example, quoting again from Dave Barry’s Globe article:

“The 2001 Turner Prize went to an artist named Martin Creed, whose entry was titled The Lights Going On and Off. It consists, as the title suggests, of lights going on and off in a vacant room. They go on for five seconds, then off for five seconds. That’s it. In other words, this guy got 20,000 pounds (sterling) for demonstrating the same artistic talent as a defective circuit breaker. Here’s the scary part. He deserved to win. I say this because, according to the BBC, his strongest competition was an artist whose entry consisted of a dusty room ‘filled with an array of disparate objects, including a plastic cactus, mirrors, doors, and old tabloid newspapers.’ Some gallery visitors mistook this for an actual storeroom before realizing that it was art. So Martin Creed’s blinking lights probably looked pretty darned artistic to the Turner Prize jurors. The prize was formally presented by Madonna, who said: ‘Art is always at its best when there is no money, because it has nothing to do with money and everything to do with love.’ That Madonna! Always joking! You should know that the artistry of Martin Creed is not limited to blinking lights. Another of his works is titled A Sheet of A4 Paper Crumpled Into a Ball. It’s a piece of paper crumpled into a ball.”

So now, instead of hard-earned craft and artistic masterworks, we have junk that shows us that “Art is...everything to do with love.” I am appalled by all this, as one who loves the art of Vermeer, Michelangelo and others, but I am also concerned because some of the same debased and mindless standards are working their way into the expectations for and evaluation of academic writing in our schools. Students are encouraged and rewarded for personal and “creative” writings which seem to be judged by the same standards which gave the Turner Prize for lights going on and off. Students are praised and given prizes for writing brief diary entries which involve as much craft as making breakfast with cereal from a box. Students are “protected” from engaging in the difficult craft of writing just as modern artists seem to have been released from any expectation that art should be the result of a long apprenticeship in a craft, such as sculpture or painting. It is true as was said about learning to play the cello, that “There are no shortcuts” in academic expository writing or in art. Artists and writers who try to take a shortcut and skip learning their craft turn out junk. Perhaps we should consider expecting our students, if not our modern artists, to try for a little higher level of achievement than craft-free junk?

“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®

America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree

Marty Nemko:

Among my saddest moments as a career counselor is when I hear a story like this: "I wasn't a good student in high school, but I wanted to prove that I can get a college diploma. I'd be the first one in my family to do it. But it's been five years and $80,000, and I still have 45 credits to go."

I have a hard time telling such people the killer statistic: Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. That figure is from a study cited by Clifford Adelman, a former research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education and now a senior research associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. Yet four-year colleges admit and take money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year!

Even worse, most of those college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education. So it's not surprising that when you hop into a cab or walk into a restaurant, you're likely to meet workers who spent years and their family's life savings on college, only to end up with a job they could have done as a high-school dropout.

Study: Reading First Fails to Boost Reading Skills

Maria Glod:

Children who participate in the $1-billion-a-year reading initiative at the heart of the No Child Left Behind law have not become better readers than their peers, according to a study released today by the Education Department's research arm.

The report from the Institute of Education Sciences found that students in schools that use Reading First, which provides grants to improve grade-school reading instruction, scored no better on reading comprehension tests than peers in schools that don't participate. The conclusion is likely to reignite the longstanding "reading wars," because critics argue the program places too much emphasis on explicit phonics instruction and doesn't do enough to foster understanding.

Reading First, aimed at improving reading skills among students from low-income families, has been plagued by allegations of mismanagement and financial conflicts of interest. But the Bush administration has strenuously backed the effort, saying it helps disadvantaged children learn to read. About 1.5 million children in about 5,200 schools nationwide, including more than 140 schools in Maryland, Virginia and the District, participate in Reading First.

The congressionally mandated study, completed by an independent contractor, focused on tens of thousands of first-, second- and third-grade students in 248 schools in 13 states. The children were tested, and researchers observed teachers in 1,400 classrooms.

Many links, notes and a bit of (local) history on Reading First here.

The complete report can be found here:

Created under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001, the Reading First program provides assistance to states and districts in using research-based reading programs and instructional materials for students in kindergarten through third grade and in introducing related professional development and assessments. The program's purpose is to ensure that increased proportions of students read at or above grade level, have mastery of the essential components of early reading, and that all students can read at or above grade level by the end of grade 3. The law requires that an independent, rigorous evaluation of the program be conducted to determine if the program influences teaching practices, mastery of early reading components, and student reading comprehension. This interim report presents the impacts of Reading First on classroom reading instruction and student reading comprehension during the 2004-05 and 2005-06 school years.

The evaluation found that Reading First did have positive, statistically significant impacts on the total class time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction promoted by the program. The study also found that, on average across the 18 study sites, Reading First did not have statistically significant impacts on student reading comprehension test scores in grades 1-3. A final report on the impacts from 2004-2007 (three school years with Reading First funding) and on the relationships between changes in instructional practice and student reading comprehension is expected in late 2008.

The Spending Side of the Higher Education Equation

Scott Jaschik:

Across sectors of higher education, only a minority of spending by colleges supports direct instructional costs, according to a report being released today as part of an effort to reframe the debate over college costs.

“The Growing Imbalance: Recent Trends in U.S. Postsecondary Education Finance,” is the result of an unusual attempt to change the way colleges and policy makers analyze higher education. The report — issued for the first time today and now to be an annual project — examines not only revenues, but how colleges actually spend their money.

After years in which people have read about tuition going up, and about state support covering smaller shares of public higher education budgets, the idea is to focus on what results from these and other trends. Some of the findings challenge conventional wisdom — such as the widely quoted belief that the top expense for higher education is the personnel costs associated with professors and other employees.

The report was produced by the Delta Cost Project, part of the Lumina Foundation for Education’s Making Opportunity Affordable program. The overarching thesis of the work is that higher education will do a better job of serving students if everyone is aware of where the money goes — not just how much college costs. By examining the different spending patterns at different types of institutions, the report notes growing gaps among sectors and among items receiving financial support. For example, spending per student at private research universities is almost twice that of public research universities.

Counting High School Graduates

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

A proposal to standardize the way states calculate high school graduation rates makes sense.

A report earlier this month examining America's 50 largest school districts found that Milwaukee Public Schools had a graduation rate of only 46.1%. The report by America's Promise Alliance, an advocacy group, reported that Detroit was at the bottom of that list with a graduation rate of 24.9%.

Wait a minute, MPS officials countered. Our graduation rate is 66%.

Who's right?

Both probably are. That's the problem U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings hopes to solve by changing some of the rules under the No Child Left Behind Act, which Congress is considering reauthorizing.

Under the proposal, states would be required to use a uniform method of calculating high school graduation rates by the 2012-'13 school year. As it stands now, comparing graduation rates is difficult. Under the proposal, only students who complete school on time with a regular degree can be counted as graduates. Students who take longer than four years or who earn an alternative diploma, such as a GED certificate, would not be counted.

Standardized Formula For Graduation Rates May Soon Pair With Tests

Maria Glod:

A Bush administration proposal to require that all states use the same formula to calculate high school graduation rates is winning applause from education experts who say it will shed light on the nation's dropout problem.

The proposed regulation is among several the administration introduced last week. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said she is using regulatory power to tweak the No Child Left Behind law because efforts in Congress to overhaul it have stalled.

The 2002 law requires schools and states to report graduation rates, but states have been criticized for understating the number of students who don't receive a diploma. Under the administration's plan, most students would be expected to graduate on time after four years of high school.

Former West Virginia governor Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a group seeking to improve high schools, said a uniform formula would give parents, educators and policymakers a better picture of student performance.

Dane County Boasts 18 National Merit Scholars

National Merit Scholarship Corporation:

The National Merit® Scholarship Program is an academic competition for recognition and scholarships that began in 1955. High school students enter the National Merit Program by taking the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT®)–a test which serves as an initial screen of approximately 1.4 million entrants each year–and by meeting published program entry/participation requirements.

Student Entry Requirements

To participate in the National Merit® Scholarship Program, a student must:

1. take the PSAT/NMSQT® in the specified year of the high school program and no later than the third year in grades 9 through 12, regardless of grade classification or educational pattern;
2. be enrolled full time as a high school student, progressing normally toward graduation or completion of high school, and planning to enroll full time in college no later than the fall following completion of high school; and
3. be a citizen of the United States; or be a U.S. lawful permanent resident (or have applied for permanent residence, the application for which has not been denied) and intend to become a U.S. citizen at the earliest opportunity allowed by law.

Press Release PDF:

This year’s competition for National Merit Scholarships began in October 2006 when more than 1.4 million juniors in over 21,000 high schools took the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT®), which served as an initial screen of program entrants. Last fall, the highest-scoring participants in each state, representing less than one percent of the state’s seniors, were named Semifinalists on a state representational basis.

Only the 16,000 Semifinalists had an opportunity to continue in the competition. Approximately 15,000 Semifinalists met the very high academic standards and other requirements to advance to the Finalist level of the competition. By the conclusion of the 2008 program, about 8,200 Finalists will earn the "Merit Scholar" title and receive a total of more than $36 million in college scholarships. NMSC, a not-for-profit corporation that operates without government assistance, was founded in 1955 specifically to conduct the annual National Merit Scholarship Program. The majority of scholarships offered each year are underwritten by approximately 500 independent corporate and college sponsors that share NMSC’s goals of honoring scholastically talented youth and enhancing their educational opportunities.

CAUTION: Any attempt to compare high schools on the basis of numbers of Merit Scholarship winners will lead to erroneous and unsound conclusions. The National Merit Scholarship Program honors individual students who show exceptional academic ability and potential for success in rigorous college studies. The program does not measure the quality or effectiveness of education within a school, system, or state.

The Capital Times:

Local scholarship winners are:
Seth B. Mulhall, Deerfield High School, Deerfield; Meredith L. Kremer, DeForest Area High School, DeForest; Aaron L. Owen, DeForest Area High School, DeForest.

Joseph K. Carlsmith, West High School, Madison; Sara C. Crocker, West High School, Madison; Erika A. Egner, James Madison Memorial High School, Madison; Reuben F. Henriques, West High School, Madison; Kelsey E. Johnson, Memorial High School, Madison.

Lucas Manuelli, West High School, Madison; Daniel T. Neuser, East High School, Madison; Richard K. Pang, West High School, Madison; Eleanor Shoshany Anderson, La Follette High School, Madison; Alexandro E. Trevino, Memorial High School, Madison.

Benjamin H. Witkovsky, West High School, Madison; Eleanor M. Wroblewski, West High School, Madison; Mary Q. Zhang, West High School, Madison.

Aubrey E. Lauersdorf, Monona Grove High School, Monona; Michael Bethencourt, home school, Mount Horeb.

Congratulations to the students and their families.

The Vacuum Called High School

Re “Clueless in America,” by Bob Herbert (column, April 22):

I don’t dispute Mr. Herbert’s claim that American high school students are not getting a good education, but I question the evidence he is using to prove it. His examples are factual (knowing who Hitler was or when the Civil War was fought).

Students today can Google that kind of information in seconds. What is more important is that they can’t do what I’m doing right now: they can’t identify claims and evidence and evaluate them. Those skills are what constitute “critical thinking” and what our students need to learn in order to succeed in college and beyond.

High schools need to focus on critical-thinking skills, not facts. Nancy Rehm

Biglerville, Pa., April 22, 2008

The writer is a teacher of gifted high school students.

To the Editor:

Bob Herbert correctly points to the dismal state of education in this country today. However, the irony of Bill Gates’s complaining that American students don’t measure up to the rest of the world is too rich to pass up.

It is precisely because of Bill Gates and his ilk that students are told by the educational reformers that they don’t have to “know” anything — they can just look it up on the Web. Instead, they say, let students focus on feel-good exercises that foster “deep learning” and other chimerical and trendy educational goals.

Is it any wonder that our students don’t know the history of their own country, much less that of the rest of the world? A global society, indeed.

Gary Kappel

Bethany, W. Va., April 22, 2008

The writer is a history professor at Bethany College.

Survey of South LA Students

Mitchell Landsberg:

A survey of 6,008 South Los Angeles high school students shows that many are frightened by violence in school, deeply dissatisfied with their choices of college preparatory classes, and -- perhaps most striking -- exhibit symptoms of clinical depression.

"A lot of students are depressed because of the conditions in their school," said Anna Exiga, a junior at Jordan High School who was one of the organizers of the survey. "They see that their school is failing them, their teachers are failing them, there's racial tension and gang violence, and also many feel that their schools are not schools -- their schools look more like prisons."

The survey, released late Thursday, was conducted in seven South L.A. public schools by a community youth organization, South Central Youth Empowered Thru Action (SCYEA), with technical guidance from the psychology department at Loyola Marymount University. It suggested that many students in some of the city's poorest, most violent neighborhoods believe their schools set the bar for success too low -- and then shove students beneath it.

In fact, the student organizers said they don't like to use the word "dropout" to describe their many peers who leave school. They prefer "pushout," because they believe the school system is pushing students to fail.

National Academic Decathlon Finals 4/30/2008 to 5/3/2008

US Academic Decathlon:

2008 Nationals will be held April 30 – May 3, 2008 in Garden Grove, California.
The essay competition will take place online on April 17th, 2008

Wisconsin 2008-2009 Academic Decathlon Schedule.

Edweek Chat: The Use of International Data to Improve US Schools

4/30/2008 @ 2:30p.m. CST:

Join us for a live Web chat about the impact of A Nation at Risk and the potential for using international comparison data to improve academic standards and student achievement in U.S. schools.

Twenty-five years ago, a federal commission issued the landmark report that declared a "rising tide of mediocrity" in U.S. education posed a threat to America's prosperity and status in the world. Today, many policymakers and members of the business and education communities are sounding the same alarm bells.

Some experts are recommending that the United States put more stock in measuring itself against other countries, including having individual states benchmark their progress against those countries to get a clear and true picture of the status of American education. Would that help improve education in America? What can the United States do to improve education and continue to compete globally? Are the problems with the U.S. education system, compared with those of other industrialized countries', overblown? Join us for this discussion.

About the guests:

• Dane Linn, is the director of the education division of the National Governors Association, a Washington-based research and advocacy organization that has taken an active role in examining how states might align their academic standards and practices to those of top-performing nations

• Iris C. Rotberg, is the co-director of the Center for Curriculum, Standards, and Technology at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C.

Submit questions in advance.

Related: Fordham Foundation - Wisconsin DPI's Academic Standards = D-. The Madison School District is implementing "value added assessment" based on the DPI standards.

Watch the Madison School Board's most recent discussion of "Value Added Assessment".

A Nation at a Loss

Edward Fiske:

TOMORROW is the 25th anniversary of “A Nation at Risk,” a remarkable document that became a milestone in the history of American education — albeit in ways that its creators neither planned, anticipated or even wanted.

In August 1981, Education Secretary T. H. Bell created a National Commission on Excellence in Education to examine, in the report’s words, “the widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” Secretary Bell’s expectation, he later said, was that the report would paint a rosy picture of American education and correct all those widespread negative perceptions.

Instead, on April 26, 1983, the commission released a sweeping 65-page indictment of the quality of teaching and learning in American primary and secondary schools couched in a style of apocalyptic rhetoric rarely found in blue-ribbon commission reports.

“The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people,” it warned. “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

What to Do With Gifted Students?

Jay Matthews:

I received a letter a few weeks ago from a mother in Prince William County, home to one of the Washington area's big suburban school systems. It starkly captured the parental frustration at the heart of the national debate over what to do with very gifted students. I ran her letter, with a short response, in my weekly Post column, "Extra Credit," in which I answer reader mail. That column produced so many letters that I decided to lay out the debate in this column, using the limitless space of the Internet. I have not been very sympathetic with parents of gifted kids. Some of the reaction below echoes things I have said. But I find it difficult to justify forcing Nancy Klimavicz's son to spend valuable time on busywork. If anyone has any good way out of this impasse, e-mail me at mathewsj@washpost.com.

Dear Extra Credit:

I've started this letter many times over the past several months. After my gifted son received rejections from Virginia Tech, James Madison University and William and Mary, I figured it's time to warn other parents. If you have a very bright student, home-school him.

My son was reading a college-level book in third grade when the gifted education specialist recommended just that. Academically, we figured he'd learn and grow regardless of the environment, but his weakness was social interaction with his peers. We believed childhood should include high school sports teams and clubs, and we remembered being influenced by one or two teachers who were passionate about their subjects. We decided to leave him in public school.

Elite Korean Schools, Forging Ivy League Skills

Sam Dillon:

It is 10:30 p.m. and students at the elite Daewon prep school here are cramming in a study hall that ends a 15-hour school day. A window is propped open so the evening chill can keep them awake. One teenager studies standing upright at his desk to keep from dozing.

Kim Hyun-kyung, who has accumulated nearly perfect scores on her SATs, is multitasking to prepare for physics, chemistry and history exams.

“I can’t let myself waste even a second,” said Ms. Kim, who dreams of attending Harvard, Yale or another brand-name American college. And she has a good shot. This spring, as in previous years, all but a few of the 133 graduates from Daewon Foreign Language High School who applied to selective American universities won admission.

It is a success rate that American parents may well envy, especially now, as many students are swallowing rejection from favorite universities at the close of an insanely selective college application season.

“Going to U.S. universities has become like a huge fad in Korean society, and the Ivy League names — Harvard, Yale, Princeton — have really struck a nerve,” said Victoria Kim, who attended Daewon and graduated from Harvard last June.

Daewon has one major Korean rival, the Minjok Leadership Academy, three hours’ drive east of Seoul, which also has a spectacular record of admission to Ivy League colleges.

How do they do it? Their formula is relatively simple. They take South Korea’s top-scoring middle school students, put those who aspire to an American university in English-language classes, taught by Korean and highly paid American and other foreign teachers, emphasize composition and other skills key to success on the SATs and college admissions essays, and — especially this — urge them on to unceasing study.

Fairfax County Schools to Review Grading Practices

Michael Alison Chandler:

Fairfax County school officials have agreed to review their grading policies in response to parents' concerns that relatively stringent standards mean their children are losing out on scholarships and college admissions.

More than 2,800 parents and students signed an online petition urging the school system to adopt a 10-point grading scale and give extra weight for honors, Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes. The current system requires a score of 94 or higher for an A, and gives no extra credit to honors courses. AP courses are given half a point.

Many competing school systems, including Montgomery County, give A's for lower scores and graduate students with similar backgrounds but higher GPA's, the parents contend. Their concerns come as competition for admission to big-name colleges is at a high and tuition more expensive than ever.

Louise Epstein, president of the Fairfax County Association for the Gifted, said the current policies are unfair. "They cost families money and reduce good opportunities for students just because they go to Fairfax schools," she said.

AP Drops Four Courses, Three over Demographics

Scott Cech:

Officials overseeing the Advanced Placement program have announced that they intend to drop AP classes and exams in four subject areas, in a pullback expected to affect about 12,500 students and 2,500 teachers worldwide.

Following the end of the 2008-09 academic year, there will be no AP courses or exams in Italian, Latin literature, French literature, and computer science AB, said officials at the College Board, the New York City-based nonprofit organization that owns the AP brand.

The College Board has in past years withdrawn one undersubscribed AP course at a time, but has never taken so many courses off its table of offerings in the half-century since the program started as a way for students to take college-level courses and potentially earn college credit while still in high school.

Trevor Packer, the College Board vice president who oversees the AP program, said the decision was made at a trustee meeting on March 27, and that AP teachers in the affected subjects were notified by e-mail April 3. “Of course, it’s sad for them,” he said of the teachers.

Mr. Packer said the decision was made principally because of demographic considerations.

Only a tiny fraction of the members of underrepresented minority groups who take AP exams take the tests in one of those four affected subject areas, he said.

The College Board has made it a priority to reach such students, including those who are African- American and Hispanic.

“For us, [the question is], are we able to achieve our mission of reaching a broader range of students?” Mr. Packer said.

He added that no additional AP courses would be cut for at least the next five years.

He said the decision was not connected to results from the recently released national audit of AP course syllabuses. ("Number of Schools Offering AP Falls After First Audit of Courses," March 14, 2007.)

Mr. Packer noted that the Italian program was 400 percent over budget, owing to the small number of students taking the exams.

The Italian program is the only one among the subjects that would not be represented in some other way in the AP program.

The College Board will continue to offer AP French Language, for example, and introductory-level computer science.

Mr. Packer also held out the possibility that the Italian program might be saved if outside money were forthcoming.

“This wasn’t a situation of us going to the trustees and saying we need to cut costs,” he said, but a question of deploying resources “less diffusely.”

Studies: SAT Writing Portion a Good Predictor of Freshman Grades

Janet Kornblum:

The controversial new writing portion of the SAT is actually a better predictor of grades for freshmen college students than the older, more-established, critical reading and mathematics portions, according to preliminary results of two new studies.

The College Board, which administers the SAT, studied test scores from 150,000 freshmen entering 110 colleges in 2006 and then looked at their GPAs at the end of their freshmen year, says Wayne Camara, vice president of research.

"Our study suggests that the writing test is the best single predictor" of freshman grades, he says. The study won't be finalized until summer, he says.

The University of California drew a similar conclusion from an analysis of its incoming 2006 freshmen and their GPAs, says Sam Agronow, coordinator of admissions research and evaluation at the University of California's office of the president.

Now It's Colleges' Turn to Say 'Pick Me!'

Valerie Strauss:

The University of Maryland at College Park is making sure that nearly every single student admitted this fall -- more than 10,000 of them -- gets a personal telephone call from a current student extolling the virtues of becoming a Terrapin.

The student government president at Marymount University in Arlington County is sending a T-shirt to every admitted student.

At Binghamton University in New York, current international students are writing letters to every admitted international student -- in their native language -- to make sure they know where to get food that suits their diets or how to solve other problems they may encounter.

Study Suggests Math Teachers Scrap Balls and Slices; "The Researchers Did Something Rare in Education Research"

Kenneth Chang:

One train leaves Station A at 6 p.m. traveling at 40 miles per hour toward Station B. A second train leaves Station B at 7 p.m. traveling on parallel tracks at 50 m.p.h. toward Station A. The stations are 400 miles apart. When do the trains pass each other?

Entranced, perhaps, by those infamous hypothetical trains, many educators in recent years have incorporated more and more examples from the real world to teach abstract concepts. The idea is that making math more relevant makes it easier to learn.

That idea may be wrong, if researchers at Ohio State University are correct. An experiment by the researchers suggests that it might be better to let the apples, oranges and locomotives stay in the real world and, in the classroom, to focus on abstract equations, in this case 40 (t + 1) = 400 - 50t, where t is the travel time in hours of the second train. (The answer is below.)

“The motivation behind this research was to examine a very widespread belief about the teaching of mathematics, namely that teaching students multiple concrete examples will benefit learning,” said Jennifer A. Kaminski, a research scientist at the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State. “It was really just that, a belief.”

Dr. Kaminski and her colleagues Vladimir M. Sloutsky and Andrew F. Heckler did something relatively rare in education research: they performed a randomized, controlled experiment. Their results appear in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

The Advantage of Abstract Examples in Learning Math by Jennifer A. Kaminski, Vladimir M. Sloutsky, Andrew F. Heckler.

I wonder what has become of the Madison School District's Math Task Force?

Math Forum audio, video, notes and links.

Writing, Technology & Teens

Amanda Lenhart:

Teens write a lot, but they do not think of their emails, instant and text messages as writing. This disconnect matters because teens believe good writing is an essential skill for success and that more writing instruction at school would help them.

Related links: AP and Tamar Lewin.

Florida Revamps State Test Standards

Linda Kleindienst:

student angst, the Legislature is about to approve a major revamp of Florida's public-school testing program -- from what students are expected to know to when they take the exam.

Rallies and motivational speakers meant to boost FCAT scores would be banned during class time. For the first time, middle-school students would be tested on their social-science knowledge. And schools could not buy new textbooks that mention the FCAT.

While the House and Senate differ on some details, it appears almost sure that the testing, now done each February, will be pushed later in the school year. That will give teachers more time to cover material that could be on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, given in grades 3 through 11.

Pending House and Senate bills would schedule the writing exam on March 1, with testing on other subjects delayed until April 15 at the earliest. On Friday, the House approved its bill 110-0.

School Test Scores Rise as More Low Scoring Students Drop Out

Margaret Downing:

A few years ago, I signed on as a volunteer tutor at my local elementary. I was matched with a student — I'll call him Eddie — who was failing miserably at both the math and English portions of the TAAS (Texas Assessment of Academic Skills), a statewide minimal skills test that was the precursor to today's TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills).

I took him on in math, it being the worst of all his subjects, and began a series of one-on-one weekly meetings. It soon became apparent that while Eddie's multiplication and division skills were very shaky, his ability to subtract once we got into double digits was no better. Asked to compute 25 minus 17, Eddie's eyes darted around the room looking for an escape hatch. There were too many numbers to count on his fingers.

Word problems only ramped up the agony.

Some HOPE Scholarship recipients need remedial help in college

Jennifer Burk:

Despite earning B averages in high school, at least one in 10 HOPE Scholarship recipients receives some type of remedial help during the first year of college.

Put simply, some college freshmen who seemed to excel in high school still need help in basic math and English.

Twelve percent of college freshmen who have the HOPE Scholarship, awarded to Georgia students who graduate from high school with at least a B average, received learning support in fall 2006, according to the University System of Georgia.

The reasons why run the gamut, with blame placed at the state level all the way down to the student.

"It's hard for me to say the causes of that," said Dana Tofig, a spokesman for the Georgia Department of Education.

But part of the reason for the state's continuing overhaul of the public schools' kindergarten through 12th grade curriculum is to get students out of remediation and make them more prepared for college work, he said.

"The curriculum">curriculum before was way too broad and way too vague," Tofig said.

"The Schools Aren't Teaching Our Kids What They Need to Know"

Bob Herbert:

Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.

"We have one of the highest dropout rates in the industrialized world," said Allan Golston, the president of U.S. programs for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In a discussion over lunch recently he described the situation as "actually pretty scary, alarming."

Roughly a third of all American high school students drop out. Another third graduate but are not prepared for the next stage of life — either productive work or some form of post-secondary education.

When two-thirds of all teenagers old enough to graduate from high school are incapable of mastering college-level work, the nation is doing something awfully wrong.

Mr. Golston noted that the performance of American students, when compared with their peers in other countries, tends to grow increasingly dismal as they move through the higher grades:

Common Core of Data.

Adult Workers Have a Lot to Learn Online

Michael Schrage:

Children are fantastic little learning machines. They are hardwired to play with ideas and absorb knowledge. Adults, alas, are not. That is why the challenge of adult education and lifelong learning is more difficult – and ultimately more important – than childhood education. Societies that are serious about raising their standard of living should focus on enhancing the productivity of parents rather than boosting teenage test scores.

The economic rationale is clear. Ageing populations of Europe, China and North America increasingly enjoy long and healthy lives. Yet as they grow older, wealth creation depends on the ability to acquire and convert information, skills and technologies into new value. In this environment, hard-won expertise, rather like expensive capital equipment, often depreciates with astonishing speed. The cruel “human capital” jibe, that many workers do not have 20 years’ experience but one year’s experience 20 times over, has assumed new poignancy.

The premise that quality education during life’s first two decades matters more than for decades four and five has become literally counterproductive. Demographic realities and dynamic economies have made “ageing adults” today’s most underappreciated – and underappreciating – capital asset class.

Improving returns on that asset requires neither great sums of money nor greater flights of imagination. The key is to rethink and reorganise how busy but anxious adults can benefit from education and training opportunities. Technology makes meeting that challenge far more affordable, entrepreneurial and compelling. Adult education is a market ripe for rapid global transformation.

Continuing our technology & education discussions. Related posts: on technology spending in Milwaukee and Lauren Rosen Yaezel on Technology in the Madison Schools.

Brittanica on Adult Education.

Indiana Governor Proposes Paying for Part of College Costs

Vic Ryckaert:

Gov. Mitch Daniels wants the state to help bankroll the first two years of college for Hoosier families struggling to pay tuition.

The governor doesn't know how the state will pay for the plan, which he said would provide $6,000, the equivalent of two years of tuition at Ivy Tech Community College.

Families earning up to the state's median income of $54,000 a year would be eligible.
"The careers of tomorrow will require training beyond that which is available in high schools today," Daniels said, noting college tuition has risen 21/2 times faster than Hoosier incomes.
"We must elevate quickly the number of our young people who pursue education beyond high school.

"Things Can't Go Back"

Peg Tyre:

It can't be easy for U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. She's passionate about all things to do with school. "This is my life's work, my calling," she says. Yet, here she is, in the final year of the Bush administration, and instead of continuing the grand work of remaking America's schools, she's stamping out brush fires in college-lending caused by the credit crunch and rattling the cages of fat cats in higher education. She doesn't like to say it out loud, but despite her very best efforts, things haven't worked out like she (or her boss) had planned.

At lunch this week with NEWSWEEK, she was determined to look forward, not back. She's had a great ride. She came to Washington, first as senior domestic policy adviser in 2001, with a popular Republican president who promptly wrested education away from the Democrats, the ones who had traditionally dominated the issue. Back then, President Bush spoke loud and often about the raw deal poor and minority kids were getting in public school. Instead of a bleeding heart, he showed a kind of flinty compassion for the poor by condemning what he famously called the "soft bigotry of low expectations" that plagued our inner cities. He coupled that with an inspired can-do attitude about making real, lasting change that disarmed even his fiercest opponents.

The New Math of College Financing

Anne Marie Chaker:

For a lot of students and parents, college costs are about to get much more confusing.

In recent months, some of the wealthiest and most prestigious schools in the country have made their financial aid more generous. Many have replaced loans with grants -- money that doesn't have to be repaid. Some are waiving tuition entirely for families below a certain income threshold. Others are capping costs at a certain percentage of family income.

So far, only a relative handful of colleges are taking these steps -- about 50 out of the nation's more than 2,500 four-year colleges. But some experts think at least some of these programs will spread further as schools compete for top students.

It's easy to be baffled about what this all means, for now and for the future. Do these offers come with hidden catches? Will you still need to borrow some money to cover tuition? Are there even better deals coming down the road?

More on Technology Education

Brian Back:

"If we don't teach this to them," Joan Fecteau, an MPS instructional technology leader, told me, "then we are doing as much of a disservice as not teaching them to read or write."

But you can't teach driving by sitting at a desk. You have to get behind the wheel. Let's give kids hands-on experience under teacher supervision.

Fecteau not only teaches students but teachers as well. "Some teachers don't know enough about the Internet to understand how to avoid viruses and tracking devices. For example, clicking on a pop-up window can lead to malicious spyware or unintended Web pages being displayed."

It is apparent to parents that most kids are far beyond their teachers' and parents' understanding. The one institution that has the mission to teach is not keeping up. We need to give schools the nod and the resources to do it - which is code for funding. Oh, no, did I say that?

Lauren Rosen Yeazel's recent words generated some interesting discussion on technology and schools.

In my view, technology, per se, is not the core issue. Critical thinking and knowledge come first, then tools. Tools we purchase today will be long obsolete by the time our children graduate (maybe this argues for some technology presence in high school). Ideally, our schools should have fast fiber and wireless (open) networks, and as Momanonymous noted, perhaps teacher compensation might include a laptop/mobile device allowance.

I am generally against teaching kids powerpoint, particularly before they've mastered the art of writing a paper.

On Toronto's Homework Reform

Frank Bruni:

On April 16th 2008, Toronto Canada became one of the first jurisdictions in North America to pass a substantive homework reform policy.

The policy reduces the homework burden on middle school and high school students and all but eliminates homework in the elementary grades. In addition, homework will no longer be allowed during vacations.

The new policy mandates that teacher’s co-ordinate their efforts and that the homework that is sent home is “clearly articulated and carefully planned” and “require no additional teaching outside the classroom”.

This policy is a major breakthrough for those of us who have been advocating for homework reform.

When I started to write this it was intended to be a “how to” guide for anyone who wanted to replicate what we have achieved in Toronto. But when I read it it seemed preachy.

I guess what I really want to communicate is, just start. Every situation is different, every school board is different, and every community is different, but just start somewhere.

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